Friday, April 18, 2014

The Light of Wonder in the Valley of Horrors

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...

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.


No comments:

Post a Comment