Open Our Eyes Lord

A meditation on John 12:20-33 for the community at St. David of Wales, March 17, 2024.
 
“We wish to see Jesus” say the Greeks in the opening sentences of today’s gospel reading. Their words remind me of an old Maranatha praise song we often sang at my home church in CA:
 
Open our eyes, Lord / We want to see Jesus
To reach out touch him / And say that we love him
Open our ears, Lord / And help us to listen
Open our eyes, Lord /We want to see Jesus
 
But seeing Jesus isn’t that easy: In the gospel reading Jesus tells those who ask to see him that they’re too late. The time to sit and learn from him as he teaches is over. The time to come before him with requests for healing is over. The time to hear him preach in the synagogue is over. The only thing that’s left for those who want to see Jesus is to see him give up his life. And who wants that? Certainly not those who love him.

Jesus, as he always does, tries to help his followers understand the bigger picture by talking about wheat and the circle of life which always brings new life from death. At least for plants. But for people? It doesn’t make sense for those gathered around.
Jesus is in the prime of his life, he’s vital and inspiring, people are leaving their home and families to follow him. And Jesus is not talking about laying low until the tensions between him and the religious authorities and the empire cool off. He’s not talking about cutting back on all this travel or going back to carpentry. He’s talking about sacrificing his life. He’s talking about dying. And not only that, but Jesus is also telling those gathered round to be willing to give up their lives and their identities, too. Haven’t some of them already done that? Isn’t what they’ve done enough?

Here’s how Eugene Peterson phrases those verses in The Message:
24-25 “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.
26 “If any of you wants to serve me, then follow me. Then you’ll be where I am, ready to serve at a moment’s notice. The Father will honor and reward anyone who serves me.
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Having just lived through a global pandemic, we have all been forced to surrender control of our lives in ways we had never before imagined. As a faith community we had to let go of our traditional modes of worship and fellowship and find new ways of being present to one another, and to act as a voice of hope despite the fear and uncertainty in our daily lives.
 
​Many of us had have our lives turned upside down in other ways. By cancer, by fire, by relocating, by retirement or job loss, by death of a loved one. We have had our identities stripped from us. We have had to ask who we without the roles that have ordered our days, and the actions that have given us meaning and purpose.
 
Being human is so very hard, and drastic change, especially when we don’t choose it, can trigger fear and resistance, denial, and the desperate clinging to life as it is, or what we want that Jesus warns against. But even Jesus struggled with what was to come. Again from The Message:
 
 “Right now I am shaken. And what am I going say? ‘Father, get me out of this’? No, this is why I came in the first place.”
 
Unlike Jesus, I’m not so clear on my purpose, but it when I struggle with change or the unknown, it helps to know that the journey wasn’t easy for him, that Jesus was acting on faith in a future yet to unfold, believing in something bigger than himself that he wouldn’t experience in his lifetime.
 
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been told those older and wiser, even those who’ve sat next to me in the pews, that my faith is naïve and unrealistic. And it’s tempting, when I can’t see what is to come in my own life, let alone in the wider world that so often seems on the brink of destruction, to think that those people are right and that I ought to set my hope on some human construct – some form of empire or power that claims to speak for God.
 
But that’s the very thing Jesus warns against, time and again. In The Message he says:
 
“At this moment the world is in crisis. Now Satan, the ruler of this world, will be thrown out. And I, as I am lifted up from the earth, will attract everyone to me and gather them around me.”
 
Two thousand years later, the world is still in crisis. And, yet, 2,000 years later Jesus is still gathering us to his side, still modeling for us how to live, still speaking to us through ancient texts about how to love and serve God by loving and serving one another.
 
Back in 2011, Pew research conducted a survey in 200 countries and found that there were 2.18 billion Christians in the world. It’s a number I can’t even begin to fathom. But it’s a number that does fill me with hope. Jesus didn’t topple empire but stood in the midst of political and socio-economic power and testified to another way of being, to a power that recognizes the inherent worth of all people simply as we are. 
 
As Christians our call is not a call to change the world per se, but a call to allow Christ to change us, to live “reckless in our love” and from there to follow the ripples of faith and love into the world. As Teresa of Avila famously said:
 
Christ has no body now but yours.
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which he looks
compassion on this world.
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.
Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.