Here it is, Holy Week already, and I’m still mentally behind the curve, having barely entered into Lent. We’ll see if I can manage to catch up a little, as this evening we’re taking the kids to do the stations of the cross at St. Ben’s, this evening being geared particularly toward children and families. Thursday evening we’re gathering together for a meal with our little band of ecclesiastical vagrants — we’ve done this every year on Maundy Thursday for the past number of years, and it generally promises to be a good time. Hopefully I’ll come up with some thematic things to say around here for the balance of the week too, as I’ve done in past years (see last year’s list of past Holy Week posts), including a detailed retelling of the events of Holy Week both for adults and for kids.

Now that we are past Advent and into the Christmastide season, I can legitimately publish Christmas carols to the list in my series, Then Sings My Soul: The Hymns of My Youth. In the church of that youth, the Christmas carols might carry on for a week or so after Christmas (depending how the calendar fell), but that would be it until December. I’m sure it was the same for many of us, who would begin the carols of Christmas again sometime early in the Advent season. This week I add a carol which it is unlikely that one can pass by a Christmas program without hearing: “Away in a Manger.”

With Advent just over a week away now, Advent resources are beginning to appear online, including Christine Sine’s New Advent Meditation and planned synchroblogs. I organized a synchroblog last year for Advent, and have collected all the post links for reference as well. I’ve also begun to reread some of my past posts for the season, like Bethlehem and Mixing metaphors, and Kicking your way to the Light. There are also collections of Advent resources appearing online as well.

Last summer, I asked if Jesus was a failure as a visionary Leader. I think I mostly made my point, but there will remain some who are unconvinced, I’m sure. To suggest anything wrong with the way our Lord did things is a serious breach of Christian etiquette, perhaps enough to get one run out of town on a rail. But there it is. I left it alone for a while, thinking maybe I’d write further on it at some point, but never did. This spring, Ruth Tucker posted a “provocative” piece on Acknowledging Jesus as a Failed Leader, which received a fair bit of blogosphere linkage. I had hoped to resume this dialogue sooner, but Tucker’s post disappeared for some time, reappearing online just recently. She may be even more provocative than I was:

Well, after almost 3½ years of blogging here at Subversive Influence and after watching a certain meme go around most of my blogfriends for a week or so, I’ve finally been officially tagged as a “Subversive Blogger.” *sniff!* I’d like to thank the Academy… it just goes to show that if you work hard and blog incessantly, anything is possible. Or something like that.

But just what does it mean? Jake (the meme-starter) Bouma says,

American author Henry Miller (1891-1980) once said, “The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.”

Okay, so I guess it’s a miniseries now… the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. We’ve looked so far at his appearance to Mary (and the other women) and his encounter with Cleopas & Co. on the Emmaus road and around the table at Emmaus. Next up would be Jesus’ appearances to the twelve as they gathered together behind closed doors. When the Emmaus disciples arrive back in Jerusalem and find the eleven disciples (Luke 24), it appears they are in hiding behind locked doors (John 20)… but they readily accept the account of Cleopas and his friend, in part because Peter has also seen Jesus. No mention is made of his appearance to Mary as further proof.

Yesterday we considered the first post-resurrection appearance of Jesus, using detail found only in John’s gospel. The encounter with Jesus that took place on the Road to Emmaus is recorded only by Luke. I love this encounter — Jesus meeting some disciples deep in conversation, but pretending for a moment to know nothing of the events of the past days as he asks what they’re discussing. Luke tells us that God kept them from recognizing him as they talked and journeyed together toward Emmaus. Jesus goes on at great length to explain every Messianic prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, showing how they all pointed to him and how the Messiah must die this way before being glorified. Of all the documents we have in the New Testament and all the accounts of the things that Jesus said and did, I wish these disciples had written down what Jesus had told them on this trip. Only one of them is called by name in this account, Cleopas. Apparently the name is a shortened form of Cleopatros, meaning “son of a renowned father”. Now that Jesus has already appeared first to the women, he now appears to some who were considered reliable witnesses — perhaps Cleopas had some standing in the community, who knows?

The week following Easter weekend is a good time to think about some of the post-resurrection appearance of Christ. The painting here is by Rembrandt, featuring his conception of Christ’s appearance to Mary Magdalene. The first part of John 20 tells the story. Mary discovers the stone rolled away from the tomb and immediately tells the disciples. Peter and John enter the tomb to find it empty, then go back home, dumbfounded. Mary hangs back and looks into the tomb for herself, seeing two angels who ask why she is crying. After she responds she sees Jesus, but doesn’t recognize him. He too asks why she is crying, but she still doesn’t recognize him — not until he speaks her name, at which point her recognition is instant.

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?

I’ve got a lot of catch-up to do… and I’m still about a week behind in my blog reading, having spent too much time this past week wrestling with blog upgrades, updates, migrations, and fixes. Should all be a thing of the past soon, then back onto “normal.” Interesting occurrence of the week — we spent a half-hour on a Skype call, video-to-video with family friends in China. Our two girls and their two girls were tickled to see each other on the computer as we talked, and they took us on a virtual narrated tour of their flat. Cool. I remarked to my buddy later that in all the movies and television I’d seen where video telephony was commonplace, there seemed to be a lot less giggling and waving than what my own personal experience suggested. He explained that it wouldn’t look right for James Bond to be talking to M with both of them waving and giggling into the camera. I had to agree of course — thought I stipulated it may have been more in character for Lazenby or Dalton perhaps, but not Connery, Moore, or Brosnan. Alright, on to the linkage, which this week is followed by a fine selection of quotations found around the Interweb:

I read John Piper’s book Future Grace some years back when it was still new. Through that book and through my various ruminations on the subject, I came to understand why having people implore me to “have grace for them” irked me at times. Some people (not everyone, of course), request grace as a means of keeping a relationship running smoothly without having to change or stop an offensive behaviour. But that’s not what grace is all about. Certainly a significant component of the grace of God is the removal of our guilt. Forgiveness, or as the evangelicals like to put it, “God’s unmerited favour.” Guilt be damned — by grace.