We should like to see Jesus

 Fifth Sunday of Lent Year B

“We should like to see Jesus.” For the past few months, many Catholics had been longing and praying for this same request: “we should like to see Jesus,” not just virtually, on the screen of their television, computers or handheld devices, but to truly see our Lord in the flesh, in the tabernacle, in the church, as His body is placed on our palms or on our tongues.

So many would have sighed with relief, still others moved to tears, as they stepped into church last week. It is one thing to gaze lovingly at an image of a loved one in a picture, and an entirely different experience to meet him or her face to face. The former is just a pale shadow of the latter. But today, many would be shocked and troubled again the moment they stepped into church to behold the image of our Beloved Lord hidden behind a purple veil. Just when we had found Him after longing to see Him, His visage is hidden from our sight once again.

Coming into our churches with our crucifixes and holy images covered, evokes within us the emptiness of a world without Christ. This is not just a hypothetical scenario in a dystopian world that has forgotten God. We have experienced it most painfully in the past few months. With our churches and chapels closed, it does seem as if Christ has abandoned us to our misery and predicament. 

But it is also in the midst of such visible absence of our Lord’s presence that we come to recognise how wrong we have been. The world has always needed Jesus Christ and always will, although we have often taken that for granted. It is only when the Lord had been taken away from us, when our churches and chapels were closed, that we came to realise how much we really missed Him. In a paradoxical way, His absence helped us to appreciate His presence.

This is what our Lord did when He went to the cross. His death is an embodiment of the words He utters in today’s gospel: “unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.” By mounting the wood of the Cross that first Good Friday, He opened the gates of heaven and the doorway of salvation to all peoples.  He united God and humanity, and humanity with each other.  On the Cross He gave every last drop of Himself as blood and water flowed from His pierced side, the same blood and water types for the Sacraments that His Mystical Body (the Church) offers for Salvation, Baptism and the Eucharist.  Because of His death, our Lord had removed the mourning veil, and tore the veil which hid the mystery of God from man’s gaze. It is ironic that the veil of our crosses reveal more than they hide. They expose the folly of our ambitions and spotlight the wisdom of God’s plan. Hidden now from our sight, the veils are a reminder that we see God clearest of all when we see Him hanging from the cross.

Just as months of fasting from sacramental communion had heightened our hunger and thirst for the Lord and for communion with Him, the fasting of our senses through this veiling of His image should deepen our longing and love for the Lord. We are confident that our hunger will be sated, our prayers will be answered, our longing will be satisfied on Good Friday when the cross will be unveiled and we will get to behold the beauty of our Lord once again. The Cross is the lens through which we are called to see Him, the world and each other; the Cross gives us our perspective and opens our eyes to reality as God sees it. From the cross we will see an end to sin and division: “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself!”

Christ looks lovingly at us through pained eyes on the Cross, eyes now hidden from our sight, dare we look back at him? What is His response if we do? Judgement? Condemnation? …. No …. I can tell you with certainty that when He is looking back at you from behind the veil, it is a look of love, mercy and longing … longing that we love more perfectly in our lives by living life through the lens of the Cross. As we echo the words of the Greeks who came in search of Him in today’s gospel, “we should like to see Jesus,” He reveals to us that the only way that we are going to see Him, is to do what He tells us to do: “Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for the eternal life.” Like Him, we must become that wheat of grain that falls on the ground and dies in order to yield the rich harvest of eternal life.