26 March 2020 - toward love, toward life

Today's Readings

(Audio)

But you do not want to come to me to have life.

The Jews had ample opportunities to believe in Jesus. John testified to him persuasively, as a burning and shining lamp. They were happy to listen for a time but would not move from John to the one toward whom he pointed. They were hoping, it seems, for a temporary fix before moving back to their old ways of life. They did not want to change this way of life or the esteem it afforded them in the eyes of others. It was for this reason that they were all to willing to overlook the works that Jesus performed. It was for this reason too that they searched the Scriptures without discovering Jesus present throughout them.

How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another
and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?

Jesus was the beginning of an entirely new sort of system that was no longer concerned with human praise. Even in the people that they admired the Jews were tended to be people like themselves. They would admire someone who "comes in his own name" because such a one did not challenge the paradigm of pride and self-centeredness on which the world was based.

Jesus did not give up on the Jews and he does not give up on us. We will ourselves to overlook one sign so he offers another. He never ceases to invite us. More than Moses he stands in the breach for us to avert God's blazing wrath.

But Moses implored the LORD, his God, saying,
“Why, O LORD, should your wrath blaze up against your own people,
whom you brought out of the land of Egypt
with such great power and with so strong a hand?

When the signs that Jesus offers call us to turn away from ourselves and toward God and neighbor let us see that Jesus is offering these as a plea for our own salvation and our own life. We are made to love and to live in love and anything else is destruction and wrath. Jesus stands in the breach for us, pleading that we would come to him and have life.

Then he spoke of exterminating them,
but Moses, his chosen one,
Withstood him in the breach
to turn back his destructive wrath.

LORD Jesus, help us to turn to you for life. Help us to recognize you pleading for us, offering sign after sign that turns our gaze away from ourselves, outward in love, and turns the destruction of failure to love away.