Christ Church Rockville Lenten Devotion

Wednesday in Holy Week ~ April 12, 2017

Holy Wednesday John 12:27-36
The more I think I understand Holy Week and our Lord’s giving of himself for our sake, the more I sense oceans of insight beyond me, still to be discovered. In this passage of John, Jesus laments, “’Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’” And a voice from heaven replies, “’I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’”
It seems to me that Jesus’ deepest desire is to reveal his Father/Mother as fully and clearly as he can, and he receives an affirmation he notes is intended for the crowd around him, and for us. Some witnesses hear thunder, some note an angel was addressing the Holy One. We know via the Gospel writer that this was God. Yet such conversation literally traversing the expanses of heaven and earth was to those first onlookers cloaked in mystery.
I had a teacher long ago declare that to arrive at Christ’s resurrection, we must pass through mystery. Today’s events bring that to mind, and Arthur J. Gossip beautifully expands such contemplation. He contrasts one man out on a “fine starry night” who barely notices the vista, whilst another “is far away, out in infinite reaches of unthinkable space, amid mighty suns heaped upon suns, and systems piled upon systems, and endless wastes of nebulae, those humming workshops of Almighty God, where tonight and every night, from the beginning to the end of time, the mind and hands of the Eternal are fashioning new worlds, new suns, new universes, hour by hour. To the one it is only some gleaming spots of light; but to eyes that can see, all these immensities and tremendousnesses lie hidden away in and behind the familiar sight. So peer beneath the simplest thing, and before you understand it, it will lead you straight as an arrow to the feet of God…. Just thundering? No. there is more in it than that; always much more….And this whole life of ours, that begins in mystery and ends in mystery, that comes from God and goes to God, is full always both of it and him.”* May God’s blessing encompass you as you walk and ponder the holy way of the cross.
*The Interpreter’s Bible: John. Nashville: 1952. Vol. 8, p. 668.

— The Rev. Cynthia Simpson