Sight
Compline on Tuesday in Holy Week
Canon Tim Schofield, Canon Emeritus of Chichester Cathedral
In 2010 there was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled “The Artist is Present”. Taking part in that exhibition was a performance artist called Marina Abramovic. The performance element consisted of her sitting on a chair in front of a small table. Opposite her was an empty chair in which visitors to the exhibition were invited to come and sit. Marina Abramovic would then, without any words being spoken, gaze at them with love and attention. It sounds rather self-conscious and indeed some of the interactions, which can be seen on YouTube, do feel a little awkward at first. But, in the end these silent, face to face encounters seemed genuinely to touch people with love and draw from them a response that was often very moving.
In tonight’s reading some Greeks came to see Jesus. These would have been gentile God-fearers who admired Judaism and lived it as best they could without actually being Jewish. And this request by gentile believers to see Jesus is a key moment. The hour has come – Jesus is drawing the whole world to himself.
But the request of the Greeks to see Jesus is more than curiosity. The Greek word “see” is used twenty times in the fourth gospel, usually in connection with some form of revelation. Following the baptism of Jesus, John the Baptist declares “I have seen and bear witness that this is the Son of God”. A few verses later Jesus’ encounter with the disciples begins significantly with the question: “what are you looking for?”. He then follows this up with the invitation to “come and see” and so they discover the Messiah of God. We could go on with many other examples but you get the point. When the Greeks say they want to see Jesus we are being told that they are more than mere spectators or voyeurs. They want to see Jesus with the eyes of the heart; they are looking for a revelation of the presence of God.
And although the fourth gospel is writing about Greeks here there is, behind this request, a long tradition stretching back to the Old Testament. The Hebrew Old Testament does not have an abstract word for the presence of God. Instead, it uses the term panim which means “face”, to denote a sense of divine closeness. Many of the Psalms, for instance, speak of a yearning for the presence of God as a longing to see his face. “When shall I come and behold the face of God?” says Psalm 42. It’s not surprising, then, that Christianity, with its Jewish roots, should have the same emphasis on seeing. In the resurrection accounts “seeing” precedes teaching in the life of discipleship. The good news is always: “I have seen the Lord”. That’s why at the outset Christianity was not so much a set of rules or ethics but a way of living in the light of the glory that had been revealed. Perhaps that’s why Iris Murdoch memorably said: “We grow by looking, by attending to that which is seen”.
And this idea that “we grow by looking, by attending to that which is seen” is characteristic of Jesus himself. Our Lord was supremely aware and attentive to the world around him. In seeing the lilies of the fields or sparrows in the marketplace he saw signs of God’s providence. For him the natural world was potent with images of the coming kingdom. And that is also true of the sign used in tonight’s gospel reading. How often Jesus must have gazed at grains of wheat. Now he uses this as a sign of what John calls glory. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12 v.24). The grain of wheat falling and dying becomes a sign of the falling and dying of Jesus. And for John this dying in agony reveals the glory of God’s self-giving love. God’s love is now seen to have no limits, no boundaries.
So, if the Greeks truly want to see Jesus, they have to see him as revealed on the cross, as a grain of wheat dying and falling.
But that seeing is a profoundly difficult thing to do. This is partly because, in the words of Isaiah, God is a God who hides himself. In Jesus, God divested himself of power and splendour, and fulfilled his saving work among us veiled, hidden in the weakness and shame of the cross. “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53). So, in the light of the cross we have to find a new way of looking and seeing. In the words of St. Augustine God stretches our desire so that we might learn to see the presence and glory of God, not only in what is beautiful as we considered last night, but also in the suffering victims of evil.
This thought has been developed in a very striking way by the contemporary Jewish theologian Melissa Raphael. She points out that in the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition the glory of God represents the feminine face of God. She then goes on to record some of the experiences of Jewish women in Auschwitz. She tells how the faces of women in the camp were routinely desecrated and defiled as they were smeared with excrement and dirt. And amidst this degradation the women cared for each other by gently washing each other’s faces using only what they had, usually dirty cloths and spittle. And as the faces of the women were cleansed so the face of God, the glory, which is the feminine aspect of God, was revealed.
And the implications of that are rather important for us particularly as the horror of the war in Ukraine, and the violence against women and civilians, comes to light. It means that whether faces are beautiful or scarred, whether they are loved or defiled by others they can reveal to us the glory and the face of God. That means that day in, day out we are constantly encountering the face of God in all those around us if we only look with the eyes of grace.
For our desire to look and see with love is stretched, first and foremost by grace, not by an act of the human will. Near the beginning of John’s Gospel there is a strange incident where Jesus sees Nathaniel sitting under a fig tree. The glance of Jesus is so piercing that he sees Nathaniel as he really is – “here is a true Israelite in whom there is no deceit”, says Jesus. And that divine gaze was so powerful that Nathaniel himself is now able to see Jesus, not as a despised inhabitant of Nazareth, but by faith as the Son of God. And that is a pattern for us all. God gazes on us – lifts up the light of his countenance upon us – so that we might see him with the eyes of faith and discern his presence in the faces of those around us, especially the despised and forsaken. In that sense Marina Abramovic’s performance art in New York, with which I began, is a kind of parable for us. As she gazed with love on those who sat before her, all types of faces, so she drew gracefully from them love and tenderness in response. That’s the power of the gaze of love.