The Little Friar

Luc Olivier Merson's  Rest on the Flight into Egypt  (1879) is one of my favorite images of Advent and Christmastide.   First, the scene is haunting and full of fatigue.  Joseph is asleep on the desert floor.  One imagines his mental and physical exhaustion fleeing danger and trying to take his wife and baby across deserts to a foreign land.   And what awaits them at journey's end?  Will they find friends in Egypt?  Work?  And when will it be safe to go back home? Then there's Mary and Jesus.  Sitting on the Sphinx, in a striking juxtaposition and lending an exotic touch to the scene.  Jesus, the only source of light in the whole scene.  What I like about  Rest on the Flight into Egypt  is how it depicts, from the very beginning of his life, the homelessness of the Messiah.  God is a refugee, an immigrant, a stranger in a strange land, a person of exile.  I've always felt that  Rest on the Fli...

Some years ago, I heard a Good Friday sermon in which the preacher mused about how the carpenter Jesus may have attempted to ease his pain by admiring the wood of his cross.  "Nice bit of wood this is.  I bet it would make a great desk."   It was all rather Pythonesque (think Life of Brian ). Here we are, following Jesus, and we've arrived at that time of the Church Year called "Holy Week".  Tomorrow is Palm & Passion Sunday.   What always startles and shakes me about being a Christian is this very week .  It's that time of the Year when we say  shocking, scandalous, scalding truth, say outrageous, even sacrilegious things about God.  Our church culture is too polite to heckle and jeer, but if we were honest about this week, in the way I think we should be honest about this week, we'd do what I always want to do:  Walk out on Jesus by sometime next Thursday night.   Let's start with some of the shocking truths about this week.  ...