Glorifying

Everyday gets a bit harder for Jesus. He was on the camino heading to Jerusalem. Every step He took, every word He made, everyone He met, He knew the burden and the glory of the Lord was on Him. His time was too dear and too near. Crowds were getting healed. Pilgrims who actually followed His steps, His twists and turns, even the Greeks (Gentiles) , those dedicated to the gods and goddesses, were curious about this man talking about salvation. It was a big gift for Jesus to get to the Greeks,  i.e. a sign that his ministry had passed out of the confinement of Israel. There was glory in that. And now through word of mouth, carried off the shores of Israel,  everyone had the door open for them.

Up to this point, Jesus had not been sure that He was ready to close the doors  - that His “hour” had come. In His mind He wasn’t ready. But as He entered Jerusalem, His destination and the destination of thousands of pilgrims arriving for the Feast of Passover, He sensed His time had come to glorify His Father as He realized He had opened the doors and minds of all kinds of people.

For too long, Jesus knew His hour had not arrived, that there was much work to be done. His challenge, His enemy,  had been the religious authorities who didn’t want to take a risk or lose their own powers. In fact, they wanted to get him out of the picture, by hook or by crook. He was messing up their powers and philosophies. They were horrified not only about the blind man seeing with a dab of mud on his eye, the demons tossed into pigs leaping off a cliff, and healing the sick so much there were mobs whenever He visited some house healing not just one, or two, but crowds. And horrors of horrors, He had raised Lazarus (surely some of them knew, at least, the family of Mary and Martha and Lazarus) - and that was like winning the impossible dream or football championship.

Jesus knew the time had come when joy had to be put aside. It was time to sacrifice His life, when after suffering through pain and death, after His friends scattered, after He would be mocked and be beaten out by criminals, that He would have to do what He came to earth to do. It was that time that the kernel of wheat must fall to the ground, die and be reborn through the soil and the rain and the sun, to bear fruit again and again. Yes, Jesus became that kernel when He laid down his Life to redeem the world. And we too will do that as we leave earth and soar to God’s lap.

A scary dictate is : Love the life on earth, lose eternal life. One has to think about that.

The servant who does this  will be where Jesus is and will receive honor from the Father while leaving behind a trail of goodness and love to others who follow that path down which we all need to dance. Those who have been treated terribly, who have been persecuted, or suffered, or were abandoned and forgotten, those living in pain and hopelessness, have Jesus before him or her - and all we must do on this confusion of the earth is to love all - even those dressed in greed and evil and crime.

When’s frustrating for me is I’m locked down in coronavirus isolation because of my age. I cannot get out and take a risk, loving our youth who are crowding the prisons by the time they are 18. It breaks  my heart that they didn’t chose the road less traveled, (they probably didn’t know they had the option, that there are choices available for them) but they chose the slick street which in these days are multiplying too rapidly, too dangerously, too sadly because youth have no other places to step freely and safely. I pray that cry that Black Lives Matter will make a difference as it follows in the footsteps and soul of Martin Luther King Jr., who turned the world around.

Remember the prayer of Jesus in agony in the garden on the night before He died. His best pals slept while He was suffering in prayer. When John and his buddies said, oh, no, we don’t want you to die, we need you to keep us going, to teach us and to guide us, they still did not understand that Jesus could not deny what He must suffer. It was part of His Father’s plan of salvation. and Jesus ended a tearful prayer with “Father glorify your name.” He was ready. Then God, through a voice from heaven, declared that the Father has been glorified already and He will be again in His sacrifice on the cross, which would set the world free from Satan.

I want to pass on to you this thought by Robert Farrar Capon. It is so true:

The human race is, was and probably always will be deeply unwilling to accept a human messiah. We don’t want to be saved in our humanity; we want to be fished out of it. We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God and then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It’s not that we weren’t looking for the Messiah; it’s just that he wasn’t what we were looking for. Our kind of messiah would come down from a cross. He would carry a folding phone booth in his back pocket. He wouldn’t do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying.

I feel that Jesus never died, that He lives. He rose to heaven and surely some saw him like Elijah in the golden chariot. But those who saw, didn’t believe the truth in the moment, and so kept silent out of fear. All Jesus’s run and hide companions, including Peter, abandoned him, and were fearful of their own lives and not particular bold about saving Jesus’ life. They were not ready to sacrifice to save Him, although eventually they pulled themselves together and became the disciples, ministers, evangelists, soldiers for Jesus - and gave their lives in extraordinary ways that made them saints. Just took a little while of believing what they needed to believe, remembering that covenant that we all are empowered to challenge empires and religious authorities that oppressed the poor.  And in the end, the apostles and all those who fought for His cause spread the faith all over the world, even till today, having given their lives for Jesus, knowing they were not necessarily going to soar into the air at that point.

But they gave us hope that one day we, who love and believe and have tried to spread love around the world, will all stand before God in glory with all sins erased. Hopefully, we will be soldiers for Christ in the heavenly kingdom glorifying the name of Father God. Thank you, Jesus.

 ~ Rev
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