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Saturday, March 14
John 7:1-13
After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him. Now the Jewish festival of Booths was near. So his brothers said to him, 'Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.' (For not even his brothers believed in him.) Jesus said to them, 'My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil. Go to the festival yourselves. I am not going to this festival, for my time has not yet fully come.' After saying this, he remained in Galilee.
But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went, not publicly but as it were in secret. The Jews were looking for him at the festival and saying, 'Where is he?' And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds. While some were saying, 'He is a good man', others were saying, 'No, he is deceiving the crowd.' Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.
How comfortable are you worshipping God? Celebrating Christ? If those seem like silly questions, consider how uncomfortable you may have been when your worship and celebration required you to step outside your comfort zone and do things that you may not have come to peace with yet? In my earliest life, my discomfort began with lack of faith. How could I comfortably celebrate something I didn't really understand or believe? I remember the feeling of doubt. Later as I moved into a faith relationship with God, an orientation more liberal than most, I remember many years when I either didn't participate in collective worship or I worshipped with people who were little like me in life orientation or theological philosophy. Perhaps you can relate? If you were blessed to always know exactly where you were in your faith journey, blessed to have complete faith in God, you might not understand how someone's worship life could be a journey through various stages of comfort and discomfort. As I reflect on Jesus struggling to stay alive until his work in Jerusalem was completed, I can easily imagine that he experienced considerable discomfort. He was, after all, human to his core. I have no doubt that he felt every human feeling to the utmost degree. He only had a much shorter period of life to perfect his faith, and a far more threatening set of challenges than I have ever faced. For me, the strongest faith challenges came during my younger years. Jesus died at age thirty-three. Consider now that most if not all of the same challenges that we face in our lives confronted Jesus in his spiritual journey. While the Bible doesn't spell them out, Jesus lived as a young child and then as an adolescent. We all know about the challenges of finding your identity, wrestling with self-doubt, struggling to understand puberty, looking for human love and acceptance - to name just four. Remember that, as a human being, Jesus faced these challenges just as we have. For Jesus, though, the most serious challenges came just as he was blossoming in the most productive years of adulthood - his thirties. And his challenges at that still youthful age were literally about the precarious balancing of life and death.
In the light of that increased understanding of Jesus, when we read the story of Jesus' seeking to attend the Feast of Booths (Tabernacles), we discover that the Lenten season is full of irony. Jesus was at once seeking to attend the joyous Festival celebration that was the highlight of God's annual worship calendar for Israel, and he understood that for him it would lead to his death during the very peak period of celebration by Israel. For us, the irony is replayed every year. Lent is a time of both solemn observance of the impending death of Jesus Christ, and it is a joyous celebration of the meaning of Christ's sacrifice as we understand it through the lens of our own unique religious traditions. We vicariously relive, through our collective worship, Christ's last steps on earth and the challenges which he confronted leading to his death.
Many levels of understanding of the Lenten season can be reached. The irony in Christ's life two millennia ago and the irony which we relive today are only two. Another level involves our deeper reflection on our own spiritual journey. How does that work? God gives us this time every year so that, over the passage of years, we can reflect upon our level of commitment, compare it to Christ's, and make the decision to increase it. I attribute to God the wisdom to know that even though I was definitely a Christian, my faith would increase incrementally year upon year, not all at once.
Last, consider what I believe is the most intimate level of understanding. Suppose that, just as Christ was, I am confronted in my lifetime with the choice between living my faith and dying, and hiding my faith and living. Myriad stories exist of other humans - Joan of Arc to name just one - who have come face to face with that choice. What will I choose? Jesus was forced to hide himself to stay alive; that part comes easy for me. But then...every year...I have to consider why Jesus was hiding. Was it because he, like me, feared death? Certainly sweating drops of blood in the Garden of Gethsemane speaks to the possibility. Were those drops only because of the intensity of his prayer for others? It is too easy for me to consider that Jesus was, after all, divine...special, not experiencing human feelings like me...possessing gifts that allowed him the courage to do what I probably would not. That is an all too easy position to adopt. What we do know for certain is that he willingly chose to die the most painful death that could be conceived of in his day, and that he hid himself only because if he was killed before his task was complete, God's eternal plan would have been interrupted. Every single year when I revisit these verses, I have to reconsider how, then, shall I live? My prayer is that God will increase in us the light of love and the wisdom that is derived from the words in these eternal verses. rw
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