What
must have been John’s mood through the horror of despair following Calvary?
Was he, like the others, in the tangle of doubt and desolation growing from the
soil of a battered faith based on inattentiveness? Worse, did he bear the
additional burden of isolation?
If
John was a kind of odd-man-out, sometimes rash young man with a philosophical
bent, he may have known a lot about isolation. In the good days, efforts to
interact may have been met with shaken heads, patronizing pats on the shoulder
and condescending remarks like, “Ah, yes. There goes Johnny again.” Looking to
Jesus requires wondering. For a youth, it can be a lonely life when lived among older
and “wiser” pragmatists. But it must be unbearable when the one who has captured the
young man’s wonder has been ripped away.
To
whom could he turn now, in the bad days?
Peter?
Nope. He would have been distracted by his own dark memories.
No. John had no one who...
Nope. He would have been distracted by his own dark memories.
No. John had no one who...
Wait!
What
about Mary? She, too, was a wonderer. When Jesus put her in John’s care, did he also intended to put John in her care?
Can
you see her kneel beside him and reminisce about the mysteries of Jesus’ birth?
Did she ask questions to revive mysteries in his own memory? Questions about
how the ministry of the prophet at the Jordan had appealed to his
disenchantment with the High Priest’s circles of doubting Sadducees; and how the
tangled philosophies of the Greek intelligencia had driven him back to his
father’s fishing nets. Did they compare notes about “the Lamb of God thing”?
Maybe
the reason John would stop short at the open door of an empty tomb in a few hours,
letting Peter barge ahead, would be because he and Jesus’ Mom already realized there
had to be an “ah ha” moment coming.
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