Seeing and Hearing

 

Some Thoughts on this 5th Sunday of Lent, March 21, 2021.

Back in the old days, that is, before this terrible pandemic and the shutting down of so much of public life, I remember how, after the Saturday afternoon matinees, a crowd would gather outside the Broadway theaters to get a good glimpse of some actor or actress in the cast and maybe even talk to him or her and get an autograph. That’s more or less how I imagine the scene in today’s Gospel [John 12:20-33], when some Greeks came to Philip and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” They approached Philip, because being from Bethsaida in Galilee, Philip presumably could converse comfortably with them in Greek. Mindful of his place in the hierarchy, however, Philip went and told Andrew, Peter’s brother. Then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 

Now, you might think, after all this, that we might hear more about those Greeks and their meeting with Jesus.  John never mentions them again, however. We never hear whether or not they actually got to meet Jesus. We may presume that they did, and that, along with Andrew and Philip and the rest of the crowd, they got to hear him speak about how the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified, and hear him pray “Father, glorify your name,” the prayer of a faithful Son, full of confidence in his Father’s response. In fact, assuming they hung around long enough, they would also have heard the Father’s answer.

 

Of course, the crowd there disagreed – as people still do (and do a lot) - about Jesus. Some said “An Angel has spoken to him,” but others just thought it was thunder.  Who and what Jesus is – the living Son of God, or a long-dead historical curiosity, a passing fad that came and went with all the permanence of the last thunderstorm or the latest cultural fad – is also at the heart of who and what we are. 

Conditioned as we all are nowadays by photo and film records of recent historical figures and events, we too perhaps would like to have seen Jesus. Obviously, such access to the past is impossible. The only Jesus to whom we have actual access in the present is the Risen Christ, the living Son of God. Like the Greeks, who, for access to Jesus, went to Philip and Andrew (in other words, those appointed as Apostles), our access to Jesus, our encounter with Christ, is through the Church, which continues his life and work in the world.

 

We encounter Christ through our ongoing experience of being his Church – not just in what happens (or at least used to happen prior to the pandemic) on Sundays, but in a very special way what is meant to happen on Sunday to form us as Church for the rest of the week and for the rest of life. The late Fr. Richard Neuhaus once remarked how consistently touched he was by the phrase before the Sign of Peace, “Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church.” The Church is that faithful host of faithful people, both living and dead, who sustain us in faith, in hope, and in love - a Communion of Saints that, in spite of our sins, unites us here and now with the faithful all over the world and back through time with those who have shown Christ to the world in the past.

 

What this also means is that (again like the Greeks in the Gospel) the rest of the world also encounters Christ explicitly through its experience of his Church. Indeed, as has so often been said, the Church is essentially the only experience of Christ most people will ever have in life – the one face of Christ they will see, the one word of God they will hear. So, if in any way, our behavior conceals rather than reveals the face of Christ, then the word of God may seem silent - precisely when and where it most needs to be proclaimed - and the love of God may appear absent from the very world Christ sacrificed himself in order to save.

(And how often has that happened - not just through malice and forethought but through misguided inadvertence, when the word of God and the love of God are formally proclaimed but obscured by the careless insensitivity of the proclaimer to those to whom the proclamation must be addressed!)

 

We hear many stories about sons in the Bible – beginning back at the literal beginning with Cain and Abel. In Jesus, we see the ultimate Son, God’s Son, whose perfect obedience is the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him [Hebrews 5:7-9].

 

In that he is everything there is to be, while revealed in and through his church, he is everything anyone ever needs to see.