Historical setting: 602 C.E. On the road between Metz and Luxeuil
It was a different kind of authority that Jesus taught in a time when Romans kept the order and Pharisees kept God’s law. Jesus opened that old Jewish vault of always knowing that God is love. He remembered the ancient stories of the father welcoming his lost son, regardless. And Jesus taught us prayer as conversation with a personal parent, sometimes to God as a mother who told us who she was, and when we forgot she let her children suffer consequences but loved us through it all anyway. Jesus reminded us of God arguing with Abraham like a papa to an obstinate son, a father begging for a strand of goodness from his children. Sometimes this parent was perceived as the maker of law and also the authority in keeping the law. [Genesis and on and on]
I remember that first part in the ancient tale of human –
“If you eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil you will die!”
Then they ate, but by God’s kind of justice, they didn’t die. They lived to tell the story. They lived to love one another. They lived to bear children. They lived to make bad choices and maybe even good choices. They lived to the continuance of the generations of humankind. They lived on to participate in the fullness of life. They even lived to grieve. They live. They die. They live…
Maybe it is the design of God’s big everything kind of love that sets us each into earthly life as infants surrounded in parent love, already knowing that despite the howling pains of birth, God is love like a mother.
Yet, humankind seems to be on this eternal quest to let go of the grand invisible universal love and keep only earthly control making human divisions of order and chaos, of rule and disobedience, of naming noble or common, of knowing ally from enemy. It is all so Roman of us. So now Gabe follows the rule and Greg follows the orders.
Dear God, so much bigger than my imagination, how is it you can notice me among all these stars and number every sparrow of every nest of every earth under every sun you watch over? At yet, you are here to assure me that my parent love is useful even to my wandering sons. Thank you. Amen.
This morning I returned the borrowed horses to Luxeuil.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 