Seeing Jesus [Good Friday]

READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Hosea 6:1-6

• Exodus 12:1-11

• St. John 18-19

Grace, mercy, and peace [are yours] from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. (1 Tim 1)
 
Jesus speaks to you on this Good Friday from His suffering heard, saying:
“But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
 
On Pastor’s “wish list”, so to speak, is a little metal plaque that could fit in the pulpit here. On it, would quote the disciples in St John 12:21, “Sir we would see Jesus.” This, then, becomes the Church’s plea to our heavenly Father and it also becomes the Church’s demand of her pastors and basically the only thing that the pastor is good for: showing Jesus.
 
But this becomes hard to do as Jesus has ascended to the Right Hand of the Father. There is no Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world, as St. John the Baptist got to point to. Neither is there the Man, Jesus Christ, that Pilate says to behold. And neither is there a man to which Phillip may lead us, as I just mentioned in St. John 12.
 
So it becomes very interesting, when Jesus goes back in time, and says things like, “Abraham saw my Day and was glad” (Jn 8:56) and from John 12:41, “These things Isaiah said, because he saw His glory, and he spoke of Him.”
 
It is interesting, because just as it appears we cannot point to Jesus in our time, neither should it have been possible for Abraham and Isaiah to see Him. But, we hear that Abraham only saw Christ’s “day” and Isaiah only saw Christ’s glory. The super-spiritual will then try to convince you that that proves they did not see Jesus before He was born and even that the Apostles did not see His glory until after the Resurrection.
 
They quote St. John 12:26, “but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written of him, and that they had done these things to him.” This is nothing else except a sloughing off of the cross. God’s glory is not on the cross. My God got off that cross. And we sinfully agree.
 
If we tell the truth, we don’t actually want to see Jesus, because of that cross. We want a fake Jesus, Who we can control, because if we were to see the real Jesus, the suffering, serving God, then we would have to admit our sins are real and the world and everything we hold dear is fake.
 
But don’t worry! The crucifixion of Jesus is just an unfortunate circumstance, they tell us, where Jesus was at the wrong place, at the wrong time. We need to move on to glory.  No one would interpret “God’s Glory” as suffering and death and He’d never expect that of us, even if He didn’t even spare His own Son. Glory is resurrection. Glory is exaltation. Glory is power!
 
That’s the God I worship. Power. Eh uh I mean, powerFUL. In fact my God is so powerful, He can make His Word suspicious and probably not true so that every religion can be right and truth is relative to each and every body. Isn’t that a powerful God??
 
Sigh.
 
St. John continues his own explanation of his words in chapter 12, for us. The men who want “to see Jesus” (12:21) get a seemingly cryptic answer from Jesus, that if they want to see Him they must understand that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (12:23) and that’s when they will see Him.  
 
Jesus tells them about the need for a grain of wheat to fall into the ground and die before it can bring forth much fruit (12:24).   Jesus clearly explains that the path to glory and salvation will also be the way of sacrifice and denial (12:25-26).
 
Jesus is also clearly asking for this sacrifice and denial from the Father as He prays, “Father, glorify Thy name” (12:28).  The Father answers that His Name will be glorified through Jesus’ death.   Jesus then says that it will be in the process of His being “lifted up from the earth”, referring to His Crucifixion, and God’s plans for the world will be secured (12:28, 32-33) through His suffering and death.
 
So we see that the glory of God is directly related to the Crucifixion of Jesus. More than that, Christ “is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3). The Glory of the Father is the Son. 
 
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” , Jesus says in St. John 14:9. 
 
In this, we now have a direct line of transmission from the Father to our eyeballs. The Father’s glory is found only in the Son. The Son’s glory is found in His suffering and death on the cross. The cross is kept among us in three ways: first, by faith we hear the Word and believe it, second, we keep the body of Jesus on our crosses, and third, we also bear our own cross of suffering in this world.
 
It was necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into His glory (Luke 24:26). It was necessary for our sakes, so that we could also see His glory. Isaiah saw the glory of the Lord, in Isaiah 6, meaning, He saw Jesus. Abraham rejoiced to see “Jesus’s Day”, meaning he saw Jesus. 
 
We proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes by eating and drinking, says 1 Cor 11:26, and thereby see Jesus. We literally feed on His flesh and drink His blood, gaining eternal life, and the solemn promise to be raised up on the last day (John 6:54).
 
We baptize in His Name and at His Command, sealing the Promise of salvation to ourselves, meaning in baptism we see Jesus. We keep His Word close and treasure it that we might hear it over and over again and whenever we want.
 
The hour that the Father glorifies the Son so that the Son my glorify the Father is the Son’s crucifixion. The way we see Jesus is not through pretend emotions or visions, but in His Word and His Sacraments.