I am sure that most of you have read, or at least are aware of, Gerry Hughes’ book called “God of Surprises”. It has been a huge success, and although it is an exceptional book, I rather think that its success is partly due to its title. That title will strike a chord with almost everyone – no, I think absolutely everyone – who has any relationship to speak of with God. God is surprising, has surprised everyone, angel or human, he has had anything to do with. There is a persistent tradition that when the angels heard that God was going to be made human in the incarnation, some of them were so horrified that they rebelled. We can’t possibly know whether or not that is true, but it is not unlike our shocking God to be too much even for angels to cope with. God has a habit of choosing shockingly unlikely people: the wrong brother; loose women (including a prostitute or two); the people who are far too old to have children but are chosen to do precisely that; the cowards; the stammering prophets; the smallest, weakest nation…and that rather confusing tradition is proudly continued by Jesus. His (alleged) father? A joiner who wasn’t even married to his mother when she became pregnant. His apostles? A bunch of probably illiterate fishermen plus the odd tax-collector and fundamentalist terrorist. The first to see him after his resurrection? A woman who might have been a sinner and had definitely been possessed by seven demons.
There are two fundamental things that we need to remember about Jesus, this person we meet in the Gospels. They seem to contradict each other but they are equally important. He was God; and he was human. We are so used to that phrase used of him in the Creed “true God of true God”, “very God of very God” , and most of us would agree that yes, Jesus was more than just a man. Some of us believe very definitely that he was true God, just as true God as the Father and the Holy Spirit. Some of us aren’t so sure. But we do proclaim it weekly, and I think we must accept that, if we are to call ourselves Christians, we have to face its implications, rather than repeating it but shying away from its meaning. And there’s no doubt that he was human; very human. I know that we are told God never asks anything of us without giving us the grace to do it, but still…how sane, how “together”, how well-balanced Jesus must have been to cope with his contradictory identity, whether he could have verbalised his oddity or not. You need to remember both sides, or you won’t come anywhere near understanding this doubly complex character.
So when you get a heartfelt cry like the one we have in today’s Gospel, you have to hear it on two levels. Jesus said this as a man, but he also said it as God, and this means that it has far-reaching connotations and resonances. He is a man, approaching the end of a mission that has, so far as he can see, been a near-total failure. He’s pretty clear by now that his days are numbered and that the future is looking very frightening. And that the very people who should have been at the centre of that mission, who should have received him with great joy and been closest to him are just the people who are rejecting him. And what is possibly worse is that he sees that if they continue on the route he sees them taking their fate will be hardly less tragic than his own. “Behold, your house is left to you…desolate.” And he loves them more than he loves himself. Christian art has depicted him as a pelican, feeding his young with his heart’s blood; the bird he himself chose was much more homely and much less dignified: a mother hen, clucking and flapping while her chicks scatter around the farmyard. One thing Jesus did not do was stand on his dignity; he preferred a small donkey to a high horse. His spirit may have had wings, but when he looked at himself the wings he saw were not an eagle’s but a hen’s.
And yet, just as the donkey on Palm Sunday was the sign both of humility and of kingship, the reference to the bird was not made just by a man; it was made by God. There is no indication in the Gospel up to this point that Jesus the man had made any particular efforts to gather the people of Jerusalem. Jerusalem of course stands for the whole people of Israel, the whole people of God. And that “how many times” refers not to the last three years but to the last three thousand…and more. I am sure that Jesus God remembered what the psalmist had said about him: He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; and Isaiah: Like birds hovering overhead, the Lord Almighty will shield Jerusalem; he will shield it and deliver it, he will 'pass over' it and will rescue it. And the author of Deuteronomy describes God’s care for Jacob like this: He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye, like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions. I like to imagine Jesus thinking of these texts, knowing that they referred to himself, but, in his humility and, in a way, his refusal to take himself too seriously, choosing to be a hen and not an eagle.
He was, as he said, meek and lowly of heart, but there was also a strength and authority about him that came from somewhere other than his human nature. You can see it in the way he simply brushed aside the power of Herod, as he later brushed aside the power of Pilate. And that was not because they did not have power. Pilate certainly did. Jesus’ life and death were indeed in his hands. It was because it did not matter. I have heard it put this way: It’s not so much what the future holds as Who holds the future. And Jesus knew who held the future, and in some fuzzy way he knew that he held it himself. When he said “I must” and “it cannot be” it was no outside agency that was compelling him. Our lots are in God’s hands, and his were in his own. It can have been no joke for a man to be God – and we can never, in a whole lifetime of thanksgiving, express even a fraction of the gratitude that he is due for going through with it.
And that’s why, sometimes, although it is of the utmost importance, especially as we move through Lent towards Easter, to remember that Jesus Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, I have trouble with pictures like that one
No comments:
Post a Comment