Recently I haven’t been blogging as much, let’s hope it’s a question of quality v quantity!
But today the Holy Spirit convicted me to write so here goes!!
Let’s for a second imagine that we are Jesus. Ok, it’s Wednesday morning and it’s a sunny day! 33 years old and in the prime of life and o yea, miracle worker, healer.. and God!
The last 3 years you have been travelling and healing and preaching. You have raised dead people, you have given sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. You have touched lepors, restored the dignity of prostitutes and yet you have been followed and criticised relentlessly by the Church of your time. The scribes and the pharisees hate the ground you walk on, so much so that they want to kill you all in the name of God! Not only do they not believe that you are God and teaching people the ways of God….they believe you are an imposter, a mad man, a loonatic, a devil worshipper, a danger to society and to the people and to the Church!
And so as you sit you cry, your heart weeps for their blindness that will cost you your life. You have 2 days left to live and the only crime that you are guilty of is love!
You could wonder, why didn’t Jesus study to become a scribe or a pharisee instead of making tables and chairs with Joseph? Surely if he wore the same clothes as them and had the same education they would have listened!
Why did Jesus hide for 30 years and then just pop up out of the woodwork performing miracles the same as others would make coffee? Surely He should have introduced Himself to them earlier and started off with a few basic tricks like pulling a rabbit out of a hat before moving on to raising dead people back to life?
Why was Jesus born to an unknown poor simple woman as opposed to be born to somebody “important”?! Surely if He was born to a royal family they would have welcomed Him!
Why did Jesus not wait till He was 50. Maybe the scribes and pharisees would have accepted correction better from a more mature man than a young upstart of 30 years old who came out of nowhere?
Why did Jesus speak so firmly against the hypocricy of the scribes and pharisees? Surely He was provoking them, some could even say it was disrespectful and prideful for a young guy to speak up like this….Some writers even suggested that Jesus sort of commited suicide because He knew well what would happen if He continued to speak out and yet He did!
And so it’s Wednesday morning and the clock is ticking….Maybe if you ran to the scribes and pharisees and apologised perfusely for calling them religious hypocretes they might call the whole thing off. Maybe if you told them that you were mad, that you went off your anti psychotic tablets for the last 3 years and were smoking funny mushrooms….Maybe they’d let you go with a warning. Or maybe if you transfigured yourself in front of them and showed your glory and said ‘hey guys, got you good!’.
And yet if you did it’d be lies. What about the poor you defended and loved, what about the truth?!
And so no, love, love for the poor, the rejected, the outcasts, the ones society and church rejected pushed you on. You became one of them, you are one of them and now you will die like one of them.
And so 2000 years on the Holy Spirit still works in the same way! He chooses nobody’s like me and you who don’t come from noble families of origin! He pours gifts and charisms on poor uneducated people who most often don’t have PHD’s in theology and philosophy!
The scribes and the pharisees live on in many priests and bishops who so often lack spirituality and run the Church like hotel managers rather than Holy Spirit filled fathers.
The more you love Jesus, the more the Spirit will bless you and yet the more the world and establishment will hate you. You will be called a fanatic, a loonatic, a crazy man even by the Church authorities. People will be warned to keep away from you in case they catch your craziness….
And so what will you do? Will you tone it down to become more acceptable? Will you chicken out under the pressure… or like Jesus, will you dig deep, implore the Spirit for help and climb dangerously and boldly up that mountain as they laugh at you, beat you and kill you?
And so dear friends, Easter isn’t a commemoration of the dead but rather a celebration of the living and what better form of celebration than imitation!
So this Easter ask Jesus to shake us out of our comfort zones and to give us the zeal to be live witnesses to the power and reality of the Holy Spirit living through us.
Ask Jesus to give us the boldness to love the poor, to stand up to the hypocricy of our time, to perform miracles through the Holy Spirit in us through our baptism!
Jesus, help me to do you will in 2018 and to be a modern day witness to you and to the reality of you and your Holy Spirit living and acting through me!
John 15:13
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends“