Tuesday, May 2, 2023

 

Tuesday, May 2, 2023


Psalm 77

Exodus 25:1-22

John 11:17-37


Observance: Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, teacher (d. 373)


Jesus wept.


As the letter to the Hebrews teaches, we have permission to go digging through the Old Testament to look for shadows, or sketches, of Christ and the kingdom of heaven. Everything that God has done (and continues to do) is deliberate and done thoughtfully of the fact that all things have been created through and in Christ: He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.


Therefore, we can hear the conversation between God and Moses on the mountain as the disciples on the road to Emmaus, who were taught all the things about Jesus in the scriptures. When Jesus taught that all the law and the prophets were summed up in the two great commandments, we look at these rules laid down by God in Exodus and see how the intended result is that we would love Him and one another.


Then we come to the dwelling place of Yahweh, the ark and the mercy seat; all that expensive, pure gold and laborious handiwork! We see how, first of all, God actually wants to live among His people. He is not the shadowy figure up in the sky, but Emmanuel, God With Us. We also see how great a thing it is for God to be both a spiritual being as well as material. The gold box, the fine timber poles, the law of love contained within, and God speaking above it all. And where is it contained? In a tent in the wilderness. God’s glory breaking into the physical, a paradox that can only be resolved if we realise that God does it because He loves us.


We could not ever underestimate just how titanic the incarnation is. God does not need to come and be with us; He is complete and perfect just as He is. But look at Jesus’ reaction to death, and weep for His weeping. When the disciple John saw Jesus weep, it stuck with him, as such an important revelation of God’s high opinion of us, fallen creatures trapped in our own sin and death, that it had to be recorded in his Gospel. “Is it for nothing that the Evangelist, some sixty years after it occurred, holds up to all ages with such touching brevity the sublime spectacle of the Son of God in tears? What a seal of His perfect oneness with us in the most redeeming feature of our stricken humanity!”

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