Sometimes we just want to see.
Earlier this week, I woke up, same as always: perhaps a little too early but grateful for the coffee, the silence, and the books that accompanied the darkness of morning.
Perhaps like you, my vision is not exactly picture-perfect. I generally wear glasses at night and in the early morning hours, but then, when daylight arrives, I pop in my contacts for the day. On the day in question, I popped my contacts into my eyes. I took the dog for a walk. But when I sat down to write an email a little while later, something seemed a little off.
My left eye was not seeing as well as my right, and instead, seemed to have worsened several degrees. I closed my right eye, and then my left; I went back and forth, back and forth, closing one eye at a time like you do at the eye doctor, confirming that I was not seeing as well in my left eye as I had the day before.
As I am then sometimes prone to do, my mind began to wander, to employ a little bit of imagination. I’d just had pink eye a couple of weeks before in that same eye, and now that eye had gotten blurrier. Had I contracted some sort of bacterial disease? Should I have used antibiotic drops instead of letting the virus run its course? Should I have not worn my contacts so soon, not have dabbed mascara on my eyelashes, not have used that contact solution for relief?
Worried about eye diseases and progressive, overnight blindness, I called my eye doctor and my primary care physician too; I avoided the Internet, because I was not going to diagnose my own eye disease, but I was going to get a referral to an ophthalmologist ASAP. I was going to figure out this problem once and for all.
I wanted whatever was blocking my ability to see to go away. I wanted to see clearly once again.
I’ll spare you the details to a story, which ends not with eye disease but with what I now believe was a simple switch of a lower-prescription contact in the contact factory and in the daily disposable packaging that has become a part of my morning routine.
Because, instead, I want us to focus on this: I wanted to see.
In this week’s gospel reading, we find ourselves firmly planted in events leading up to the Passover. In the scene prior, a woman named Mary poured expensive perfume on the feet of Jesus and wiped it with her hair. This had caused a ruckus among the disciples, who felt like the perfume could have been sold for a lot of money, the money given to the poor. Then there was the fact that Jesus kept hanging out with those siblings, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, the third of whom he raised from the dead. The family was utterly grateful to him – he’d brought a dead man back to life, after all – so they wanted to thank and feed and honor Jesus in return.
When word about this raising from the dead spread fast, it prompted a large crowd of Jews to also want to see the man who had been raised from the dead and the man who had raised him from the dead.
After that dinner with the siblings, the crowds wave palm branches before Jesus. They shout, “Hosanna!” They call him blessed. The people have heard about the great things he has done; they want to meet this special healer. They want to see the man named Jesus.
This is where our story picks up, with great throngs of people looking, hoping, wanting to catch a glimpse of the Great Man. When some Greeks go to worship at the festival, they walk up to Philip, who is one of the disciples. “Sir,” they say, “we would like to see Jesus.” Philip, in turn, goes to tell Andrew, who then goes with Philip to tell Jesus.
The interesting thing is that we don’t why the Greeks wanted to see Jesus. The text leaves their motivations a mystery: did they want to see Jesus for the sake of curiosity or because they didn’t like what he was up to? Did they want to see Jesus because they had heard such good things about him or because they had begun to believe or because they wanted to see him killed?
This, we don’t know. But also, does the motivation to see really matter? Does it matter which Jesus they wished to see? Isn’t the fact that they simply, merely wanted to see Jesus enough?
It is here that Jesus gives a response that feels like it’s been lobbed from the farthest reaches of left field: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” He speaks of himself in third person; he calls himself God’s son and speaks about his future death, even though the people don’t know it yet.
But then he brings it back to the ground, literally, and describes himself as a grain, in terms of life and death. The kernel of wheat is going to fall to the ground and die. But the one seed it leave behind is eventually going to produce many seeds in return.
This is the illustration he gives the people. This is what he offers them see, even if they don’t understand the deeper meaning behind his words, or the trouble he speaks of a couple of sentences later, or even the booming voice that comes down from heaven soon after.
Might this be what Jesus is inviting us to see today too?
Death is coming but life will soon follow, for Jesus is the one who bursts “open like a seed so that new life [will] grow and replenish the earth,” as one theologian writes. Later, he will take “an instrument of torture and [turn] it into a vehicle of hospitality and communion for all people, everywhere.”
What does it mean for us to see this death and this life, this interconnection of vegetal resurrection and of a kind of holy decay that leads to everlasting life?
What does it mean for us to see?
Perhaps our invitation is simple: walk outside. See the dead things. Then see the life that springs forth from those dead things. Find a compost pile, a tree stump, a neglected strawberry container: life is bursting from death, right there.
Whatever it is, wherever it is, square your eyeballs (and perhaps, the right prescription, if you’re able) to see life inching skyward, because that is what God is in the business of doing. This is who God is.
Because no matter our motivation, Jesus begs us see the life and death made present all around (and now made real through part of this prayer):
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.
Amen.
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This is a sermon preached on March 17, 2024 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California. If you liked this post, you might also like “God is here, in this place, with us.” In the meantime, might our eyes be opened to see.
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