![]() Later, we learn that Judas betrays Jesus for money. He's a thief, and as the treasurer for the disciples he pilfers the money bag. ![]() John tells us bluntly that Judas doesn't really care for the poor. "You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me" (12:4, 7-8). "It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial," Jesus says. The story continues: "But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, 'Why wasn't this perfume sold and the money given to the poor?'" Jesus tells Judas to leave Mary alone. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume" (12:3). At a dinner that the resurrected Lazarus and his sisters give in Jesus' honor, Mary "took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume she poured it on Jesus' feet and wiped his feet with her hair. "This Mary," John says, "was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair" (v. John 11 begins with a description of Lazarus, the man who is sick and whom Jesus loves, and his two sisters, Martha and Mary. Jesus wept in a world whose economic priorities had become terribly skewed. Here is love, mercy, passion, compassion, grief, and anger over our condition, our frailty, our vulnerability, chiseled down to two words: Jesus wept. The starkness of it contains a cosmic pageantry the sparseness of it holds a theological galaxy. The fullness of the Incarnation, Christ's coming among us-to be with us, to be one with us-is gathered up and pressed into a single subject and verb. Never have such riches been rendered with such economy. And, in truth, never has so much theology been so cleanly distilled as here. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, his friend, the one he loves. That one line, John 11:35, is the shortest verse in the Bible. He's too cool and too tough for that.īut Jesus wept. If my emotional range and display is an indication of the Jesus I follow, Jesus doesn't weep. I am critical of the bad art and bad theology in that portrait of Jesus, but I carry it anyhow, a version of it, like an icon inside me: the serene and savvy man, facing danger, crisis, loss without even flinching. That way, I reason, my preaching can be masterful, controlled, persuasive but not manipulative, and not ambushed or sabotaged by stray or unruly emotions. If there is weeping to do, I do it there. Before I preach, I try to work through my deeper emotions in solitude, in my study. Maybe that frightens us, or threatens us, or embarrasses us. But one thing the portrait could never make you believe is that Jesus is weeping, or even capable of such a thing.īut Jesus wept. Or he is posing, in a stilted way, for a portrait, maybe this one. ![]() Behind Jesus' head, encircling his sleek, smoothly combed hair, is a piercing-white light. These hands are good for petite point or finger-wagging but not much else. Could these hands cut dovetails and mortise joints, wield the saw and plane and hammer, touch lepers' sores and blind men's eyes, braid and lash a whip, spread wide to grasp nails? No, not these hands. The artist has managed somehow to make those hands look both boneless and rigid, soft as dough and brittle as porcelain. His hands rest on his lap like the front and back covers of a stiff-spined book laid open, face down. His body, perched on a rock, is held with prim straightness. Jesus' face, in angled profile, is coolly serene, aloof almost. Behind Jesus, in the backdrop, is an idyllic (and lakeshore!) Jerusalem. That painting I saw gives not the slightest hint that any of this is so. In fact, Hebrews implies that for Jesus, crying and weeping were as habitual as praying-that this was Jesus' oft-struck posture "during his days on earth." The writer of Hebrews, in all likelihood referring to this moment of reckoning and wrestling, says that Jesus "offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death" (Heb. Gethsemane was the place where Jesus prayed in deep anguish, his sweat like drops of blood falling to the ground. Recently I saw a portrait of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |