Finding Jesus

[The following sermon I preached at St. Joseph's Episcopal Church, the 5th Sunday of Lent 2010. The Gospel text is John 12:1-12.]

This is the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Next week we follow Jesus into Jerusalem, joyfully proclaiming as king this goofy beggar riding on a donkey, whom we will then proceed to mock, judge, torture and kill during holy week. We are not quite there, however. This week we sit with him in Bethany, continuing our strident and joyful penance, to which Bp. Marble called us anew a couple weeks back.

To what, this week, is our attention drawn? From what vanity are we to turn?

St Augustine says on our Gospel passage: “Anoint
the feet of Jesus: follow Jesus’ feet by living a good life. Wipe them with your hair. What you have beyond what you need, give to the poor, and you have wiped the feet of the Lord…You have something to spare from your abundance: it is excess for you, but necessity for the feet of the Lord. Perhaps on this earth the Lord’s feet are still in need. For of whom but his body parts did he say, “In as much as you did it to one of the least of mine, you did it to me?” You gave what was beyond necessity for you, but you have done a grateful thing to my feet.”

I wish to make just make a couple of simple points.

First, Augustine makes the point that what we lavish upon the poor we lavish upon Jesus. This is simple enough, but hard in practice. It is hard to see Jesus in the drunken, slightly pushy, smelly beggar on 9th St. But, though he is not a saint, he is still our Lord. “You will always have the poor with you.” Jesus says. He also says “I am with you even unto the end of the age” and St. Thomas Aquinas says that we had better read these two saying together: Jesus hangs out with us, dwells among us, in the person of that beggar. Jesus is not being selfless when he says: “Give to him who begs.”

Beggars themselves do this all the time. If you want to see folks unafraid to give, go hang out in our back parking lot. A while back I was taking a couple of these folks to down to Target to get some things they wanted. As we were pulling out of the parking after having done our shopping we stopped at the light where a beggar stood with a sign asking for money. I knew I only had a 20 in my wallet and so I didn’t reach for anything. The two guys dug in their pockets and came up with about four bucks for the beggar. “Whenever you get a chance to help somebody out, do it,” one of them said.

Jesus lives among us in the poor. But this points out that, downright inconveniently, Jesus has not chosen to hang out just everywhere. He does not tell us that we will find him everywhere we look. He does not say “if you want to find me, look at the sun set, look in a child’s eyes, look at the flowers, or the moonlit night.” We might find him in these places, but probably not until we have learned to find him in the places that he has told us specifically that he hangs out. Where else does Jesus say he is going to be found?

Besides the poor, Jesus says that he is present in the corporate prayers of the church. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” Here we learn our Savior’s voice in the daily reading of the scriptures and his prayers in the Psalms. We sing the songs of the church, his body. We read about his saints who embody him, and we beg for his mercy and forgiveness for the ways that we do not. We receive his peace from the hand of our sisters and brothers.

Climactically, of course, Jesus, has promised to be present in the Eucharist. In bread broken and wine poured out, as one saint used to say, we look at Jesus and he looks at us. Here, in this food, we taste and savor our Lord. Our senses are trained to know him, as it were, from the inside out. We know how to see the Lord only after he has told us where he is and what he looks like.

Before we can see Jesus everywhere we have to see him somewhere. So the first step toward seeing Jesus everywhere is to hang out in the places that he has promised us he will be. Learning to see Jesus in our spouses, our children, our labor or the created order must start by seeing him in the Eucharist, in common prayer, and in the poor. For how will we know how to find him in the places where he is hard to see if we haven’t learned from his certain presence in the places he assures us he will be.

But Judas always stands as a temptation to find Jesus wherever we want. “This resource could have been sold and given to the poor.” Such things are allegorical. Judas becomes for us a type of vice, whereby we determine the most effective means of serving Jesus. How many times have we all heard the argument about how inefficient and impractical it is to give directly to the beggar! Jesus says “Give to him who begs and you did it to me.” Judas says “He just wants a beer. I give my money to the shelter and I pay my taxes. That’s what the state and the charities are there for. They make sure the money goes to good use. If I keep giving to him I’m just perpetuating the problem.” The particularly vicious part of this outsourcing of the poor, says St. John’s Gospel, is that thereby we do not actually love the poor. For in not lavishing what we have on Jesus right in front of us, we profit. We might even say that we steal. We keep something for ourselves that belongs to Jesus. If it is not the money, it is security, it is comfort, it is our own schedule, our own healthy boundaries.

So: in this chaotic world with its anxiety and pressures, distractions and temptations, and demands for loyalty on all sides, it is hard to know where to find Jesus. But He gives us a roadmap of sorts. He tells us where we can reliably find Him, where He will always 'show up'. And if He is 'showing up' at the Eucharist, the prayers and among the poor, but we are not, then we must hear again that chilling question asked of Adam in the Fall: 'Where are you?' We are invited back into Eden, to walk in the cool of the evening with God, this is the building of and participation in the Kingdom, and it looks like this: Come to the Table. Gather for common prayer. Anoint and wipe the feet of the Lord while he is with you.

Amen.