He's Gone!
If Jesus suddenly pulled out of your life, would you weep?
Me... I'm not sure I'd cry. Am I that emotionally involved with the Lord? Mary looked inside the opened tomb, and Jesus' body wasn't there any more. She started crying. His absence hurt.
Oh, I have the intellectual part down solid. I know what Jesus has done for me, and what he continues to do. Emotions, however, seem to be more difficult. Mary wept, and wasn't afraid to show others that she was hurting. I can't see why.
Jesus had told them all he'd come back. She should have been expecting that, but it was such an unlikely thing that it probably didn't enter her consciousness. Now there's proof in the empty tomb and instead of realizing that the Lord had risen, she bursts into tears because someone swiped his body.
Intellect is pretty thin milk to sustain a life. It's the rational way. Rationality can't give you a reason to get out of bed, look at a sunset, or start a family. Reason is essential, but not sufficient. I think God wants to teach me to weep, and I of course run.
Time to get up! John 20
First off, I would like to say, that I was not bothered by the F-Bomb. Although one could look around the room and see its impact, sometimes we need to be shaken in to a state of alertness. This leads me into my comments concerning this week’s portion of scripture.
This story is about Peter and John being alerted and awaken from sleep to the statement of Mary “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb”. What! Without brushing their teeth or taking a shower, they both run to the burial sight of our Lord. Yes the scripture says that “They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead” but when John wrote this, he had come to some understanding of this doctrine.
Questions:
What are some events in our life that has given us a paradigm shift in our understanding of God and the Gospel of Jesus?
What are some ways we can be in tune to the alarm clock of Mary?
After this discovery of the empty tomb, Jesus makes an appearance to Mary. We find her crying because the body of her Savior is missing. Besides, what can the dead body of a Savior do? It is now time for Mary to be awakened. And, she is. The good news she brings to the disciples “I have seen the Lord!”
As Christians, it said that we have seen the Lord. That we were once blind, but now we see.
Question:
How do we bring this news of awakening to the lost?
Jesus Breathes
The disciples are still thunderstruck. They saw him die on the cross. Now he's standing in the room with them, no tomb strong enough to hold him.
What would it be like to see someone die, incontrovertibly dead, and then have that same person, pierced hands and all, walking with you, warm, incontrovertibly alive? Talking. Telling stories just as he had when he was... What? Alive? Alive before? We don't have the words for this. Before you died, Lord? No wonder Thomas was confused.
It's His voice. It's his hand reaching for the bread. Live with someone for three years, you know them. The disciples could identify Jesus by his walk at half a mile.
What does this mean?
And then Jesus walks up to each of his disciples, and breathes on them. The breath of the Lion of Judah. God breathes. Warm air wafts over each of the men in the room.
"Receive the Holy Spirit," he says to them. Poor confused men. They have no idea what has happened. Their world has been turned upside down by one living breath.
Finger to the Sign
Thomas had the right idea. Don't take anyone else's word for it. Jesus, come back to life? Come on. You guys have been smoking something.
"Unless I put my hand on the wounds, touch His side, I won't believe."
Jesus said he was blessed, and then went on to say that those who don't see but believe anyway are even more blessed. Back door, front door, I don't care. Do what it takes to get your questions answered. Sooner or later the lack of a working answer will turn around and bite. Faith builds from answered questions; you don't trust a car until you know how to drive it.
Note that unlike some of the competition, Jesus didn't fry Thomas on the spot for having the temerity to question His reality. Try that with Baal or any of the others. Unfortunately people today are just as limited by tradition, believing through long-standing tradition that God loses patience easily. If that were true, I'd be dead.
No, the big problem I have is that God really does answer questions, and then assumes that I'll use the answer to move on. Answers with a purpose, touch going both ways.
Where'd He Go?
There is weeping, there are tears, there's the shock of loss. The center of their lives is... dead? They carry the body away.
Worm food. When people die, they're dead. Get used to it and move on. Jesus' body lies on cold, uncaring stone, like any other deceased. Just ask Joseph and Nicodemus, who took the body down from the cross, wrapped it in cloth and spices, and carried it to the new tomb. They knew. Jesus was dead.
History is full of dead gods. They come in, are popular for a time, and then go out of fashion for no better reason than clothing or car colors. One set of little ceramic figurines gets pushed back on the family altar to make room for the new ones. "Maybe this time we'll get what we deserve. We'll get gods who will do what we want. Or at least they won't cause us too many problems. Capricious things they are."
"Peter! John!"
The two disciples look up, dazed faces turning toward Mary. They look like two ships without rudders. "Now, what?"
"Somebody took the Lord's body!"
They all dash off, John getting there first (love is a powerful stimulant) and find the tomb open and empty. Nobody home.
"Mary, did you fold up this cloth?"
"No, I didn't even go in there."
"If you destroy this temple, I will raise it again in three days," Jesus had said. The Pharisees all had looked at the big stone structure and wondered what he was talking about.
The truth of the matter is so far outside their experience that it takes several appearances of a lively and warm Jesus to convince them that the usual laws of human life have been torn apart. Jesus isn't in the tomb any more. Body and all, he's alive. He has passed through death, and can now show us the way to do the same.
Jesus had to die. That was the plan he and his father made. All of human history leads to that singularity. We all know death. We see it all the time, small-scale and large-scale. Nobody ever comes back. We don't think about life. Jesus knows death and life. He died for us, so that he could bring us a life that isn't ruled by death. Look forward. No stone can hold us down.
Words, Constructing Communication
Any attempt to use words to send meaning to another person is fraught with problems. First I have to encapsulate my shining thought in a shaky and porous construct of words. Then I have to speak those words clearly. The other person has to, first, hear them, then understand the basic words and then assemble them into some concept that is analogous to what I said. It's all a lot of work.
I prefer writing. There's time to choose words and time to think about, and experiment with, different ways of saying the same thing so that what I want to communicate has a good chance of getting across. Spoken words are brief in themselves and are limited in a conversation to the fewest that will do the job. They have to be conjured quickly because the moment in a conversation where those words will fit is fleeting.
And often words are used as a comforting blanket. We've heard them all before. You no more than start to speak and people know what you're going to say, and they tune out to start thinking about lunch or any of a zillion other things.
So, sometimes you need to wake people up. In writing this can be done in a measured way, structured bumps in the narrative that cause people to go back and reconsider. Or quit. Their choice. In speaking extemporaneously, decisions have to be made quickly.
As you might have figured out by now, I have little liking for standardized expressions. God doesn't do anything by rote, and I know that life doesn't come from memorized application of someone else's principles. The normal result is such odd little stories as I've posted here.
The spoken result sometimes takes an odd turn, as it did today when I dropped an "F-bomb" in the study. To those who were offended, I apologize. I had my eyes focused on making a particular point and my brain, as usual, chose the shortest way to make it. The construct got out before the censor could catch it... if it would have.
The point is to communicate, but what is being communicated? If the one bad word wipes out the whole thought, then I've failed. If, however, the listener feels the bump in the road and sees an old concept in a new way that adds to life, then, while it may not be justifiable or could have been done better, good enough. All groups vary. You make your choice and go.
Someone is going to be offended by something I say or write. People are even offended by my sand sculptures sometimes. I can't live my life so as to avoid offending everyone. I'd stay home in bed. Even that would bother somebody. My personal view is that rules have to bend before life.
Alone Under the Cross
"If you want to follow me, you must pick up your cross and carry it daily," Jesus said, or words to that effect. He picked his up and carried it, until he fell over from weakness brought on by beatings and deprivation. His was clear and he knew it was coming from the moment the world was made. He did it anyway, the bitter burden growing on his shoulders through the years of his life on Earth.
We all tote burdens through life. Jesus says elsewhere that the burden he imposes on us is light, his yoke easy, not like the heavy carven wood that binds oxen to carts. Our burdens are mostly self-chosen. The years go by and our psyches take on clutter like our garages, old stuff piling up. It's no wonder we get tired and falter.
Then Jesus comes along, and because he carried his cross all the way, he can pick up the clutter that binds us. So, what's the cross we have to carry? Like all the other aspects of following Jesus, probably not what we think.
We're all willing to pick up every burden out there but the real one. The real one has to do with a real relationship, fragile flesh and blood with God's Universe-spanning power. It's frightening for me to look at him every day and try to walk another step into what I know will be confusing, painful, and even bitter at times. Forcibly but gently shorn of old dreams, what else is there to live for? Jesus walked that desert utterly alone. I have his company, which is a good thing because otherwise I'd dry up and disappear.
The best thing to do is ask. Course and cross, Jesus will advise. It's simple in concept but the execution is often hair-raising. The Holy Spirit makes possible another day of boosting a cross along the way.
Vinegar Victory (John 19)
Things look grim. Soldiers all over the place, the Jews in a big hurry to get the Son of God out of the way before they celebrate Passover. The world has been drunkenly dancing on the edge of an abyss ever since the Fall, and here is God's answer done in the only possible way to keep the whole pack of us from falling over.
Jesus has already had a world's worth of bitterness dumped onto him. His heart aches for the people meets, people whom he could save if they would turn to him and listen with more than the surface of their ears. You'd think the Romans could find a decent drink, but they find some old vinegar and give him that. No last meal deluxe in those days.
The Pharisees are all standing around, tapping their feet, looking at their watches. "Come on, come on," they think. "I have to go home and get ready for the party. I have some new clothes that'll just knock everyone out. And we can't have this hanging over us because it's against the rules."
So, Jesus takes the vinegar he's offered, and then, by his own free choice, gives up his spirit. The pain ends. He dies. The Pharisees are freed of the embarrassment of someone who speaks with great authority but says things that just don't fit with their teachings. They all breathe a sigh of relief. That little problem is taken care of. They run off through the weeping women to their important plans.
Jesus' whole life was characterized by bitter events. He continually tried to give sight to blind people, but willful blindness is incurable. The blind see the vinegar, see God die, and think that's the end. Jesus looked beyond the vinegar to the richness of being reunited with his Father, and being able to have fellowship with us. He chose to give up his life so that we could meet him, spotless.
