As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about her. So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them.
That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was.

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”

Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else, to the nearby villages so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons. – Mark 1:29-39

If I could heal sick people at will, do you think there is anything else that I would bother doing in this life? If I could sneak in while patients were sleeping, touch them and remove their cancers, stitch up their broken bones, give sight to their eyes, eradicate the viruses and germs – do you think you could drag me out of the hospitals with chains and a tractor?

Not a chance.

Obviously, I am not Jesus.

I don’t see things as He did and does. I don’t see what sin does to people; how it rots them from within and brings death to their cheery, healthy, happy-looking faces.

I will confess something to you, though. I’ve had a glimpse.

Not just in this life, but in a dream a few nights ago. A nightmare, actually. I dreamed that I could see the effect of evil on people. I dreamed that I could even see objects that had been used for evil purposes, and I saw them differently. They were grotesque underneath their translucent skins, in the kind of way that H.R. Giger designed the black-and-bleached-white flesh-ripped-from-bone world of the creature from the movie Alien and its sequels. Horrific, dead-through-and-through, rank with wickedness, eaten up with malice, consumed by self.

I think I once blogged that I wished I could see things as Jesus sees them.

I no longer wish it.

I understand now – a tiny fractional understanding – the way He sees evil, and sees it in us.

What I cannot comprehend is why He loves us anyway.

But I now have a greater appreciation for His desire, when tempted to spend His time healing the physical, to move on with the good news that brings healing to the inner man.

“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” – Mark 14:36

Abba. It’s the Hebrew equivalent of “Daddy.” The first word babies can put together, whether they realize it or not.

In this case, a desperate plea: for mercy, for release, for any other way for His will to be done.

My friend Jim lost his faith over this moment in scripture. He had just become the father of a beautiful little boy. Good man. Husband. Science instructor. Could not get past the idea that God could allow His only Son to die when He could have done anything and everything to stop it. Jim’s faith crumbled. Not long after, his marriage crumbled. And his son grew up, of necessity, with a part-time dad.

It’s a moment in scripture that shatters my heart, too.

Because parents have to send our kids out into a world that will have its way with them. We have to let them go. We have to let them live. Sometimes, we have to let them die – because we can’t be with them all the time; and we can’t always keep them safe.

And if you look at it only with respect to one life lost and one death taking place, it will destroy your faith in this incomparable truth, too. But there is so very much more at stake here.

There are the lives of thousands of millions on the line. There is a perfect plan, a uniquely just and merciful scheme of redemption to rescue as many as will through the sacrifice of One. The One knows He must make that sacrifice, both as Father and Son.

So I see it differently than Jim did.

I can see myself letting my strapping 14-year-old son dive into dangerous waters to drag as many drowning others as he could to a deck or a dock where I could pull them to safety. I can see that, as a 50+ year-old, I would have a role in that rescue – and that he, as a strong, excellent swimmer, would be better suited for another role. If he were willing, I would want him to try. And if anything went wrong, I would be right in there with him to make sure he made it to safety, too.

I’m not sure I could live with my conscience – whatever the outcome – if I didn’t let him try.

That would be just the merest human example. The rescued would not even have to be familiar to me for me to want my son to try. They would not have to be other children of mine, estranged from me and yet precious to my heart.

That’s who the endangered are to God, you see; they are and always have been His children – no matter how prodigal; no matter how lost; no matter how hateful and hurtful and proud and rebellious. They are His still children.

And He is their “Abba.”

His Son knew that. So the will of the One who stood by became the will of the One who would die.

Like Father, like Son.

Okay, I’m reading between the lines here. (At least I try to admit it when I do.)

Because you won’t find in most versions of the Bible a phrase that specifically describes Jesus as exasperated. Mark, however, twice records Jesus doing something that other gospel writers do not:

He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means, “Be opened!” ). – Mark 7:34

He sighed deeply and said, “Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it.” – Mark 8:12

I don’t know about you, but I have been known to sigh when exasperated. When I exptected more, or better, or smarter. I’ve sighed for other reasons, too. But in the context of these verses, Jesus sounds exasperated to me.

He used other expressions that support my suspicion. “You of little faith,” He addressed Peter, who had failed to walk on water. As well as all of the chosen, when a storm nearly swamped their boat … and when they didn’t understand His warning about the leaven of the Pharisees. He also upbraided a whole group of followers who heard him describe how God clothes the field with lilies. That conversation began when someone tried to get Jesus to arbitrate an inheritance disagreement, and Jesus responded: “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?”

Then there’s the time early in His ministry, John records, that He evicted animal merchants and money changers from the temple courts, telling them, “Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!” Perhaps the incident presages His return some years later to do the same thing, and add: “It is written, ‘My house will be a house of prayer’; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.'”

And He went so far as to call some folks “snakes” and “vipers,” and called Peter “Satan” once. That had to hurt.

It all sounds pretty exasperated to me.

You can probably think of more explicit examples.

“In your anger, do not sin,” advises Psalm 4:4. But being angry itself, or even just exasperated, is no sin.

It is human.

So was Jesus.

The pattern I suspect, though, is that most of us humans get ticked off about relatively small things.

As I recall the situations that seemed to exasperate Jesus, they were when other folks couldn’t see the big picture because of their focus on the microscopic. When they couldn’t see the eternal beyond the transient.

A sign or miracle that would only last as long as memory and life. A storm that would pass. A chance to make a few bucks from an inheritance, or from a temple worshiper who didn’t have the right kind of money or the right kind of animal to sacrifice. A fascination with this temporal life, with no hope nor faith for a life that cannot end.

Am I reading between the lines?

Or do the lines converge on Jesus’ point each time – putting everything into perspective?

As a conduit of God’s power to heal on the earth, Jesus seems to have been shorted out on occasion.

I’m not talking about those instances when He – as many have said – went to “recharge His spiritual batteries” in prayer, alone or with His closest friends, after exhausting missions.

No, I’ve got two specific instances in mind from scripture. One is found in Mark 6:1-6. He could heal just about anywhere – except at home, where virtually no one believed in Him. The last two verses of that citation read:

He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith.

I don’t know if there’s a cause-effect relationship there. But I suspect it. The reason is found in the second instance, in the previous chapter (Mark 5:21-34). He has gone to help Jairus’ gravely-sick daughter when a woman in the crowd about Him reaches out in faith that just touching His garment will heal her, too. He stops, apparently surprised; feeling power leave Him. He asks who touched Him, and she knows what He means by it and confesses. He tells her that her faith has healed her. Did He have nothing to do with it, as far as His own will is concerned? If so, then hers was enough. If not, perhaps He was waiting to see if she would act upon it.

We know that when He walked this world, He could divine the thoughts of others. To what extent, I’m not sure we can accurately surmise. Maybe the din of the crowd’s thoughts around Him drowned her out. Maybe He knew exactly what she prayed for.

But in the previous instance, there was an almost-complete lack of faith. And He apparently could do little. Mark’s gospel doesn’t say that He wouldn’t, but that He “could not.” Perhaps His power was, in fact, short-circuited by the lack of faith around Him. Perhaps those around Him refused to recognize the miracles He performed for what they really were – supernatural acts of God on earth – because it would naturally follow, then, that the Mary’s son they knew (with four brothers and at least a couple of sisters) might not be the carpenter’s boy after all.

The point I’d like to get to doesn’t depend on the correct answer to those questions, fortunately.

In both these situations – and in many more – I find evidence that Jesus actively wanted to work through the faith of the people around Him. I don’t believe that has changed. In fact, I believe that His Spirit is sent among those of us who seek to follow Him for that very reason and purpose.

That prompts the uncomfortable question:

Are we short-circuiting His power in the world today – not because He can’t work around us, but because He wants to work through us – simply by our lack of faith?

That’s how Jesus pictures himself in parables in Matthew 13:1-40.

Sowing seed. Rooting out the weeds sown by an enemy. Harvesting the good grain at the end of the season.

Pointing out that even the tiniest seed can grow into a tree sturdy enough to support the nests of birds.

You know He’s the farmer for certain in the last of the parables in that group, because He says so (v. 37).

This is an accurate agronomical forecast he’s giving.

You’re not going to get 100% yield.

Sow anyway. Sow all you can.

Sow even along the edges of the path where the birds will eat it up. They have to poop sometime, somewhere.

Sow even among the rocks in the sun. You never know what might spring up, even for a short time.

Sow even among thorns. You’re not responsible for them choking out the new growth.

Sow on the good soil, too. You might get a hundred times more seed-bearing plants. Or sixty. Or thirty.

Sow even where the enemy tries to sabotage the harvest by planting weeds. it’ll all be sorted out later.

In the first parable with the different soils, the seed is the word of God. In the later one with the weeds, it is the sons of the kingdom.

But who’s the farmer in the first parable?

I think it’s us.

I think from the first parable’s phrasing, we’re to sow the same way He does in the later one:

Any way and anywhere we can, expecting nothing, weeding out bad teaching (such as a false “gospel” of wealth in this life) just in the same way He weeds out bad teachers … then rejoicing at whatever growth God gives and whatever harvest the angels bring in.

It’s pretty amazing how much a Carpenter knows about planting and seeds and trees. How sin began with a tree, and ended with one. How God cast man out of a garden, and men took God captive in another. How that story becomes a gospel that grows like dough with yeast. How we grow to maturity in it, and it grows in us, and we grow more like Him.

But He gets that knowledge honestly.

As I recall, His Father planted that first garden in the east, in Eden …

That’s how He referred to Himself, at least once.

The backstory is in Mark 3:20-30:

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”

So Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house. I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin.”

He said this because they were saying, “He has an evil spirit.”

Jesus was the thief in the story He told, carrying off the possessions of Satan – the “strong man.” By exorcising demons, he was tying up the strong man and stealing back what belonged to God.

Not a metaphor most of us Christians would use for ourselves.

Maybe we should.

Maybe we ought to be more about our Father’s business of stealing back His kidnapped children from the enemy.

Maybe it would help if we realized that we’re not alone in the Godfather’s business … He has given us His Spirit to unite His kingdom and empower us to tie up the strong man just as Jesus did.

The deep irony of this metaphor, to me, is that Jesus describes the unforgiveable sin as blasphemy of that Spirit – the one they had called “evil” – by comparing His mission to breaking and entering and tying up the owner and theft.

Something we would, under normal circumstances, consider quite wrong.

Unless the justice of this world had failed, and it was the only way to take back the ones God loves who had been abducted by Satan.

The irony would be hilarious.

– If the stakes weren’t so high.

I don’t believe that anyone of His days-as-mortal would have called Jesus “politically-correct.”

If He had been, He would have said things like this:

“Let the little children and the young people and the middle-aged and the old folks come to me, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these – and, of course, everyone in-between.”

“Blessed are the meek, as well as the bold and those who are sometimes self-confident and sometimes not, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

“When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Also invite the rich and middle-income neighbor and you will be blessed, because they might assume it’s pot luck and bring something.”

“Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him. Or at least whoever believes in something.”

“You might be slightly mistaken or misled because you are not completely familiar with the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. Sort of all unisex, you know.”

“I tell you the truth as I see it: Unless you eat the something that simulates the flesh of the Son or Daughter of Man or Woman and drink a fluid which reminds your of his or her blood, you have only some life in you.”

“Sell a few of your possessions and give to the poor and keep the rest as wise stewards, lest you become poor and must receive gifts from others. Provide purses or wallets for yourselves that will not wear out, a secure investment in heaven or nirvana or the afterlife that will not be devalued by inflation, where no borrowing-but-not-returning unfortunate comes near and no moth or butterfly nibbles.

“I am one of the ways, one of the truths, and one of the lifestyles. No one comes to the Parent but by his or her own path.”

Wow. That would really be teaching with authority.

Last year at about this time, it was The DaVinci Code – Ron Howard’s slick film from the Dan Brown novel about the quest for a Jesus who married, had a child, then an earthly dynasty.

This year it was The Lost Tomb of Jesus, the not-so-slick James Cameron documentary about the discovery of a tomb with ossuaries (small stone coffins for bones) marked “Jesus Son of Joseph,” “Mary,” “Mariamne” which was catapulted into a theory remarkably similar to the DaVinci Code fiction.

There was a time when television networks and movie studios would show or release movies during the Easter season like King of Kings or The Greatest Story Ever Told or even the comparatively anemic Jesus of Nazareth. Then they backed off of those and just showed an occasional The Bible in the Beginning or The Ten Commandments. I don’t think we can blame them, though. They’re just giving the viewing public what they’ll watch and what will sell commercial time. And viewers will watch something about a Jesus who’s easy to believe in.

This “Jesus” isn’t both human and divine – he’s just human. He lives. He teaches. He has a normal life. He dies. It’s a sad and tragic death, but that’s all. End of story.

It isn’t a life that draws one emulate. So the teachings aren’t anything that one feels compelled to obey, or follow, or even listen to. This “Jesus” is a good Jesus, but not a perfect Jesus. He’s acceptable to Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist. He doesn’t make demands of selflessness or sacrifice or spirituality on people.
Perhaps, more than ever before, that is why it is so crucial for those of us who follow Christ become more dedicated to telling His Story.

There have been studios in recent years which have dared to tell its beginning (The Nativity Story) and its second beginning (The Passion of the Christ) but very little or nothing in-between … or after. We can’t – and shouldn’t – count on Hollywood to do our job for us. It’s our privilege and our gift to share that truth.

And the time is now.

Oh, man, am I depressed.

Haven’t you heard?

They found the box with Jesus’ bones in it. Twenty-seven years ago, and even though the BBC found out about it a decade ago, American TV is just now breaking the news. And on that paragon of scientific research, The Discovery Channel. Well, I expected more timely coverage from them.

At least it’ll be well done, I’m sure. Hey, James Cameron is a heck of a filmmaker. He can break your heart on the Titanic, scare the bejeepers out of you with The Terminator and even bring you to tears at the awesome beauty of God’s creation in the bottom of the ocean’s Aliens of the Deep.

And even though I’m not familiar with the authors of the book this documentary is based on – or their qualifications – you’ve gotta know that James Cameron would never side up with anyone less than stellar, or pursue a project he couldn’t believe in, or do something just for the money or the news coverage. And they’d never cook the books on statistical probabilities of name distribution in an ancient culture or exaggerate the implications of DNA testing. Right?

So.

The bones of Jesus. Though I hear that they were considered unimportant by those who discovered it, and were disposed of. Man, what a loss. What a story they could tell … about being whipped, crucified, lanced and all. Not to mention resurrected and gathered to heaven.

But what made Jesus come back to Jerusalem, start a family, move mom and dad there and choose to die all over again in middle-class comfort and be buried in a fairly expensive tomb? (Did Joseph of Arimathea donate that one, too?) Or are we to believe something else implied by this incredible 27-year-old discovery?

Wow, I guess we’ll never know for sure.

It sure could throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of traditional Christianity, couldn’t it?

I mean, haven’t we always thought that Jesus just died the one time, left an empty tomb with folded grave clothes and dozens if not hundreds of witnesses to the sham trials, the torture, the murder, the resurrected body that still featured wound marks and was capable of cooking and eating fish for breakfast?

Just the idea that the people who loved the family most would lie about all that, maybe to protect them so they could live out normal lives – would lie about it, even when threatened with death by Romans – and that the martyrdoms for the lie would continue on and off for three hundred years … well, it’s just kind of sad and pathetic, isn’t it?

Especially when the story they told conformed to all kinds of prophecies from centuries before. Even when it offered hope to thousands and then millions and now billions of people. Even when people lived out lives of service and generosity to others in need, just in the attempt to be like Jesus.

Breaks your heart, doesn’t it? That it was all for nothing?

All those hospitals created for the sake of showing the love of Jesus … all those mission outreaches that brought appropriate technology like well-digging, irrigation, and brick-making to undeveloped cultures … all pointless, because they pointed to a Jesus that lived pretty well; lived the American dream: married the girl that had been rescued from seven demons, had the family with 2.2 kids with the folks living nearby and even had a pretty nice box to be buried in when it was finally all over.

To think, all these centuries, we poor deluded Christians have labored under the delusion that you can’t put Jesus in a box.

Well, the documentary’s gotta be true.

Because the names are right there on the ossuary. In real Hebrew, no less. The DNA proves that two of the former occupants weren’t related maternally, and therefore could have been married to each other. The odds of a Jesus being buried with a father named Joseph and a wife named Mary and not being the ones in the New Testament are, well, incalculable.

After all, statistics don’t lie.

When I returned home to my wife and daughter from a ZOE Group/New Wineskins strategy meeting in Nashville a few hours ago, they told me that my 13-year-old boy Matthew seemed reticent to bid them goodbye at the end of their laundry-doing visit at Camp Tahkodah yesterday afternoon.

It’s an odd coincidence. On the way to meet them in my car, I had been wondering how the conversation might have gone between Jesus and Mary before He went out into the wilderness to be baptized by His cousin, John; to fast right up to the brink of starvation; to be taunted by Satan himself; and to begin his ministry by choosing twelve no-accounts to finish the work he would start.

Did He hesitate like my Matt did yesterday? Had Jesus prepared his mother for that day when He would leave the carpentry shop? Did He tell her that James and Joses were old enough to take it over? Did He tell her He had to go? That His heart would burst if He had to wait another day?

Did she force a smile and say, “I know”?

Did she promise to check in on Him when she could?

Did she send a lunch with Him?

Did He caution her that when they met up again He would have another, larger family; that there would be other mothers and brothers and sisters?

Did she reassure Him that she would be all right; that His Father would take care of her? Did she suddenly remember those fateful words of prophecy from the old priest at the Temple on the day she took Him to be circumcised? That a sword would pierce her own soul, too? Did she, trembling, tell Him to be careful?

Did He tell her that His Father would take care of Him, but in a way she could not possibly imagine?

Did she tell Him what every mother tells a departing son: “Remember how much I love you. I will always be there for you”?

Sometimes I wish there were more of those moments described in scripture.

Then again, maybe some of them are too private to share.