WATCH JESUS

We have a knack of studying about Jesus.  I've learned over the years to sit and watch him.  Look at him as you read the gospels.  Imagine his pace, his grimace, or his darting eyes.  Study him.  Watch him; what distracts him and what will not.  What calls him and what is it that repulses?

Jesus is the Way.  He is also the Truth.  To the utmost, he surely is the Life.  Since we are to mimic him, we will do well to do more than read verses.  We must study him as a man filled with God's Spirit walking about the vineyards, the paths, and the fields.  Watch Jesus be God on this earth.  Watch God be clothed as a man.

William Willimon reflects upon his stark manner.  Why, Jesus?  Why do you explain God with unexplained stories, most of which lack neat endings or immediately apparent points?  It's as if Jesus says that God is not met through generalities and abstractions; God is met amid the stuff of daily life, in the tug and pull of the ordinary.  Yet God is usually encountered, if the parables have it right, in ways that are rarely self-evident, obvious, or with uncontested meaning.  In parables, the joke is on us.

When you open to the gospels, look at him.  We in the church have fought over Truth as if it could be owned, trimmed, and dispensed by one individual or a group of us.  Not so with Jesus in the picture.  When we watch Jesus we will be forced at several points to throw up our arms and declare, I don't get it.  His walk is with God.  I may not understand him...but I choose to believe him.  He is the truth whether I can explain or grasp it.  I will continue to watch God walk within the earth-feet of this Son.  For a bit I felt I could hang in there with the best of debaters.  Not true, I now see.  For with the best of us compared to Jesus....the joke is on us....when we think we have explanation of him sliced, diced, and figured.