“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

What does it mean to see Jesus?

The “Greeks” in the beginning of our text surely want more than to just “see” Jesus- they wanted more than just a glimpse of this great man they’d heard about. They wanted to truly “see” Jesus- to meet him, touch him, hear him speak—to know him. Their request seems simple enough. Jesus’ answer, however, is another matter entirely. He answers in a way that is anything but straightforward and perhaps not quite what these foreigners had expected. But we can only assume that they were granted their request and got to “see Jesus.”

But what about today? How do we “see” Jesus? How do we meet him, touch him, hear him, know him? In the world of Philip and Andrew, the Son of God was there in the flesh, there for everyone to see. Today, we have to look for Jesus in other places entirely. We have to look for evidence in places we might not expect.

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

Where do we see Jesus?

If we take a look around today, locally as well as globally, it might be hard at first glance to see Jesus. It is hard to see around and through the natural and human made disasters, the economic issues, and other things that seem so overwhelming. But if we take a step back and look at the people involved, it is another matter entirely. We can see Jesus in the faces of the people we meet every day. What an idea! If we take the time to look at- to “see” those who need our help and all whom we encounter in our daily lives, we can “see” Jesus. What if we treated everyone like we were encountering Jesus? Just as we treat Jesus with the utmost respect and love, we should treat everyone we meet. If we work to see face of Christ in others, it naturally means that we treat them with the respect and dignity that every human deserves. If we treat everyone as if we were seeing Jesus, it might make it easier to pay someone a livable wage, to work for peace and justice for all people, to work for human rights so that all people might be free from the bondage of poverty, hunger and disease.

In January I took a J-term trip through the seminary to Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota. Shannon county, where most of the reservation lies, is one of the second poorest county in the entire country.

Over and over again, I looked into the eyes of the people who have suffered for so long. I heard the stories of people’s struggles with alcohol and drug addictions, the mistreatment at the hands of the people entrusted with caring for those living on the reservation. In those stories that brought tears to my eyes and even anger to my heart, I realized that every person was loved by Jesus. And that fact alone made it easier to see Jesus. In the faces of the children who came to play at the Lutheran retreat center every afternoon, in the eyes of the mothers struggling to feed their children and heat their homes.

We heard stories of triumphs, of traditions passed on, but we also heard stories of pain and suffering. One particularly cold and rainy day we ventured up the hill to Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890 massacre that claimed the lives of 300 Lakota people- men, women and children. It is also the site of the 1973 standoff between a Lakota group- known as the American Indian Movement- and US Marshals that lasted for 71 days.

Standing on the top of that hill in the cold rain, looking over the cemetery where so many people are buried, I wondered where I could “see” Jesus in the midst of all the pain and sadness. While our guide, Kelly Looking Horse told the story of his own involvement in 1973, I realized that Jesus was right there, in front of me. Kelly Looking Horse and others like him work to keep the stories of their people alive and pass on the history to future generations. He also reaches out to visitors to help spread the message and to encourage people to support the reservation. That day, perhaps more clearly than any other time on our trip, I looked and saw Jesus in the face of someone else. When he finished his story, someone in our group thanked him for sharing his story and for allowing us to come to this sacred burial ground. His response made us all pause: “This is my life, my story. And I give it to you so that you might tell someone else and keep the hope alive.” That is where we see Jesus: in the moments of hope and promise that exist in the darkest and seemingly most hopeless of circumstances.

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

We don’t have to look far to see Jesus today.

But if when we look at others, we see the face of Jesus, the opposite is true as well. Can others see Jesus Christ when they look at you? When they look at me? Author CS Lewis writes in his book Mere Christianity, that we are “little Christs.” We are called to be the face of Christ to others- to witness by our very lives the good news that Christ died on a cross and rose again for all. But to be “little Christs,” we are called also to act. To be the very hands and feet of Jesus. To carry Jesus’ message to world. To work for peace and justice, to reach out to those who suffer, to remember and embrace those who are at the edges of society.

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

Let us live our lives so that others might see Christ in us. And let us live our lives seeing Christ in everyone we meet.

Amen.