In mid-May I was still in the wheelchair, having traveled through Texas, Michigan, Indiana, and North Carolina. None of these commitments could have been managed without great preparation by and with friends. I quickly learned to have deep sympathy for those who will never be able to leave their wheelchairs. I am in utter awe of the friends who made my travels possible. While I was in the midst of it, my incarceration seemed horribly long, but I knew it was going to come to an end, and I could look forward to walking again. Someone pointed out that I did not mention pain in connection with the surgery. I had been in so much pain for so long that a little bit more for a short while was hardly noticeable.
Should I just have canceled all my commitments and not have burdened my friends? I’ll never forget Marilyn’s making a game of tossing my folded wheelchair like a discus into her van.
And I’ll never forget people who came to me with pain of body and spirit far worse than mine.
In our own lives and the lives of our friends we can understand Jesus’ need to leave everybody and go off alone to pray, and we need to take heed of his example, and not feel guilty when we follow it. Most of us don’t leave our busy lives and return to God often enough. My daily quiet time is in the evening after my bath when I sit in the big chair in my quiet corner for Scripture reading and the gentle service of Compline, where I can hold out the day to God for healing.
Even Jesus did not get the opportunity to be alone with God often enough, because people followed him wherever he went, clamoring for miracles.
After he had prayed one early morning in Capernaum, he left for Galilee, saying, “I must preach the Good News of the kingdom of God to other cities also, for I was sent for this purpose.”
As he went about loving and caring and healing, his fame spread. He stood by the Lake of Gennesaret where the fish had been few and told his friends to let down their nets for a catch, and to their amazement their nets were filled. He did many miracles, and cast out many demons, and warned everybody not to tell anybody who he was.
Who was he?
Yes, yes, he was a mortal man, and he was God, and if nobody understood then, it is not surprising that we still don’t understand, for this is one of those marvels that is impossible with us, but not with God.
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Jesus was called to respond to a woman who had been taken in adultery, and who was cowering in terror as a group of men stared at her with condemnation and, perhaps, eagerness, looking forward to inflicting on her the traditional punishment for adultery: stoning to death. And they looked to Jesus to confirm the verdict.
Had he ever been told that his mother was pregnant before she was married?
Jesus bent down and wrote in the dirt. What did he write? It has been suggested that he wrote the name of the man who had been the woman’s partner in adultery. He wrote in the dirt twice, and we are given no hint in Scripture as to what he wrote. But he said to the crowd, “Whoever is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”
Did his writing in the dirt have something to do with the crowd’s response of shame, of their slowly drifting away? When they were all gone he told the woman that he did not condemn her, but that she was to “go and sin no more.”
Perhaps our sins are less spectacular, but that story reminds me that Jesus did not (like some of the good people around us, then and today) condemn her. Jesus tells us to stop whatever it is that we are doing that separates us from God, from Jesus. From the whole Trinity. In The New Zealand Prayer Book the persons of the Trinity are referred to as Earth Maker, Pain Bearer, Life Giver, and that touches me deeply. Jesus, our pain bearer, bears our sins and our sorrows by coming to be one of us, Adam’s sins, Samuel’s, David’s, those of the men who would have liked to throw the first stone and the woman who had been caught in the act (though not alone).
If we truly live in a universe can we ever separate ourselves completely from the sins of the whole world? I do not believe that we should wallow in false guilt about wrongs over which we can have no possible control. We cannot go around bent under the sins of our ancestors, but we can try to prevent them from being repeated; we can learn something from them. We can respect rather than shun people who live in different cultures, whose diet is totally unlike ours, and who are understandably still suspicious of us because of the wrongs we have done them in the past.
Knowing that we ourselves have no right to cast the first stone, we can have compassion and understanding of the sins of others, no matter how alien to us they may be. And we can pray for equal forgiveness of our own sins.
What would Jesus write in the earth today?
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O my bright evening Star, my Companion, show me the way, show me the way.
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Some scholars with high reputations see Jesus’ healing of non-Jews as being anti-Semitic. It doesn’t read that way to me. Jesus was a Jew. He wanted his own people to understand him. When he first started his mission he thought the Good News was entirely for the Jews. The other regions around them seemed to have no concept of a Messiah, the One Who Was to Come and heal all things. I think that it surprised and saddened him first that his own family could not understand, nor his friends and neighbors, nor the elders in the temple who had been so kind to him when he was twelve but who now did not understand the glorious message he brought.
He was a good Jew brought up to respect the religious establishment, an establishment he loved. Some of his healings of people who were not Jews came almost by happenstance: the centurion’s servant, the Syro-Phoenician’s daughter. Perhaps it took the human Jesus a while to understand that he had come to the whole world, and it was a much smaller world then than it is today. Not only was it planet-centered, but most of the people in the Middle East knew nothing about China, India, Australia, or the New World of North and South America.
Jesus’ amazing message widened slowly, and the marvel is that it is now heard all over the planet, whether it is accepted or not. And whether it is distorted or not. Sometimes I hesitate to use the word Christian because it has come to mean so much meanness and narrow-mindedness and hate, with promises of vengeance and retribution and name calling. I’m not sure what secular humanism is, nor that strange thing called the New Age, but neither using fear as a weapon, nor condemning the current culture is helpful in changing it.
I seldom turn on the television news because good news is not news and I see no reason to burden my mind and spirit with a load of horror. But once when friends were visiting me, we turned on the evening news and we listened to a story of the emergence of a new group of terrorists, teenagers or even preteenagers who steal, rape, and kill with no conscience, no remorse, no sense of responsibility except to their own whims and fleeting desires. One young teenager was interviewed; he had a mouth full of gold teeth; he wore gold chains. To him a murder was justified if it meant he could buy another gold chain. How terrifyingly sad that he has lost all awareness of the value of life. I shudder with grief when I see the dead body of a fawn at the side of the road, or an egg that has fallen from the nest with the unhatched little bird caught in the broken shell. Life is infinitely precious.
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Perhaps it was Jesus’ sense of the preciousness of all life, of the infinite value of a sparrow or a child or an old woman, that made people follow him wherever he went, up a mountain, listening to his stories, calling for help, trying to find the magnificent life that was like a light around Jesus.
And Jesus, giving them life and light, needed to get away from the crowds and be alone with the Father. It is important for all of us. When I am at the cottage it is easy. I just step outside, toward the west and the mountains. Sometimes finding our wilderness is difficult, but it is always possible. In the city I have discovered that a subway, at a time when one doesn’t have to strap-hang, but
can have a seat, is a good place to tune out and be quiet.
The word burnout had not been heard of in Jesus’ day, but he avoided it by going off alone. As John Greenleaf Whittier expressed it, he went away to the calm of the hills,
Where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity
interpreted by love.
God’s work is done better if periodically we leave all that we think we have to do and go off quietly to be with the Maker so that we can be refilled with the energy needed for the work of love. One of my problems, as I suspect it is for many others, is doing too much without giving myself enough time to be with God. Time to be with God is essential in order that our work may indeed be God’s work, not ours. Sometimes I think of myself as a very small car turning into a gas station to be filled with faith.
One time when Jesus was exhausted (healing takes great energy), he got on one of the fishing boats and lay down in the stern. He was asleep when a heavy storm came up, and his disciples woke him in terror, telling him they were about to drown, and there he was, sleeping! Didn’t he even care? He quieted the battering of the winds and the wildness of the sea, and the implication was that if we only had faith, we too could work in collaboration with the natural world God has given us. But most of the time we do not honor God’s creation and so we separate ourselves from it, from all that God has made, and that is a terrible loss.
Why is it that some Christians are separating themselves from nature, seeing nature as a lesser aspect of creativity, rather than following Jesus’ example? One explanation that has been given to me is that some fundalit Christians believe that God has given us exactly enough of the earth’s bounty to last until the Second Coming, and since the Second Coming is imminent, it’s all right to use everything up, air, oil, forests, land, because after the Second Coming we won’t need them. There’s a strange selfishness in this. Where did the idea come from, anyhow? I do not believe that it is scriptural, and the smug greed in it frightens me. Should we not tenderly tend the land, and perhaps especially so if the Second Coming is near?
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After the healing of the sea, Jesus healed a man of horrible demons and sent the demons into a herd of pigs which rushed into the sea and drowned, to the horror of those who tended the swine for the owner, and the joy of the man who had been released. And yet again the demons were the ones who immediately recognized Jesus as the One Who Was to Come.
He returned to Capernaum, and a paralytic was brought to him. The crowd was so great that the paralytic’s friends took tiles from the roof and let down the paralyzed man that way—wonderful, loving, innovative friends. They were not going to be deterred in their desire to have their friend cured. But then Jesus shocked everybody by saying, “My son, your sins are forgiven.”
But was it so strange? Centuries earlier, when people came to Epidaurus in Greece for healing, they had to stay in rooms outside the gates before they were allowed into the holy precincts where the priest/physicians were. They had to wait until their spirits were made clean enough so that they were fit to be healed. Is that so very different?
Jesus asked, “Which do you think is easier, to say ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or ‘Take up your bed and walk?’ But that you may know that the Son of Man has the authority on earth to forgive sins, come, rise, take up your bed and go on home.”
We tend to be most impressed with Jesus’ telling the man to get up and walk, but our physical health avails us little if we are bent and burdened by sin.
I think of the man at the pool in Bethesda, where there were five porches, in which lay many people who were ill or lame, and who were waiting for the angel who, at a certain season, troubled the water. Whoever was first into the pool was made whole of whatever disease was causing pain and anxiety. There was one man who had been there for thirty-eight years. Jesus asked him, “Do you want to be made whole?”
Do we want to be healed? Of our diseases, our anger, our resentment, our hurt feelings? Before we can be healed we have to let go of whatever it is that is holding us back. Sometimes we are unaware that we are holding onto something, a disease which may make us feel important, an anger that we have been unfairly treated, a guilt that keeps nagging at us. The man replied to Jesus, “There is nobody to put me into the pool when the water is troubled, and while I am trying to get there, somebody else is always ahead of me.”
Jesus said, “Get up. Take up your bed and walk.”
And immediately the man was cured, and got up and walked.
Once again, this happened on the Sabbath. The man was asked who had cured him but Jesus had immediately slipped away into the crowd and the man could not answer. Later, Jesus saw him in the temple and warned him, “You are cured of your affliction, but make sure you do not fall into sin again, or something worse might happen to you.” Had the man not entirely let go of whatever was holding him back?
Doctors today are learning that a healed spirit may make the difference between life and death. There may be two cases of equal severity, but one patient will recover, and the other will die.
Our immune systems are great mysteries, no matter how many vitamins we take to reinforce them, no matter how many psychiatrists we consult. I believe that laughter is good for the immune system, but so, indeed, may be tears. If we do not grieve for loss and pain at the appropriate time, our immune systems are going to feel the lack. But not everybody who gets flu during an epidemic has a depressed immune system. My husband’s illness came during one of the happiest times of our marriage, when we were giving readings together which were so successful we had more invitations than we could accept. Our comfortableness with each other was deep and warm. We were happy. And then, out of the blue, cancer struck. And killed. Hugh was surrounded by prayers. He was only seventy—that seems young, to me.
I don’t need to understand miracles now in the midst of my human life. I have to believe that what happens to us will be used in God’s plan for the universe. We are again tangled in the contradictions of human free will and God’s will, but ultimately God’s will indeed will be done.
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After Jesus had healed the man by the pool, the religious leaders were angry because Jesus had once again broken the law by healing on the Sabbath day. Believing that law is more important than love can be a great hindrance in our ability to accept healing whenever Jesus offers it. Why were the religious authorities more concerned about Jesus’ breaking the law than they were at the wonder of his healing? Didn’t they want people to be healed?
We do need to cleanse our spirits before we can be made well, but sometimes we carry that idea too far. It was common in Jesus’ day and still is now to think that if someone has a physical ailment, it is that person’s fault. The sick person gets blamed, without compassion, because some inner evil has caused the problem. Some people proclaim that you do not get cancer unless you are angry. Or, conversely, some Christians see pain and illness as God’s punishment for our sins. And if we are being justly punished, is it proper for someone to heal us?
Jesus did not think in terms of punishment but love. Healing is a great mystery. I know of one family of faith who prayed that their two-year-old would be healed of leukemia. They believed that their prayers would be answered as they desired, but the child died. Why does this child die, and that one live? We do not know. But prayer is never wasted.
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If the religious leaders were offended by Jesus, there were others who wanted to make him a king, and when Jesus saw that they were coming for him, he went away to a mountain to be alone. Alone. He wanted to forgive, to love, to heal, but he had come to earth as a servant, not a king. Satan would have liked to tempt him with kingship, but that was not the calling of the incarnate One. He wanted his healing to be quiet, but people shouted it out. He told the people that he was the
bread of life, but he was not understood.
No, he did not want to be king, Jesus, the bright evening Star, bringing with him wherever he went hope and joy and the promise of God’s love.
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KEEPING TRACK OF IT ALL
How often Jesus surprised and confused his friends. Even his choice of disciples was surprising, and no committee today would have approved of his selection. True, fishermen were good, solid citizens, but then he went and called Matthew, a tax collector. Our tax collectors are bad enough. The rich with their clever lawyers don’t pay very much, and the rest of us are bled white, but perhaps it was even worse for the Jews because they had to pay not only their local taxes, but taxes to the Romans, heavy taxes. But what did Jesus do? He picked a man who collected taxes for the Romans as one of his disciples. Not only that, but he went to have dinner in Matthew’s house along with other undesirable guests—desirable people did not dine with tax collectors. The Pharisees, who were beginning to think of Jesus as a rabble-rouser, questioned his choice of dinner companions. Jesus overheard and said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Isn’t this at odds with those who insist on moral virtues as the marks of the Christian? Have we forgotten who Jesus’ friends were, and who they weren’t? Jesus’ choice of friends did not please the Pharisees. Would Jesus choose us?
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Oh, Jesus, I need you.
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He was pretty clear about what he wanted. Don’t fast in public. Do your good deeds quietly. And rejoice! Rejoice! While the wedding party is going on and the groom is with you, be glad. When the bridegroom is gone, then will be the time for fasting and sad faces. What are all these stories about the Bridegroom? Coming. Going. Did they know who he was? Were his stories too confusing? Was he?
Bright Evening Star Page 10