Passion Sunday: Show me things I've never seen before

First preached as sermon at Guildford Cathedral on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Passion Sunday, 2018.

Gospel reading: John 12.20-33

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’ (John 12.21).

'What do you see?'

Many people are familiar with a trip to the optician. Famously on the wall there are letters of ever decreasing sizes to test your sight. But we know that sight does not always equate to vision and seeing things on a deep level.

Seeing, recognising and believing are constant themes throughout St John’s gospel.

The climax of the Prologue to St John’s Gospel, speaks of the Word being made flesh, Jesus Christ, who dwelt among us ‘and we have seen his glory’. John continues ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father who has made him known’. (John 1.14, 18).

John also deals in signs, visual pointers to the profound truth of Jesus Christ’s mission and purpose. Famously he records seven signs – a perfect number – and says there were many more: water changed into wine (John 2.1-11) showing the coming hour of transformation in Jesus Christ; the healings of the royal official's son in Capernaum (John 4:46-54) and the paralysed man at Bethesda (John 5:1-15); the multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed the five thousand (John 6:5-14); Jesus walking on water (John 6:16-24); and the raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-45). All signs to be seen to point to Jesus’ divine power. They ask us, ‘now do you see?’

The remaining sign is of the man born blind whose sight is restored such that he can see who Jesus really is (John 9:1-7). The story culminates in Jesus speaking to the man whose sight has been restored saying,

‘Do you believe in the Son of Man? He answered, ‘And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshipped him. (cf John 9.35b-41)

Seeing in John’s Gospel is far more than a visual reception of data and a function of the retina; this seeing is seeing with the eye of the heart. What I coin deep-sightedness.

It is this sort of seeing that Mary Magdalene has when at first she fails to recognise Jesus through her tears on the Day of Resurrection but on hearing Christ speaks her name she sees, as says ‘Rabbouni, teacher’ (John 20.1-18). And Mary Magdalene the first missionary, the Apostle to the Apostles, proclaimed, ‘I have seen the Lord’ (John 20.18).

The apostle Thomas sees with his eyes but not with his heart, and he seeks visual evidence of Jesus’ resurrection: but then a moment of recognition comes and he says ‘My Lord and my God’ (John 20.24-29).

***

So, those Greeks appear saying to Philip, ‘Sir we would see Jesus’. Well, what have they come to see? What do we see in Jesus? What does their question demand of us if we place ourselves in the shoes of Philip the disciple when someone else says to you, ‘I want to see Jesus? There is a missional edge to their request.

Quite what the Greeks made of their seeing Jesus, history does not relate. It is in St Mark’s gospel that the centurion gazes at the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, on the cross and declares, ‘Truly this is God’s son’. Many did see and believed; many saw Jesus and saw nothing beyond.

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’. This notion of seeing is important. The Greeks arrive to see Jesus, and their own mother tongue, Greek, has a variety of words that mean ‘to see’.

Their request to see could be from scorpion from which we get the word ‘scope’, as in telescope and microscope. Were they scoping Jesus? Getting the measure of him? Assessing what it would mean to follow him?

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’. It could be, that far from be intrigued and seeing Jesus to get the measure of him, that there was a different edge. Their request ‘to see’ could be another Greek word sképtesthai from which we get the word ‘sceptic’. It was true then, as it is now, that there are sceptics about who Jesus Christ is. They may want to be entertained or to dismiss, as in Herod’s request to see Jesus (Luke 9.9). Sometimes, though, even scepticism can lead people on the journey of encounter with him; that’s true even today of people who come to see Jesus sceptically and find their lives turned around by him. When Jesus encounters two of John the Baptist’s slightly sceptical disciples he says, ‘Come and see’ (John 1.39)

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’. The word John’s gospel actually uses is idein which means ‘to see’, in the sense of ‘to visit’ or ‘to meet with’. But it can also mean, in the context of John’s gospel, ‘to believe in’. ‘Sir’, they could be saying to Philip, ‘we wish to believe in Jesus’.

In meeting them Jesus he doesn’t say, “well, here I am have a good look”. Rather he unveils what is hinted at in the Prologue to John – and we have seen his glory –as Jesus declares that now his hour has come. And what will be seen is his glorification, the glorification of the cross, when he is lifted up from the earth.

Window in Guildford Cathedral - South Aisle

In the wilderness the Israelites who were being infested by poisonous serpents could be cured by looking at a pole erected by Moses (it features in the window on the south side of the Cathedral nave). Therein lay their healing and restoration. The cross is the new sign to be gazed upon for salvation. That is the image Jesus is drawing upon as he speaks of the Son of Man lifted up. (cf also John 3.14-21)

This takes us to Good Friday and the Proclamation of the Cross and we hear the haunting verse of Lamentations, ‘Is it nothing to you all you who pass by. Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow’ (Lamentations 1.12a). We hear that as we gaze upon the stark wood of the cross. Not just a bit of carpentry but the sign of our hope and salvation.

It is this deep-sightedness that enables St John Chrysostom to say of Jesus on the cross: ‘I see him crucified; I call him King’.

***

Today is Passion Sunday. It is the day in the Church’s year, before the intensity and drama of Holy Week, on which we begin to contemplate more intensely what we see in the glorification of Jesus Christ and ‘behold the wood of the cross, whereon was hung the Saviour of the world’, as the Good Friday liturgy puts it.

As the time of his Passion draws near may we consider how we see Jesus Christ, and behold God in all people, moments and things. Passion Sunday is a spiritual optician’s check-up (from another Greek word optikos "of or having to do with sight and seeing’).

My prayer is that believer and enquirer alike may cry out to the Lord: ‘I wish to see Jesus: show me things I’ve never seen before’. Amen.

© Andrew Bishop, 2018

Encounter & Transformation

First preached as a sermon on the Sunday before Lent 2017 at Guildford Cathedral.

Readings: Exodus 24.12-18;  2 Peter 1.16-21; Matthew 17.1-9

‘”This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased”.

We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven,

while we were with him on the holy mountain’. (2 Peter 1.18)

+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I want to invite you to mountaineering with me. You don’t have to be supremely fit or nimble, and you won’t require oxygen. All you need is openness of heart to an encounter, and a readiness to go back down the mountain changed.

View of Guildford Cathedral from the south east

The first mountain, well, hill. Morning by morning I ascend Stag Hill and up here at its summit I meet the Lord in word and sacrament as I come to Morning Prayer and the Eucharist. I then descend the hill into the University bearing, I trust, the life and light of Jesus Christ. And in the evening I repeat the ascent and descent through the sublime worship of Evensong.

It may not be Mount Sinai, Mount Zion or the Mount of Transfiguration, but it is my place of ascent and encounter, one I share with you. This holy place is a place where we meet the Living God, where the Holy Spirit draws us Sunday by Sunday, day by day. In coming here we open ourselves afresh in word and sacrament to the transforming, igniting, inspiring possibilities of God.

The Bible is replete with times and places of encounter with God, and transformation through God, and more often than not, but not exclusively, they happen on high places.

The Transfiguration of Jesus as described in our gospel reading, our second mountain, is one such moment.

Icon of the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ

Jesus takes with him three disciples - Peter, James and John – and is joined on the mountain by the figures of Moses and Elijah. Moses embodies the teaching and guidance of Torah and is the representative figure of the Exodus: liberation and freedom. Elijah encapsulates the prophetic tradition of the radical call to turn afresh to God.

In Jesus’ presence Moses and Elijah are recast as the pillars on which the people of the New Covenant will be shaped. Jesus is not another person amongst them but is the very presence of God, not superseding but shot through the first covenant which Moses and Elijah represent.

The transfiguration accounts of the three synoptic gospels, and testified to in the Second Letter of Peter, are emphatic that something quite decisive and remarkable happened on that mountain on that day. They ascended a mountain, encounter Jesus and through his transfiguration they are transformed themselves, ready to descend as new creations in Christ.

This rich and powerful moment of encounter and transformation on the mountain gives shape to all our encounters with God. It tells us that encountering God in Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit is not a matter that can leave us indifferent. As St Paul writes, in a different context, ‘we shall all be changed!’ (1 Corinthians 15)

The transfiguration of Jesus conjures up an image of the surging vision of people streaming up our third mountain to God’s dwelling place as described by the prophet Isaiah, ‘Many peoples will say, “Come let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths’ (Isaiah 2.3).

The transfiguration also evokes the picture too of the water flowing down from our fourth mountain, the Temple Mount described by the prophet Ezekiel: surging water flows and meets the stagnant waters to transform them and make them fresh (Ezekiel 47.8). It shapes what the action of dismissal at the Eucharist is meant to be: as transformed people we go to be living water to a stagnant world.

Ascent and flowing down; encounter and transformation; God’s ways of life.

Christianity is a religion of enduring encounter and transformation. It is a religion of intensity and extensity, in other words intense moments of encounter that then spread out without being thinned down.

We call this sacramentality: intense moments when the divine presence breaks in. The pouring of water in baptism, the breaking of bread at the Eucharist, the words of absolution following confession,  the pledge of the husband and the wife, the soothing oil of gladness in anointing, the empowering Spirit given at confirmation and ordination: in all these intense moments God’s transformative grace breaks into human experience.

Churches and cathedrals are places of encounter with and transformation by God, and are themselves sacramental. That is at the heart of why this is a precious and holy place and not just a big brick hall.

The great Christian quest is to see the light of Christ breaking through in all places, all moments and all people. This is a gift of the Holy Spirit which is open to us all. In this light we see things afresh and differently; when we have seen the light of Christ shining out then our eyes focus in a new way.

If we will allow it – and God works with us, not against us - this transforms how we see the world and how we are seen in the world. It means we see the Kingdom of God in our midst and we are seen as signs of that Kingdom.

So what will a transfigured you or I look like now, and when we’re out and about in daily life? Perhaps to modify the words of St Benedict, we will be ‘striving to live by God’s commandments every day. Treasur[ing] chastity, harbour[ing] neither hatred not jealousy of anyone and do[ing] nothing out of envy… not seek[ing] to quarrel; shunning arrogance. Honouring the elderly and loving the young. [When having] a dispute with someone mak[ing] peace with them before the sun goes down. And never los[ing] hope in God’s mercy’ (RB 4). That’s not a bad application of being a Christian.

But it’s not just about us: this also about who Jesus Christ, our Saviour, is.

In the gospels Pilate declared ‘behold the man’ and the centurion declared, ‘truly this is God son’: both were right, because Jesus Christ in his body is truly human and truly God. The reading of the transfiguration gospel today tells us of what will be accomplished in Jerusalem in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Our journey to Easter takes us to see Jesus exalted on another hill; the hill of Golgotha. There, as St John Chrysostom said, ‘I see him crucified; I call him King’.

In a dying and dead man on the cross – flanked not by Moses and Elijah but by two criminals - we see the exalted glory of the God who loves us.

The season of Lent, of careful, prayerful preparation that we will begin on Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, is a time of deepening encounter and transformation as we are exalted in the heights and walk the way of the cross. It is not too late to prepare for Lent!

As you prepare for Lent you can ask yourself two questions: how and where do I encounter Jesus Christ? What does my life transformed look like?

You have ascended the mountain of the Lord; you meet Christ in word and sacrament: then go from here and be bearers of his light and life.

‘”This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased”.

We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven,

while we were with him on the holy mountain’. (2 Peter 1.18)

© Andrew Bishop, 2017