We wish to see Jesus
One night this week, I was sitting around a table with a number of friends. Topics of conversation seemed to move effortlessly from pleasantries and inquiries about mutual friends to discussions about common interests and interesting discoveries. One of the people at the table is nominally Catholic, although in the years that have passed since the Sacraments of Initiation were experienced, there have been many other chapters to her life story. One question led to another and before we had realized it, all of us were involved in a discussion about the understandings and misunderstandings surrounding the Catholic faith and our practices. As we spoke, there was a little voice echoing in my head: Never discuss politics or religion at the dinner table. It seems that these two topics have been the source of many a heated discussion at far too many tables, but this particular discussion seemed to take the form of questions and answers exchanged among friends.
I couldn’t help wondering whether such a discussion may have taken place between the Greeks and the apostles mentioned at the beginning of today’s gospel. Then as now, politics and religion were both subjects to be carefully handled. In fact, these would have been even more volatile subjects, given the fact that the political rulers in Israel were also religious authorities. Perhaps in the midst of a discussion of thorny subjects, a different kind of question seems to have arisen: We wish to see Jesus. This is not a question about current events, or about politics. It speaks about the questions that often arise in the hearts of believers and those who want at some level or other, to enter into a personal relationship with Jesus. Answers to such inquiries are not so much dependent on human wisdom and rhetoric. Rather, responses to questions of faith must be born out of an existing relationship with the Son of Man.
The apostles eventually told Jesus about their encounter, and about the expressed desire for the Greeks to meet Him, but his response to their enthusiasm is another lesson for the disciples themselves: Unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains just a single grain. Jesus never stops teaching, for no matter how much we may know about Him, no matter how closely we may follow him, no matter how capable we may be of responding to the questions posed around our dinner tables by friends, we all need to be reminded every now and then that a relationship of faith with this man named Jesus must by its nature lead to the cross.
The covenant of love that was established long ago between God and His people has been written on our hearts. It is inscribed at the core of our being, and some of us spend our entire earthly lives discovering it, questioning it, even wrestling with it until we are at peace with it. At the heart of this covenant is a promise that our God will always be with us: I will be their God, and they will be my people. While this covenant does express a desire on God’s part to enter into a personal relationship with each of us, it does not promise prestige. In fact, it promises the exact opposite, for it calls us to a deeper understanding of love: the kind of love that is willing to die so that we might know the fullness of life.
The secular world would have us believe that suffering and death are to be avoided, or even that it is possible to cheat death, and yet in the person of Jesus, God showed us that through suffering, Jesus was made perfect … and became the source of eternal salvation. This is the paradox of our faith. Through our own experience of suffering, we are better able to sympathize with others in our world who suffer through no fault of their own. Through our own experience of dying to self, we are better able to understand and appreciate the great gift of love that Jesus gave us by dying on the cross.
In the next two weeks or so, we will once again listen to the story of Jesus’ passion and death. I wonder how many will stand by and watch as the story is retold. I wonder how many will come to believe that it is a story about life. I wonder how many will tell the story to friends and family gathered around our dinner tables. Ah yes: politics and religion make for interesting conversation.
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