Tuesday of Holy Week, March 31, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
What next?
Hear me, O islands,
listen, O distant peoples.
The LORD called me from birth,
from my mother’s womb he gave me my name.
Last day of the month. Two days before Holy Thursday. When we saw Jesus entering Jerusalem, the chosen one in The Chosen, his disciples surrounded him on the prophetic donkey everyone enjoying the moment. Even the rocks were jumping. Then suddenly, streaks of blood on the stone wall leaped out. Jesus was stunned. Mary and Jesus stood together, remembering what happened in the temple when he was a baby.
Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary His mother,
 “Behold, this Child is destined for the fall
 and rising of many in Israel,
and for a sign which will be spoken against
 (yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also),
that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
Jesus’ own blood on that wall.
But also the blood of so many men and women, soon to be lost in fruitless battles with the Romans, only a few years after they turned away from Jesus.
For if they do these things in the green wood, what will happen in the dry?
And Jesus wept.
In an earlier scene, when Lazarus has died and Jesus takes three days to get to his home in Bethany, Mary collapses in grief when he arrives in the midst of their funeral preparations.  “Why didn’t you come, oh God, why didn’t you come!” He looks at her, aching. and suddenly Jesus is sobbing too. Paroxyms of grief. The two words that make up the “shortest verse in the Bible” don’t do this weeping justice.
In the background Thomas, who lost his fiancée when a soldier killed her and Jesus did not bring her back to life, is seething. Of course he doubts Jesus. Peter, who spent months silently angry with Jesus when his wife miscarried and Jesus did not heal her, remembers walking on the water, and falling, and he remembers when Jesus held him and in an instant he is free. And Little James, who asked Jesus for healing but Jesus, full of compassion, invited him to see that it was better for the world to see his disability and know that he chose to love and follow Jesus anyway.
The camera catches them all, now, in various stages of forgiving Jesus. Jesus longs for them to see life as he does, and when they cannot, his grief overwhelms him. Will they ever understand? Now in this moment at Bethany, for Mary, for Thomas, for Peter, for Little James, he sobs, at last unable to hold it in. He loves them, loves them, loves them.
Our theologies have trouble with this side of Jesus, with the desperate sadness that courses through him, through God, when our inability to accept renders him powerless to be God-with-us.  He knows Lazarus will return to physical life, but his grief pours out anyway. He weeps with Mary. He becomes her grief. There is exactly zero distance between them. And so he shares the moment with her, rather than looking ahead. Everything Jesus has carried suddenly blows up inside him when he sees Mary so desperate and angry and sad. Why? Why? I think in this moment, I begin to understand what Rev. Moon said so often. “We must comfort God.”
Of course I’ll feel like Mary did. And so will you. Why, Lord! Why, why, why! Won’t you just make things right? I know you can! I know! Please!
And then when he does more than that, when he holds me and sobs with me, and knows my deepest pain, I’ll realize in an instant that I can trust him, that I am never alone, that always I will be loved into the deepest part of my soul.
This happens in all our lives. But I think of John Wimber’s vision of honey … the honey is falling from the sky and some of us are opening their mouths to take it in … and some of us are holding up umbrellas to keep from getting sticky. Then God says, “Don’t ever ask me for healing again, John. The problem is not on my end.” And this former member of the Righteous Brothers … wept.
Accept … surrender. Accept … surrender. I’ll do it over and over, because between these gifts of Holy Spirit honey I forget. Forget that God is God and I am not. Forget that I’m loved far beyond my circumstance.
But then I’ll remember. And among the gulps and gasps of breath that always come with the deepest grief, I’ll catch a breath, and another, and from deep down in the core of me, I will know how close God is.
O! Taste and see!
(Isaiah 49, Psalm 71, John 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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