Lent #33:  Tuesday in Holy Week.

Not one stone will be left upon another.

(Matthew 24:2)

After a full day of teaching in the magnificent porticoes of the temple courts, Jesus and his disciples make their way back home to Simon’s house just a bit east on the other side of the Mount of Olives. As they pass over the Mount of Olives they can’t help but look west and marvel at the “wonderful stones” of Herod’s temple. Jesus is not impressed. He tells his disciples that the temple will be destroyed stone by stone.

Solomon’s Temple stood for near 400 years till the Babylonians breached the walls, destroyed the temple, and took the Israelites captive into Babylon. Seventy years after their captivity, the Persians conquered Babylon and set the captives free to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild their temple.  This second temple—the temple of the exiles, turned out to be a sorry sight as the prophet Haggai observed: “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” (Hag 2:3) Those who remembered Solomon’s temple’s “wept” when they saw the meagerness of the second temple (Ezr 3:12). Yet, Haggai went on to prophecy of a future splendor that will be far greater than Solomon’s temple (Hag 2:9).

King Herod thought that he could fulfill Haggai’s prophecy by rebuilding the shabby second temple into something even greater than Solomon’s temple. It was these stones—Herod’s stones, that Jesus was talking about. Is Herod’s temple really the “Splendor” of Haggai’s prophesy? Is it really the place where God has dealings with his people? Is it really the place where heaven and earth meet?

From the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry among us, he spoke of the destruction of the temple and how a new temple would rise up in three days (Jn 2:22). Mount Zion would become Mount Calvary: “Come to him, a living stone …and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house …through Jesus Christ. …See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame" (1Pt 2:4-7).

Lent #32:  Monday in Holy Week.

There were some Greeks.

(John 12:20)

At the Passover Festival, when the Jews made pilgrimage to Jerusalem and its Temple to celebrate their deliverance from Egyptian bondage, there were also some Greeks. Lookers on, I suppose, wondering what this could mean. They had seen and heard enough of Jesus to want more. So they connect with one of Jesus’ disciples with a good Greek name: Philip. Philip gathered up his buddy Andrew (another Greek name) and the two of them sought from Jesus an audience for “some Greeks.”

No audience is granted, apparently; but, Jesus does give Philip and Andrew a message for the Greeks: “The hour has come,” Jesus tells them, “for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:23-24).

Jesus’ mini-parable about the grain of wheat that dies to bear fruit, would resonate with the Greeks—particularly their poets (Ac 17:28). In myth and song, the Greeks told the story Persephone. It’s a myth (complicated like Greek myths are) about how death comes to the crops in winter and how spring brings them back to life. We’ve been watching our young new tree out front. Linda is fearful it might not come back to life. We spotted possible makings of some new leafs yesterday. There’s hope.

Maybe Jesus is saying something like, “Tell them that their myth has to do with me.” My guess is that all such myths and longings has to do with Holy Week and who Jesus is.

Lent #31:  Palm Sunday

Who is this?

(Matthew 21:10)

That’s what folks asked as Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a young donkey: “Who is this?” The crowd, waving their Palm Branches, sing out their praises: “Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Yet, even while they sing their praises, they wonder: “Who is this?”

Though the crowd wonders about who Jesus is; Jesus accepts their praises. That’s true of all our praises. Who can know the whole of Him? We offer up our loud hosannas still wondering, “Who is this?” Who could have foreseen that by the end of the week, we will know Him as the One Crucified? “Who is this?”

Lent #30: Day before Holy Week

Leave her alone.

(Jesus, John 12:7)

It happened “six days before Passover” at “the home of Simon the leper” where Jesus and his disciples stayed just outside of Jerusalem. You may know him as Lazarus’ dad. Maybe they still called him “the leper” because Jesus healed him and made him whole. Simon’s home was always open to Jesus. His son Lazarus and Jesus became friends (phileō, Jn 11:3,36). One senses that Jesus felt at home with Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha.

There must have been something about the human love of Simon and his family that freed Mary to take “about a pint of expensive ointment and pour it on Jesus' feet and then wipe his feet with her hair. The whole house filled with the fragrance” (Jn 12:3). Such human warmth offended Judas. He made a big fuss insisting that Mary should have sold the expensive ointment and given the money to the poor. Judas has a point. It’s hard to argue with that. But, Jesus comes to Mary’s defense: “Leave her alone. She bought it for the day of my burial” (Jn 12:7). Somewhere, way down deep, Mary knows what Holy Week means. She alone anoints Jesus for what lies ahead. So, “Leave her alone,” Jesus says, “for she has done a beautiful thing” (Mk 14:6). Let her be. She knows.

Lent #29:  Seven Lenten Disciplines.

Do not let your left hand know

what your right hand is doing.

(Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:3)

Before we leave our seven Lenten Disciplines:

1)      self-examination

2)      repentance

3)      prayer

4)      fasting

5)      almsgiving

6)      meditating on scripture, and

7)      marking our mortality;

let’s listen again to Jesus’ warning about how we go about such disciplines. It’s assumed that we do pious disciplines like almsgiving, prayer and fasting; we’re just to do it different—the Jesus way. Maybe the Jesus way is best summed up by his mini parable about how your left hand should not be aware of what your right hand is doing. When your left hand knows what your right hand is doing, it ruins everything.

I’m tempted to explain it; or, try to explain it; or, in some way make perfectly good sense of it. But this left hand/right hand parable, like most parables, is best left as is. If the explanation were better than the parable, Jesus wouldn’t have bothered teaching us in parables. The parable says a Jesus thing that can’t quite be said any other way. Whatever is said falls short. So, let’s just allow Jesus’ left hand/right hand parable to nestle somewhere deep down inside us where “soul and spirit, joints and marrow meet” (Hb 4:12). It’s the place where Jesus’ parables percolate.

Lent #28: Discipline 7 of 7—Marking our Mortality.

Our mortal nature

(First Corinthians 15:53)

“Marking our Mortality”: that’s our last Lenten Discipline, at least according to the Book of Common Prayer. This one is too easy. Just getting out of bed “marks my mortality.” But, it was not always so. The “mark of mortality” sneaks up on us when we find ourselves “bent over”, when, as the wisest of mortals observes: “The

      -grinders cease because they are few, and

      -those that look through the windows are dimmed…

      -When one rises up at the voice of a bird, and…

      -the grasshopper drags itself along and

      -desire fails; …and

        -the pitcher is broken at the fountain” (Ecc 12).

Like a “broken pitcher,” vitality begins to leaks out of us.

I suppose marking our mortality is a Lenten Discipline because of Good Friday when Christ took on our mortality; and, Easter Morning when God turned mortality on its head so that “our mortal bodies might be clothed with Christ’s immortality” (1Cor 15:53). Immortality is not something we have of ourselves. It comes from God’s decision about us in Jesus Christ. Even throughout Eternity, our immortality comes to us as a gift from the Immortal One.

Lent #27: Discipline 6 of 7—reading and meditating on scripture.

Sin is lurking at the door.

(Genesis 4:7)

I don’t suppose that’s the most inspiring verse in the Bible—one worth Lenten meditation. Linda and I found ourselves there, in Genesis four, because of our reading aloud to one another Steinbeck’s East of Eden. The deeper we get into the book, the more we realize it really does have to do with how Cain found himself east of Eden. Great writers, like Steinbeck or Melville, seem to care about such Bible stories more than we who make big claims about the Bible.

Anyway, it caused us to read aloud to one another the story from the fourth chapter of Genesis that shapes Steinbeck’s novel. Of all people, I should know the story. I got paid to understand, explain, and make sense of such things. But, as we reread the story to one another, I marveled: What a strange, strange story—well worth a good Lenten meditation.