Now Jesus cannot be followed, Holy Tuesday

Jesus had put himself in a difficult situation. Not only was he vulnerable, and in fact Judas betrayed him, but no one could follow Him: “Where I am going you cannot follow me NOW,” Jesus tells Peter. After asking so many people to follow Him during his ministry, NOW not even Peter could follow him, much to his disbelief.

What is so special about NOW? Why did Jesus call people to follow Him before and Peter could follow Him after, but not NOW? Now is the hour. The hour, in the gospel of John, is a technical term to explain the moment when the hour of darkness and hour of glory meet.

Basically our Christian lives can be understood as following Jesus, which means to go where He is going. He went to the Father, which is why Christian life is simply about how to go to the Father. However, this section of His journey is for Him alone. Only Jesus, because He is man, He can be vulnerable to be reached by man’s sins; but, the same time, because He is God, He can attract and exhaust the sin of the world.

Only after the Son had finished this section of the journey, can we, as God’s children, follow him.

You are gods! 5th Friday of Lent

“Every man who knocks at the door of a brothel is looking for God,” G. K. Chesterton said. True. But I would add, every one of those wants to be God. Jesus himself quoted the Scriptures, “Is it not written in your Law: ‘I said, you are gods?’ “

The desire to be gods must be a deep one, because the serpent, the most astute of the animals, knew it was man’s soft spot. The one lie with which the serpent could tempt Adam and Eve out of the garden was this : “If you eat…, you will be as gods.”

Like all desires that God put in the human heart, the desire to want to be like God is a good one. What is wrong is the use of strategies that fail to achieve that end. We call those bad strategies sin.

The sin of Adam was to want to be god without God. Jesus shows the right strategy. No man can be god apart from God. Not even the Son can be God apart from the Father.

Who can fail to notice the obsession the gospel of John has for the verbs “abide”, “dwell” and “remain”. That concept opens the key to the mission of Jesus. He shows us how to remain in God, and in so doing, he heals the rupture Adam caused. Jesus abided in the Father and the Father in Him. When His word abides in men… then and only then, can men fulfil the age-old dream of becoming gods in God.

Splitting or gathering? 3rd Thursday of Lent

“And if Satan is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?” The very name of Satan, diabolos, makes reference to splitting. Splitting is the secret to winning. The very wound of our hearts is a deep splitting. Split between what we want to do and what think we should do; split between what we feel like doing and what we consider is best for us; split between doing good to the people we love and finding ourselves hurting them. Split is to defeat as integration is to victory. That Satan, the splitter, would split himself is unthinkable, a truly intelligent being would know that it would mean his end. There are only two roads: to gather or to scatter; to integrate or to split.

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