Dear Friends,
As August ends, this summer series concludes. To send us off refreshed into September and beyond, I invite you to “keep your eyes fixed on Jesus.” (Hebrews 12.2) I hope to do so as well.
To help do this, I have found several authors particularly encouraging. They ask us to look at the Gospel as a whole. We are used to being limited to the Sunday Gospel portions, which give us insight into Jesus piecemeal, one incident, one parable at a time. What does the whole Gospel tell us about Jesus?
Scripture scholar Gerhard Lohfink says that “Jesus possessed an unheard of freedom. He is not a model of one who is tormented, grim, dissatisfied, or who has fallen short of his goal. He is no fanatic, utterly convinced that he must force others to adopt his own position…He remains to the end a free person…full of generosity and humanity.”
Michelle Francl-Donnay, adjunct professor at the Vatican Observatory, writes in a new way about the Transfiguration event: “Hovering behind Peter’s wild desire to hold on to the moment, I see Jesus in a garden gently telling Mary Magdalene not to cling to him. Listen to my Son, says a voice from the cloud, and I see spit and mud and a deaf man who can suddenly see and be heard. Ephphata! Be opened! Rise, says Jesus, and Peter comes to him across the water, a paralyzed man rolls up his mat, and a young girl gets up from her death bed.
“And always, do not be afraid. Resounding over and over. On a storm-wracked sea. To a worried father. His disciples gathered for one last meal. To the multitudes. To all of us.”
The last author I want to quote whose insight into Jesus is particularly remarkable since her field is mystery novels – the British writer Dorothy L. Sayers.
“Perhaps it’s no wonder that women were the first at the Cradle and last at the Cross.
“There had never been a man like this man…A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them…who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension, who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them, and was completely unselfconscious.
“There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity.
“Nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about women’s nature.”
And finally, from my own wonderings, think with me for a moment about the woman in Luke (18. 10-18) who had been bent over for 18 years. Jesus lovingly refers to her as Daughter of Abraham, and he cures her. This is what I wonder: Did Jesus see her for the first time when he was a youth, who stayed behind to experience the teachings in the temple? Was he so touched that he remembered?
So many delicious new ways of taking Jesus with us into the fall season! May the eyes of your heart be enlightened! (Ephesians 1.18)
~Sister Joan Sobala
