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The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Fifth Sunday in Lent
Year B
RCL
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33, for the texts click here 
I had a visitor Saturday morning who came because he saw the church open with my green open sign. He complimented the church for its open door policy. This gentleman is an Episcopalian from St. Marks, Jackson Heights, he was across the street at a training session hosted by a group called Empire State Pride Agenda, The Empire State Pride Agenda is New York's statewide lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) civil rights and advocacy organization and we discussed briefly wether we were a gay-friendly congregation or not.
I have just finished a First Communion class, made of mostly an unruly mixture of Hispanic kids, some of which can not use Spanish for any academic purpose having barely a domestic vocabulary of the language of its parents.
Then as I was leaving and old “friend”, mostly a frenemy (mixture of friend and enemy), showed up. We have had for the last couple of years, a “junkie”, face contorted with some teeth missing, he has been known to have bad body odor sometimes. During the cold months we have provided him with a coat that have not lasted a winter, when hungry, at times we have fed him, sometimes he just hangs around the AA meetings long enough for a free coffee, he sometimes comes and have dinner with us on Wednesdays evenings.
This was mostly a typical day at the Redeemer. Everyday people come to pray or just to be quiet, even sitting in the cold of our unheated sanctuary. On sunny days some ladies come to chat in the benches, while the many AA group members come in and out of their meetings in the basement. During the summer month as our congregants flee more people from “outside” come in.
A church with an open door agenda has considerable gains and challenges. On the front of my house I had these beautiful crocuses, they are a tropical plant so every year for the last five, Adria and I took them in for the winter, and I took them out in the summer. They barely survived indoors in winter but when they were outside in the summer, they just grew. We took them small and by now they were very big, filled with yellow and red leaves. At the end of the last summer, when it was already getting colder and we were deciding where it was time to take them in, they disappeared, my babies!
Jesus also runs a sort of open agenda movement, from time to time, we see Jesus expanding the boundaries of the Jewish nation to include for instance the woman with a hemorrhage, calling her daughter. He sit at Mathews’s, the tax collector and in plain view of his shocked followers, shares a meal a sure sign of intimacy with someone rejected by the poor and exploited. Sometimes, healing escapes the racial and religious boundaries of Israel and goes out the Roman centurion or the syrio-Phoenician woman, some times Jesus himself initiates the opening of the social walls, sometimes the excluded ones ask him to do it for them.
Now Jesus has already entered the city of Jerusalem, triumphant and acclaimed by his many followers it’s perhaps Monday or Tuesday of Passion Week. The city is overflowing with visitors coming for the Passover. Jerusalem would benefit financially from the influx of pilgrim business and there were most likely congestion and altercations. After the Palm Sunday, the city was abuzz with rumors that would frighten some and encourage others, a so called Messiah has entered into the Holy City riding a donkey just as the prophecy of Zachariah 9 declared. In the fracas, all sorts of political parties were actively meeting and planning.
It is the midst of this cauldron of emotions that these Greeks ask Philip, “Sir we wish to see Jesus”. Then Philip instead of going directly to him goes to Andrew and both them go to Jesus, like the case of the Greeks was a difficult one to make, since they were pagans, once more the border is stretched to breaking point, by Jesus telling these foreigners that were interested in his movement that contrary to the aspirations and hopes of the people what he had close to him was really a cross, not a crown.
It is to these seeker Greeks that want to see Jesus, he tells them that his dying will multiply the movement and they should be with him, if they want to serve him they must follow Him to be with him. The crowd expecting a Messiah-King confronts Jesus with the tradition and reminds Him "We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?" (V34b). The tide has began its turning.
Is it the “Son of Man” that is going to be lifted -crucified- that the Greeks have come to see alongside the multitude? Or were they looking for the King-Messiah that has just arrived? We do not know for certain, but we know that they wanted to see Jesus.
If Jesus were to become available to us all of the sudden, in this corner of the city of New York, I assume that we all this morning may wanted to see Jesus. Some, may want to be rid of ailments or challenges, or crosses too heavy to bear. Others may want to be free of addictions: to substances or to toxic relationships. Others may want to be free of anxieties and concerns. We may be attracted by his instant fame and like a celebrity may want just to see Him, like by looking at him, in a way for a moment we may share of his life surely glamorous and more important that our relative obscurity. Yet, we wanted to see Jesus.
During the worst years of Cuba’s crisis in the Nineties, discreetly every time I could I will distribute either cooking oil, or detergent or soap and medication to my congregation. Not surprisingly, new people started to show up for mass. As I heard somebody complain about this “rice Christians” -a charge leveled against missionaries in China in the forties- I said: well they came for what they wanted to get and they will go away with much more than they bargained for. For me it was clear, that material need aside, they wanted to see Jesus.
In Matthew chapter 25: 31-46, a parable of a King sitting in judgement
of his subjects at the endtime after an absence. Jesus tells this
story, two days away from Passover, just before the Passion week was to
start. In the story Jesus says to those who did their duty as subjects
while the King was away: the righteous: 'Come, you who are blessed by
my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since
the creation of the world. 35For I was hungry and you gave me something
to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a
stranger and you invited me in, 36I needed clothes and you clothed me,
I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to
visit me.' In the parable the righteous in response to the praise
received claim not have ever seen the King “hungry, thirsty, naked,
sick in jail, etc...(since the King was absent)” and Jesus gives us the
foundation of churches’s social gospel -'I tell you the truth, whatever
you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for
me.'
With this small morality play, Jesus was telling his disciples that
while he is away, we have the poor and the needy to be his ambassadors,
his icon, his image, so He is with us in them.
Remember my stolen crocuses? A neighbor diligently told me to have seen
the same junkie that at times we have fed and dressed along with his
friends come to the front of my house and took my crocuses in broad
daylight. At the light of Matthew 25, the thief of my stolen crocuses
is then also my Jesus, I have to discern the Lord’s face in his
toothless smile of this junkie-thief who quite frankly I just want to
slap silly.
We all want to see Jesus moved by our all too diverse motivations and
yet when we see Him, when we truly see Him, we will not be the same.
Some will walk away from this Jesus of the Cross, who looks so
impotent, nailed to the wood, unable to walk, unable to help. Other
will see the reflection of their own vulnerability and pain. Some will
let stuff they have carried to die at the foot of the cross. Other will
be shaken like me in my affection for possessions that prevent me from
seeing Jesus in the radically Other, like in my junkie thief.
You see here at Redeemer we see Jesus all the time, we see him in the Gay community fighting for equal rights under the law and for acceptance in the Christian church, we see Jesus in the recovering and not so recovering alcoholics and addicts that come every week, we see in the unruly Hispanic children learning their First Communion lessons, or we see in the people that we do not knwo but yet come by, all by their own reasons, I hope they can see Jesus in us, community of faith, body of Christ. You too see Jesus all the time on the countless people you find everywhere in your own lives.
May in this Holy Season of Lent all of us be confronted with a sight of
Jesus that we will never forget, a sight of Jesus that will change us
in very core of our being.
“Sir, we want to see Jesus,” the Greeks said to Philip. We, too, need
to see Jesus, so that when others want to see Jesus, they can see him
in us. As the old spiritual puts it:
In the morning when I rise,
Give me Jesus.
When I am alone,
Give me Jesus.
When I come to die,
Give me Jesus.
You can have all the world,
But give me Jesus.
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