April 26, 2026
We Wish to See Jesus
John 12:12-24
This is the Easter season, and we are a few weeks out from the cross. But today the scripture reading takes us back — to the days just before the arrest, before the trial, before the crucifixion. Go back with me to Jerusalem, to the festival crowd, to the noise and the anticipation.
The crowd had just heard what Jesus did in Bethany. He had called a dead man named Lazarus out of a tomb, and word had spread through the city like wildfire. When he rode in on a donkey, they came out to meet him.
Palm branches. Hosannas. The word hosanna comes from the Hebrew — “Save us, we pray.” It was originally a cry of desperation. It had become a royal acclamation. The crowd was placing all of their hope on him.
They wanted a king. Someone to deliver them. Someone who would set things right in the way they believed things needed to be set right — by force, if necessary, by power, by the kind of arrival that would inspire shock, awe, and fear. That is what a Messiah was supposed to look like. That is what the Passover crowd was ready to celebrate.
Instead, he came on a donkey. That’s the ancient sign of a king who comes in peace, not on a war horse. The crowd didn’t know what to make of it. The parade happened anyway. The branches kept waving. But the donkey was already telling them something they weren’t ready to hear.
The Pharisees, those fearful religious leaders, stood watching and said to each other: “Look, the world has gone after him.”
They meant it as a complaint. It spelled trouble. John tells it to us as a prophecy.
Because in the very next scene, the world comes.
Some Greeks arrive. Gentiles, from outside the covenant community of Judaism. They are seeking an audience with this Jewish teacher they have heard about. They find Philip — who was their most likely contact. Philip is a Greek name, from the northern edge of Galilee, maybe he spoke Greek as well as Aramaic. They seek him out with a request that is simple and direct.
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”
In John’s gospel, the word “see” is never merely visual. Seeing is a mode of knowing. It is recognition. It is encounter. We use the word that way ourselves: “I see what you mean!” “Now I see!”
On Easter morning, the disciples look into an empty tomb and do not yet understand. Mary looks at the risen Christ and mistakes him for the gardener, until he speaks her name. You can look but not see.
To see Jesus in John is to come into contact with the living God, with the true Messiah, with a Savior who reorients your life.
When these Greeks say “we wish to see Jesus,” they are not asking for a glimpse. They are asking for something they cannot quite name. But they have sensed from a distance and traveled to find it.
Seeing Jesus is the oldest spiritual hunger, because it is the desire to encounter God. It is deeper than the hunger for pleasure, for accomplishment, for legacy, for safety, for survival. It is deeper than the hunger for certainty about the future, or peace about the past.
Deeper than anything else, the human heart that is made for eternity wishes to see Jesus. To hear clear truth-telling. To know life-changing mercy. To experience self-giving love. To find saving power. To experience transcendent presence. To take hold of hope that will not disappoint.
People who have been burned by religion know this hunger. They are not done with Jesus. They are done with what has been done in his name. With Christians who have been a poor advertisement for Christ. With faith that is leveraged as a political weapon. With a community that turns out to be smaller than the one it claims to follow.
But underneath the disillusionment, the old question remains, unextinguished. It is burning in the heart of the person who walked away from church but never stopped looking for God. It burns in the heart of one who came today but is not quite sure why.
“We wish to see Jesus.”
That is still the question. In every age. In every generation. In every culture.
Notice what Jesus does with the question.
Philip goes and tells Andrew. Andrew and Philip go and tell Jesus. There is a small relay of go-betweens who pass the request toward him. But Jesus does not say, “Bring them to me.” He does not arrange a meeting or send greetings.
He announces his hour, the time when he will fulfill his destiny. And then he talks about a seed.
“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.”
This is the only answer Jesus gives, but it is the whole answer.
The Greek word for grain is kokkos, a single kernel. It’s not a packet of grain, or a bag full of grain. It’s one seed. And the word for fruit — polun karpon — is abundant, multiplied, a bigger harvest than can be counted. From one grain: abundance. But only if it falls into the ground.
In John’s gospel, the glory of Jesus and the cross of Jesus are not opposites. They are the same event, seen from different angles. When Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” he is not talking about a triumph that follows the cross. He is talking about the cross.
The revelation of who God is — of what God’s character actually looks like — happens not in the resurrection but in the cross; not in the moment of power, but in the moment of self-giving love.
When the Greeks ask to see Jesus, Jesus answers them with the cross. If you want to see me, look here. This is where you will know me. This is where you will encounter me. A grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies.
It’s not a lesson in agriculture, or a metaphor about sacrifice and growth. It is a theological claim about the nature of God. The fruitfulness of Christ’s life comes through his death.
The harvest — the many who will see him and know him and believe in him — comes through the grain of his life that disappears into the earth.
To see Jesus is to see the self-giving, self-sacrificing love of the living God.
Philip and Andrew are the go-betweens in this story. They receive the Greeks’ question and carry it to Jesus. They do not have all the answers. They do not perform a miracle or deliver a lesson. They take the request to the one who can answer it.
This is where we can find ourselves, as the church, in the story. The season of Easter is about seeing yourself in the resurrection story. Church, this is where we are and this is our calling. We are not the ones who have the answers to all the questions. We are the ones who carry the questions to Jesus.
The church is called to hear, see, and bear witness to the spiritual hunger of every age — the kind that is named unnamed — and we point toward Jesus. What does it look like? It looks like Saturday Sanctuary opening its doors on a cold morning. It looks like a child learning to pray and worship for the first time in this building. It looks like a family in crisis finding a community that will not let them go. It looks like a congregation gathering with the earthly remains and bearing witness to the promise of eternal life.
We do it with words, with the way we live, with what we build and sustain and invest in. We do it by being a community where the character of God — the self-giving, cross-shaped love of God — is visible in how we treat one another and the world.
A capital campaign is not the most obvious place to find a theology of the cross.
But think about what this campaign seeks to do. We are giving money that may not come back to us. We are investing in spaces for people who have not yet found their way here. The children, youth, and adults who will be shaped by what we build — baptized here, introduced to Jesus here, formed in faith here, held through grief here, re-energized for life in God’s name here — most of them are not yet in these pews.
The grain falls into the ground and does not see its own harvest. That is the nature of it.
Caitlin and I made our pledge this week to the Building a Wider Welcome campaign. It was a stretch for us. We prayed about what God was calling us to do and sat with the number. The questions that we wrestle with in giving are genuinely hard — because there is always a reason to be more cautious, to wait and see, to give what feels less risky. Because the worries are real: will we have enough? Is this wise?
Everyone understands those questions. But what moved us, ultimately, is not a calculation. It was the image of a seed. And it was the promise of the Savior. It was the desire to help others see Jesus – to see him, and know him, and love him, to know his love.
On Thursday night, we had a service for Earth Day. The children’s choir kids made seed paper. At the reception afterward, I helped pass this tray of seed paper around like hors d’oeuvres, offering little squares to anyone who would take one. I made sure to reinforce: you cannot eat this. You plant it. All it needs is light and water and soil.
The seed paper looks like a piece of scrap. It is flat and plain and you cannot see what it contains or what it will become. Someone made it, someone else gave it away, and neither of them will be there when it blooms. But given what it needs, it grows.
This congregation has been planting seeds for a long time, before any of us were here, 190 years to be exact. The story is told in the Atrium. The people who built this sanctuary did not live to see everything it would become. The teachers who formed generations of children in faith did not see where those children went or what they carried with them. The mission partners who have been nurtured and sustained by this community have multiplied that investment in ways no one here will ever fully know.
The grain falls. The harvest comes. Not always in our lifetime. Not always in ways we recognize. Maybe in ways we will never see. But it comes.
When people in this city encounter a community that shows them the self-giving love of Christ, the harvest is taking shape. People are seeing Jesus and that is all God has ever wanted.
The Greeks were traveling toward Jesus because they heard he had something to offer. It was more than they could imagine.
The Pharisees said it with contempt: the world has gone after him.
We, the church, are charged with making sure they can find him.
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” May they find him here.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina