I honestly believe we are afraid, but not necessarily for those reasons. Much like the Greeks, we wish to see Jesus. We come to those who proclaim his name and ask for him. But we believe that we can protect ourselves from the dis-ease. Instead we feel at ease with the Jesus that we have come to know. We are too smart to get snookered by the minions who do whatever their religious leaders tell them to do. So we have come to see Jesus as a friend, as someone who will be “on our side,” as someone who will teach us the right way and give us hope for the future.

But as we come to Jesus and ask for his attention, the tables turn. Jesus, who teaches love and cures the sick, speaks to us of death and calls us to servitude. He says that unless we are like a seed that dies, we cannot be fruitful. He says that unless we hate our lives in this world, eternal life is not an option. He says that those who follow him will become servants, lackeys, those who take direction well.

This is not what we signed on for. Jesus was supposed to give us a better life, improved conditions, not death and hate and slavery. We may not be like the puffed-up media ministers who claim that their riches and good health are due to their pious life of faithfulness to Jesus Christ; but come on, we are capable, indeed called Christians who yearn for life, and love, and leadership. It is beginning to sound like a disease, like dependence, if not all out depression. We wish to see Jesus, but we wish to see him differently, more like us, and less like this raving lunatic of John’s gospel.

If anyone else said these things, would we even listen? If I, as your pastor, said that you are called not to life, but to death, would it sound remotely reasonable? If I told you to hate the life you’ve been given if you really love God, would your lifestyle change? If I told you that to be where Jesus is, you need to spend less time at church and more time with the sick and dying, more time late in the evening in bars and on street corners, that you needed to share your homes with the homeless, and your meals with the hungry, would you make it your priority to listen more carefully to the street person who wants your spare change? Those who wish to see Jesus are confronted with the knowledge that they might not want to spend much time where Jesus is.

Therefore, in the next verses we hear the deep sigh of Jesus’ loneliness. “Now my soul is troubled,” he says, “And what should I say –‘Father, save me from this hour?’” We all too clearly are shown that we can’t really go where Jesus went. We are afraid – afraid of getting sick, afraid of dying, afraid of what we might really believe.

In John’s gospel, Jesus is always pushing the boundaries just a little bit further. Want to follow me? Take up your cross. Give ALL that you have. Love as I have loved you -- which means laying down your life for your friends and maybe even for your enemies. Want to be first? Make sure you’re last. Want to be right? Make sure that you’ve listened first to the poor, the outcast, and those who are disturbed. Jesus didn’t come to make the world a better place; he came to turn the world upside down so that those who sit now in judgment will be ripped from their thrones.

Have you seen enough yet? Will you walk away today saddened that you don’t know this Jesus, or do you want to know more? Do you want to know about this love so extreme that it changes our worldly desires and pitches us closer to the divine flame? Roman Catholic priest, Brennan Manning, describes the passion of and for Jesus this way: “[Jesus is] a living injunction to strip ourselves of earthly cares and worldly wisdom, all desire for human praise, greediness for any kind of comfort, spiritual consolations included; a living summons to let go of every kind of worldliness - including that which prefers the more attractive duty to the less attractive, which prods us to put more effort into relationships with the people we want to stand well with. Even the last rag we cling to – the self-flattery that suggests that we are being rather humble when we disclaim any resemblance to Jesus Christ – even that rag has to go when we stand face-to-face with the crucified Son of Man.” (Manning, p. 81)

It is only through the shame and embarrassment of the cross that we can begin to see that following Jesus is not a self-improvement plan, or as Manning calls it, “the prosperity Gospel” in which good happens to us when we do something good. The Christian life is an uncomfortable life that we will never be able to perfectly follow, and yet we still can be drawn into the amazing love of God in very profound ways.

Look at the Psalm text. With my whole heart I seek you. I delight in your decrees as much as in all riches. I will fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your law. I will not forget your Word. In our own prayerful ways, we yearn for this same kind of relationship with the divine. We not only want to see Jesus, we want to be touched by him, we want to be changed by him, and we truly want to be where he is as difficult as that may be.

In the old south, the deep south of a hundred years ago, they didn’t use the phrase, “Born again” like they do today as a sign of the transforming love of Jesus. Instead, they used to say, “I was seized by the power of a great affection.” (Manning, p.42) To follow in this kind of life we must be seized, confronted, changed, and transformed. This is a “love so amazing, so divine,” as the Issac Watts Lenten hymn suggests, it “demands my soul, my life, my all.”

Amen.