Reflection,
Monday April 14
Isaiah
42:1-7
John 12:1-11
In
today’s Gospel reading, John 12:1-11, it is six days before Passover, and Jesus
visits his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Martha prepares a dinner for him,
and he and Lazarus recline at table together. I have never noticed this before,
never realized that just a week before his death, Jesus spends time with the
friend he so recently raised from the dead. I wonder what that was like for
him. I imagine that his friends’ moods were exuberant, that they wanted to
share with Jesus their delight and joy in Lazarus’s life. And I imagine that
for Jesus, his heart ached as he tried to both be present to his friends while
not fully revealing to them the worry and grief he was experiencing – for we
know he did not approach the cross lightly. And it’s not that his friends
wouldn’t want to support him, it just wasn’t time.
This
is a tension and a loneliness that we all know, the burden of carrying hard
news within while trying to be happy for someone you love. It’s the time you
celebrated at a friend’s wedding while mourning your own singleness. It’s
rejoicing over a friend’s new baby days after your own miscarriage; it’s
delighting in a loved one’s promotion when you’ve recently lost your job. Life
is full of those lonely moments. What a gift, then to know that Jesus knows
that experience intimately, that he can fully understand how it feels to hold
both joy and sorrow, that he can enter that experience beside you.
And
because he can enter our experience, I wonder if we can enter his. I wonder if
we could sit at that dinner with him, holding our knowledge of his impending
death, and provide comfort to him. And if we can, what a holy place to begin
this Holy Week, to begin our journey with him to the cross.
~ by Lauren Horstman Burdette
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