Friday, April 21, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Up the down staircase
If this endeavor or this activity is of human origin, it will destroy itself. But if it comes from God, you will not be able to destroy them; you may even find yourselves fighting against God. The Pharisees were convinced and released Peter and John, but only after flogging them and repeating their order for them to stop speaking in the name of Jesus.
This Jesus, who according to them, was dead! This resurrection malarkey didn’t make sense, didn’t fit their idea of the messiah, and so they did not believe. The Holy Spirit hovered over them, but no sparks came off their heads to allow the flames to rise.
How about this, again as often lately, from Richard Rohr:
Without the sign of Jonah—the pattern of new life only through death (“in the belly of the whale”)—Christianity remains a largely impotent ideology, another way to “win” instead of the pain of faith. Or it becomes a language of ascent instead of the treacherous journey of descent that characterizes Jonah, Jeremiah, Job, John the Baptizer, and Jesus.
Unfortunately the idea of descent did not occur to most of the Pharisees. As it certainly does not occur to most of us. Give our lives away? It is easy to forget the promises of reward later in the heavenly kingdom. And it’s impossible to know the joy of that kind of giving until you do it, JUST DO IT, a few dozen times.
So Peter and John left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing that they were found worthy to suffer dishonor for the same of the Name. And all day long, both at the temple and in their homes, they did not stop teaching and proclaiming the Christ, the Messiah, whose name they knew was Jesus.
For much of human history we humans lived through our years “Before Christ.” BC it used to be called. Then for two thousand years we have lived “After Christ (Domini).” AD. This is 2023 AD. Jesus has become the marker on which even time is anchored. But perhaps we are not completely clear about how Jesus changes our lives. Rohr again:
After Jesus, we Christians used the metaphor “the way of the cross,” though unfortunately, it became “what Jesus did to save us”—or a negative theology of atonement—instead of the necessary pattern that is redemptive for all of us. Jesus became the cosmic problem-solver instead of the teacher of the path.Â
This is complicated theology about the man who fed five thousand with a few loaves and fish, and then forgave his killers as he died on the cross. I love the stories. As I love this story about a package Thomas Merton received, from his journal The Sign of Jonas (p. 341):
Frater John of God got a lot of kids’ pictures from a sister in a school somewhere in Milwaukee…. Most of them were of Jonas in or near the whale. They are the only real works of art I have seen in ten years, since entering Gethsemani. But it occurred to me that these wise children were drawing pictures of their own lives. They knew what was in their own depths. They were putting it all down on paper before they had a chance to grow up and forget. They were proving … that there is something in the very nature of [humans] that expects a Redeemer and resurrection from the dead. The sign of Jonas is written in our being. No wonder that this should be so when all creation is a vestige of the Creator but also contains, written everywhere, in symbols, the economy of our Redemption.
This economy isn’t about our money. It’s about the deepest parts of ourselves, and it’s best, I know for sure, to entrust it to Jesus, who keeps nothing for himself.
They filled twelve wicker baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves. When the people saw what he had done they said, “This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world.” Since Jesus knew they were coming to carry him off to make him king, he withdrew, again, to the mountain, alone.
 (Acts 5, Psalm 27, Matthew 4, John 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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