The Look of Love

John 18:1-19:42

With fear and trembling a preacher would add any words to this passion play, which is our story of stories, and which continues to tell itself wherever love meets the lust for power and control.

So rather than adding my own words to this narrative—or adding very many of them, anyway— I want to ask you to see it. Literally, albeit with your imagination. See it through your own eyes and Jesus’. That’s not such a farfetched undertaking, because in a sense he asks people to do just that. Remember what he said when Judas showed up in the garden with the soldiers and police and chief priests and Pharisees? Using weapons and lanterns and torches to find their way, when the true light was standing right in front of them? He asked, “for whom are you looking?”

Hear the question directed to you. “For whom are you looking? Today. Right now. Are we looking for the criminal or the Christ? In another person or within ourselves? It matters, because what we see depends mainly on what we look for, as Sir John Lubbock has said.

And lets be clear: in the garden, its not as if Jesus didn’t know who the military and religious powers were looking for. And its not like they didn’t know either, distorted though their perspective may have been. But it appears that Jesus really wanted them to name and to own their role in this drama of condemnation and mercy. Its as if he were telling them to say it out loud, so they could hear it for themselves. “Who are you looking for?”

We see this dynamic of characters having to face their own complicity in the crucifixion throughout John’s passion narrative. Jesus chooses to say almost nothing in response to his accusers, but rather lets their own questions convict them. Jesus claims only to be himself, to have taught openly, and to bear witness to the truth. But to Pilate he says “You say that I am a king.”

And then there’s Peter. Lets look upon him for a moment. Radically faithful: he was the first to follow, impulsively offered his whole body to be washed, and even insisted that he’d give up his own life for his teacher. A model disciple, no? Boldly confessing Christ… until he denies him. See him in that courtyard, when Caiaphas’ slave asked “did I not see you in the garden with him?” and the cock fatefully crowed the truth that Peter himself could not speak.

In Luke’s version, the text tells us that at this moment “the Lord turned and looked at Peter.” I find this image profoundly unsettling—its underlined in every Bible I own—and at the same time profoundly hopeful. Imagine Peter’s shame after a third denial and the feeling of that knowing gaze. All of it—the faithful and unfaithful of him—is seen and known by the Lord. Likewise the faithful and unfaithful of us: we cannot hide from his sight, just as we cannot hide from his love.

Which is, I believe, what the point of this looking for and looking at and looking upon is. Rich young rulers, disciples faithful and unfaithful, criminals on adjacent crosses… they all, and we all, must ultimately bear the gaze of Jesus’ love. Which is what he chooses to give in those wordless final hours.

Almost wordless, I should say, but not quite. When Jesus, moments from his final breath, saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he told them that they were to be family to each other. So take your eyes off Jesus for a moment, and look around you. Here is your family.

These things occurred so that the scripture might be fulfilled, said the evangelist, citing the prophet Zechariah. ‘They will look on the one whom they have pierced.’” So the question I leave you in this hour of our Lord’s dying is, who or what do you see in the one who was pierced?

There’s a lot of ugliness to be witnessed in the scene: betrayal, abandonment, torture and death. These are the visible manifestations of the sin which is part our human condition, and we need to honestly witness their impact, just as the soldiers needed to say who they were looking for and Peter needed to hear the cock crow. But in the face of the one who suffers the consequences of sin there is only one thing to see, and that is love.