Today is Tuesday of Easter week. Our papers are full of our political candidates touting promises and trying to convince voters of their plethora of virtues. And it seems like every other week is a Super Tuesday when the candidates seem like they are everywhere at once making a crazed effort to convince any fence sitters who might go to the polls. I think of how much different this Tuesday was for Jesus. Jesus wasn't making promises or trying to convince people of his virtue. He wasn't trying to make sure people knew how much better he was than Pilate or the High Priest or whoever else was a possible candidate. He spent Tuesday teaching the befuddled crowd with stories of Wedding banquets and terrible tenants and a widow's mite. At one point he is sitting in the Temple watching people give their offerings. What would you be doing if you knew you were going to die this Friday? He sits and watches people. What do you think was going through the mind of Jesus? Was he looking at each face and being reminded of how much he loved each one? Was he wondering how each of us had gotten so far away from the Father and what it would feel like for that feeling of separation to creep into his soul on the cross? Whatever it was we know this, that Jesus last week was not spent trying to sell himself. He wasn't trying to win a popular vote. He was headed to the cross to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. On Tuesday no one saw it coming yet. Only Jesus. He knew. Every where he looked he saw people who needed a redeemer. Even the ones who were plotting behind closed doors to get rid of him someway. Even for them he would die. There is no love like the love of Jesus and no time is that more evident than the week we celebrate this week. So for me, this is a different sort of Super Tuesday. A day when the One who could have touted his accomplishments, denigrated the opposition, and shamelessly promoted himself did not. Instead he watched people as they came and went in the Temple. He watched the ones he loved so much and began to feel in his soul what they felt in theirs. He began to sense more deeply what you and I feel which is a little bit of lostness and a whole lot of selfishness. Jesus on Tuesday could see it in their eyes. Jesus on Friday would feel it in his heart and it would make him cry out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me"? This is my Savior on this Super Tuesday.
Join in realizing the vision of Christ Community Chapel with Senior Pastor Joe Coffey
3 comments:
Thanks for this reminder. It's so easy to be caught up in this world and the "after" of the cross.
Joe,
Thank you so much for this. I tend to ponder on the events...Palm Sunday, the last supper, the trial and crucifixion. But those times in between, the times Jesus spent in quiet reflection and prayer with his father, must have been times of unbelievable intensity for him.
So often in our human existence, the fear and anxiety we experience in anticipation of something in our future ends up to be unfounded and the actual event is not nearly as bad as we had feared. We fear the unknown.
But Jesus knew. His future wasn't unknown - it was inevitable, inescapable, his destiny.
Faced with that knowledge, I would have been reduced to a trembling, hysterical, sobbing mass of nothingness.
But Jesus knew. And he walked right into it. For me.
May all celebrate Easter but let us pray together for those that do not know our Savior that they experience Easter. Pray they embrace the one that suffered and died on the cross for all of humanity and now sits at the right hand of the Father. HE IS RISEN!
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