When I was a child I began my lifetime habit of getting things wrong.
When I was learning about how we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, I wanted to know why don’t we run out of oxygen? I was told that plants turn the CO2 back into breathable oxygen. So I thought that the plants were not the things with green leaves but these giant factories…
I also noticed that the beach was always very windy, so the falling waves must be what made the wind, fanning the air as they fell, and that all wind came from the waves falling on the beach, it just took awhile to blow inland…
You know that feeling of awakening suspicion that things don’t work the way that you thought they did, but you don’t know yet how things really work? I have that feeling a lot. Curiosity that exceeds understanding…welcome to Jack world.
You know those jokes about famous last words? Mine will be, “Hey, I wonder what this is?”
Jesus kept talking about dying.
Death has a way of shaking up our lives, our world, how we understand the way the world works. What we thought was important isn’t so much, what didn’t matter before now suddenly means everything. Conversion often grows out of grief and tragedy.
In Mark’s Gospel Jesus kept his disciples in a constant state of shifting perception and understanding, of knowing they have things wrong but not really sure how things really work. Their curiosity exceeded their capacity to understand.
And Jesus saying he must die, that just tipped everything over.
Who are the truly great?
Who are the truly mature?
Who are the childish?
Where do we meet God?
All these things are not what we expected.
Jesus spoke yet again about how he must suffer and die and rise again. The last time Jesus brought this up Peter told Jesus that he was wrong and Jesus called Peter something horrible. This time they kept quiet, not understanding, and knowing that they didn’t understand.
I imagine that they had that awakening suspicion that things are different than they thought or hoped. The universe is put together differently than we expected.
The disciples were in a growing state of confusion, really not knowing what they were getting into by following Jesus, but drawn to him anyway, following Jesus anyway.
Being servants of all, welcoming children in Jesus name, not just children, but everyone who is unnoticed or set aside, forgotten, the invisible…in that welcome they welcome God…
Meeting God in the hidden sacrament of welcoming the unnoticed, the overlooked and the discarded…
Jesus filled the lives of the disciples with such strange things.
The cross of Christ is the glory of God.
The greatest person in the world is the one who serves everyone, and is probably never even noticed, invisible. I wonder who it is?
So when, because of Jesus, we welcome those who don’t matter at all we actually welcome God who matters the most.
The last are first because that is where God lives.
These unexpected and hidden mysteries…they hold the world together. They are the air that we breathe. They are the waves that whip up the wind.
Have you ever had that feeling that things are not as you thought?
Jesus has that affect on people.