Seeing Jesus
Lent 5, Year B 2024; John 12:20-33
This story takes place during the third and last Passover of Jesus that John’s Gospel narrates, and is a turning-point for the whole work. It immediately follows the triumphal entry, a story still to come for us in the liturgical rehearsal of Holy Week. This scene is the realization of or reaction to that event, the evangelist’s narrative about a changed situation once Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem to prepare for the climax of the Gospel. A seemingly minor set of events and more dramatic exchanges of words set the scene for what will follow.
Reacting to the crowd following Jesus, the Pharisees had just bemoaned that “the whole world has gone after him!” (12:19), and as today’s passage opens the world—“Greeks”—want to see Jesus. The sign entailed in the entry of Jesus as King now unfolds, as the scope of his reign is expanded, and the nature of his rule “seen.”
These Greeks are not to be imagined as from Greece itself. “Greek” here is equivalent to “non-Jewish”—compare Mark 7:26, where the very local Syro-Phoenician woman is initially described with the same word, even though NRSV translates it there as “gentile.” The connection made with Philip, from Bethsaida, adds to the impression that they are locals, but not Jewish. The significance of their arrival is thus religious or ethnic (closely related things in antiquity, and in some other times and places too) rather than geographical, but it does indicate that the reign of Jesus, signaled locally in Jerusalem, will be felt by the whole world.
These particular “Greeks” play no part in what follows; they have introduced or focused how Jesus’ reign will work, now he has arrived at the scene where his glorification (v.23) will take place. Their interest in “seeing” him is taken up in what follows, where Jesus again refers to his being “lifted up” (v. 32), i.e., made visible.
There is a characteristic Johannine move here, from the apparent simple meaning of an event or statement to a more profound one. We start reading the passage as though the particular “Greeks” are seeking a meet-and-greet with Jesus, but through a set of sayings we find instead that Jesus will “draw all people”—people of all nations, that is—to himself. Taking the “we would see Jesus” quote out of context—like hundreds of plaques in pulpits—risks reversing John’s basic interpretive move. Of course people want to see Jesus, but the point is how that happens. It is not just a matter of introductions; like John, the preacher must proclaim the paradox of the Cross.
Between the request to see Jesus and the solemn but triumphant end of this passage, where the nature of people seeing him is grounded in his death (v. 33), comes a curious set of sayings including a dialogue in which the voice of God appears. Rather than Jesus pursuing one theme like bread, light, etc., into more profound territory, as often happens in John, we instead have a whole set of images and ideas that rapidly give way to one another and which connect more closely to Synoptic material than John often seems to do.
The imagery of seeds and sowing, leading to much fruit (v. 24), sounds like Jesus’ parables (see Mark 4 etc.), yet the likeness to Paul’s image in 1 Corinthians (15:37-8), where the death and re-birth of the seed is key, is also strong. Then the idea of losing and saving one’s life in conjunction with following Jesus (vv. 25-26) is reminiscent of (e.g.) Mark ( 8:34-37), where like this passage it forms part of the key transition for the Gospel as a whole, between ministry and Passion story. Then Jesus speaks—with an unusually vulnerable tone, for John— in a way reminiscent of the Gethsemane stories in the other Gospels: “Now is my soul troubled.” The effect is to place the coming Passion story at the center of the request; this is how Jesus must be seen, not because he will suffer but because he will triumph over suffering and the violence of the world’s logic, and reign.
The passage also shows John’s distinctive approach to time —the straightforward sense of a movement through narrative time is combined with a sense that everything has already taken place. So “this hour” announced by Jesus is also future. The climactic speech that becomes a dialogue with the Father, for whose name Jesus seeks glory—“I have glorified [Jesus’ name], and I will glorify it again” (v.28)—also suggests a future which is a recapitulation of the past, yet already present to the eye of the faithful reader.
In Jesus’ response to the Father’s voice promising him glory he says, strikingly, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” This is the first time in John the phrase “ruler of this world” occurs; it will reappear twice, at 14:30 and 16:11. This climactic moment is not (just) the Father’s voice (which we are told was for the crowd’s sake, not his), nor the following triumphant reiteration of the exaltation of Jesus, but this dramatic declaration of victory over the worldly power. This reminds us of the observation by the Pharisees about the world “going after him,” and the implication of the Greeks’ presence and their quest, that they too are part of the world whose true ruler has now come.
This “ruler of this world” language is John’s terminology for Satan, but the point here is about Jesus, the world, and who gets to rule. Jesus will famously state before Pilate that his kingdom “is not of this world,” which is routinely misunderstood. His reign is about everything, including human society and its power relations, yet his power and policy does not derive from the same sources that Pilates’ did. The invocation of the “ruler of this world” here looks ahead to that encounter; it emphasizes that Jesus’ power is more authentic than Satan’s or Pilates’, deriving from God rather than from either human or diabolic authority. He comes to bring freedom and peace which the world cannot. His reign it extends over all; it is “spiritual,” not by way of limit, but by way of truth.
“World” thus functions for John in two ways: first it is a way of talking about the disordered nature of our existence, of a reality that is under powers other than God’s love; yet it can also refer more simply to the world that God loves (see 3:16), as we were reminded recently. Jesus is “of” another world, but this one was made through him too, and he has come to save and rule it.
So the Greeks’ question results in our being given a renewed or deeper vision of a Jesus in whom they and all the world might place our hope. We and they, coming to seek him, are drawn into his true reign of love over all things, and the defeat of the ruler of this world. The nature of Jesus’ rule invites us to understand his suffering not merely as the exercise of the violence inherent in the regime of that other “ruler,” but as a work of love that bears much fruit. We will see Jesus, if not as we expected.