Parable

In July, 2023, I found Jesus on my kitchen floor. Literally. I’d just unpacked the groceries into fridge and cupboards and basement pantry, then bent to gather and stow the reusable bags strewn about the kitchen, and saw him lying there on the green and white tiles. Tiny Jesus. I picked him up. He was made of some sort of laminated cardboard. Posed with arms outstretched, feet in first position, hands and feet inked with red stigmata. Haloed head tilted slightly to the side, dark hair lank on his shoulders, great wide eyes of an Orthodox icon. I looked at Jesus lying there in the palm of my hand and wondered where he’d come from. Fallen out of one of the grocery bags? (Unexpected literature has landed in my grocery bags before.). From a recent wedding attended? (I hadn’t remembered adding any prayer cards to my purse.)

I know exactly when I found Jesus because I was so struck by the unexpected encounter that I texted a photo to husband and daughters, and to my seminary sisters, and wrote about it in my journal. It had been a hectic season, with multiple moving parts meshing imperfectly, and I felt more aware of busyness than blessing. I was a bit weirded out to find Jesus on my kitchen floor — those eyes! those bleeding hands and feet! At the same time, I was a bit delighted to think that I went out for groceries and ended up encountering Jesus in my own kitchen. Little laminated Jesus lying on the floor. But Jesus. I tucked him into the pocket at the back of my journal and every so often took him out to hold and look at. Jesus and I gazing at each other. When that blank book was filled, I moved him to the pocket of the next, and then the next after, until I bought some books without pockets, and then left Jesus on my desk, for his own safety.

Sometime last academic year, I saw that the middle image had dropped out of my key-charm. The cross-shaped charm had been a gift from a colleague. The cross was bigger than any individual key on the ring, and the whole was a difficult fit in the small bag I carry. (The key-ring-and-cross fit more easily before I also carried a cell phone, which gives some indication of how long I’d had the key ring and charm.). That said, I liked the heft of the cross in my hand (if not its fit in my purse), and when I saw its center was missing, I was dismayed. I went back out to the car, looking around the driver’s seat, reaching my hand into the creases, bending low to look on the floor. I checked the other car too, just in case. I did not see the center anywhere. For a few weeks, I left the cross charm on my key ring, then decided that it was silly to spend purse space when its center blank seemed to gape absence whenever I glanced at it. I removed the cross from the ring. It was, I admit, a lot easier to snug the keys into my bag. I appreciated the convenience.

This morning, I again came across the key-charm with its missing center. Why am I keeping this? I wondered. Then I thought Wouldn’t it be funny if the little laminated Jesus could fit in the empty center? Maybe I could trim and fit him in. I looked through my desk and found the Jesus, placed him in the center of the metal cross, and realized Oh … oh … This empty space is the place he’d come from. I set him in the outline, pressed slightly, then ran my thumb over the whole. The surface felt smooth. The fit was precise, even to its depth.

A parable cannot be reduced to any single meaning. Nor can this two year sequence of finding and losing and finding again. I might dwell on the shock of that initial encounter in the midst of everyday, an unexpected, weird, delighting, welcome right there on my kitchen floor. I might be stuck instead in the rueful realization that I hadn’t recognized the kitchen-found Jesus as one I’d carried for years — he looked so unfamiliar there on the floor — nor that I had carried the key-charm for months after without seeing that its center was missing. I might pause on the added thought that without that center, the key-charm didn’t seem worth carrying anymore.

For now I’ll rest in the reunion of the two pieces into a single whole. Find some glue to restore the charm securely, then attach it again to the ring. Yes, the whole will take up more space in my small bag. I’ll have to arrange things carefully each time, if they’re to fit. Do it, that the inconvenience of the matter may become its own parable. Re-enacted every time I take out my keys remembering, now, to look for the center image present.

Testimony in the Wilderness

“Moses descended Mount Sinai, and the two tablets of the testimony were in Moses’ hand in his descent from the mountain. Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone from his speech with [the LORD].”

Exodus 34:29; See Exodus 34:27-35 NRSVUE

The wind is wild tonight. I sit at my desk upstairs and hear it roar through the trees. Do I hear the creaking of the trees themselves? Does the house shudder slightly as another gust hits it? Something outside crashes loudly down. It’s too dark to see what.

The wind unsettles me. To be fair, I am already unsettled. Too much these weeks do I lurch from news report to news report, calming myself each time with recourse to countering commentary. (Also dark chocolate.) But these means keep me bracketed to meaning as defined by this world. Even opposing empire, I am allowing empire to define the terms of engagement.

With difficulty I wrest my mind from the wind’s violence to Exodus 34: Moses transfigured. I have sat with this text before, focused on the transformative intimacy of Moses and the LORD. Now I feel its larger context of wilderness, of people terrified and mourning and longing to be led into new life, of trauma.

Exodus 34 is a reprise of Moses’ earlier ascent to receive from the LORD stone tablets with the teachings and the commandments (Exodus 24:12-18). Then also Moses had been up there forty days and forty nights. Meanwhile, at the base of the mountain, the people had seen ‘that Moses delayed to come back down’ (Exod 32:1) and responded with the desperate anxiety of an abandoned child. They demanded a god to go before them. Aaron made the Golden Calf, and the people made an unholy festival (Exod 32:2-6), and the LORD made Moses go back down the mountain with the two tablets of testimony, God-carved and God-inscribed. God’s anger had blazed forth, ready to consume, but for Moses standing in the breach (Exod 32:7-14), identifying himself as one of God’s own, not God’s only own. At the end of a dance of judgment and mourning (32:15-33:11), request and response (33:12-23), the LORD said to Moses, ‘Now, carve two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you shattered’ (34:1). A second summons. A second ascent. A second span of forty days, after which Moses descends, shining.

In Exodus 32, the people’s sight of Moses’ absence so consumed them that they rushed to fill it. In Exodus 34, the people see in Moses’ radiance the presence of God.

The text tells that Moses did not know before it tells what Moses did not know. Moses doesn’t need to know his face shines. The people do. They have been oppressed by empire; terrified by wilderness. Maybe they’d imagined, leaving Egypt, that the road to the place God had promised would be straight, that any ascent would be so carefully graded that progress would be steady — that they could walk it without losing pace nor heart. Exodus tells a different story: a series of complaints and protests, of turning and returning. Wilderness life is precarious. God’s people know it so. They need to know it so. We need to know it so. So that they — we — can learn the only presence that will sustain life. Can leave space for it to shine, to speak.

This feels a wilderness time. My surprise at this feeling — or at its pain — is to me convicting. It reveals my mistake in imagining that the journey to kingdom living would be steady. That progress would be stable. Incremental. Within my control. As if control was ever meant to be mine. As if stability, rather than righteousness, is God’s priority. Have I (have we?) imagined myself ‘good people’ and forgotten the call to be ‘God’s people’? Goodness is a shallow cup. God is an inexhaustible well. Terrifyingly deep; ultimately sustaining.

Pray presence at the center. Not the small flickering that speaks of itself, but the great radiance that — even unknowing — tells God. Attend to the light; heed the speech; drink of the source. The stance on any particular issue may be the same; the strength will be greater.

Pray to see, pray to be, God’s testimony even, or especially, in this wilderness.

Breakfast on the beach

photograph (c) Katherine Brown

Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach, but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!”

John 21:4-7a [from John 21, NRSVUE]

A week of Vacation Bible School, our first after long while. Thirty children, a dozen youth helpers, and another dozen adults. Decorated spaces and energetic music and four stories about the way God feeds God’s people. With manna. With endless enough. With vegetables and water. With bread and fish.

Me, I don’t anticipate VBS with unmitigated enthusiasm. The cartoon puppets and pop music and bright-T-shirts-for-volunteers are not my style. (I come home after, button on a cotton shirtdress, and feel myself again.) There are compensating charms, however: the children’s energy as they sing and move; the one whose pipe cleaner creation is a ‘funny squiggle dancing thing!’ and whose goodbye pat is soft on my back; discussion about how to be a friend, about feeding the whole world.

Mostly I love the stories. I love telling them, acting them, helping the children learn the words with their bodies as well as their minds. I love the moments when a spark seems to catch. We act out the story of Elijah and the widow, letting every child have a turn: each time a child-widow hands a last-cake to a child-Elijah, I slip another plastic cake out of my pocket and onto the ‘widow’’s plate. ‘Let’s do it again!’ the children clamor, and we do. One sunny face looks up and laughs: ’You’re being God making more cakes!’ She is delighted at her recognition of the story in the action; so am I.

I awake the last morning of VBS and feel as if I’ve been dreaming John 21, this text telling Vacation Bible School. I nearly laugh aloud with the recognition of the story in the week.

Breakfast on the beach.

John has already told Easter: Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene in the morning [20:11-18], and to the disciples that same evening [20:19-23], and to Thomas, too, a week later [20:24-29]. Resurrection has been experienced in the text, and resurrection has been written so that others may know it too [20:30-31]. So. Resurrection. What next?

John seems to take a breath to start on this next movement of the story: ‘After these things…’ He tells us what the disciples don’t yet know. Jesus will show himself again, and ‘in this way’ [21:1]. The disciples have been out on the sea all night, fishing without catching [21:3]. This is told in one terse verse, yet the action stretched over hours and involved much effort. Get the boat out to sea — push it from the shore until it floats, row out farther, hoist the sail to go to deeper water, then repeatedly throw and haul nets that are heavy even when empty. (Organize volunteers and decorate church spaces and plan a schedule and prepare snacks.) Dawn breaks, and in the half-light of early morning, the disciples realize they’ve drifted back in; they see the shore and a man on it. He calls to them, and they answer, admit the result of all their effort. No fish. Throw your net on the other side, the man says, and they do, and then the net is so full of giant fish that they cannot even haul it in.

Only then do they realize what we already know. The disciple Jesus loved is the first to voice his recognition: ‘It is the Lord!’ Peter, hearing, throws himself toward shore. The others come after. Jesus is there. A charcoal fire is burning; breakfast is prepared. ‘Bring the fish you just caught,’ Jesus urges, and they haul in the fish-laden net, and it does not break — this itself worth noting.

‘Come and have breakfast,’ Jesus summons [21:12]. They do.

See them there on the shore as the sun rises and lays a path of light on the surface of the water. The air is scented with the sharpness of morning, the tang of charcoal smoke, the smell of fish roasting and bread baking on a hot rock. The sun rises higher, dazzles in its brightness; the sky turns hard blue, the day grows hot. The disciples do not ask who Jesus is because they do not need to. Their feeling of unreasoning joy confirms what the beloved disciple had said to Peter. Their awareness quivers brim-ful, on the cusp of overflowing. Presence, Jesus had promised. Abiding, fruit-bearing, joy [15:4-11]. Now it is.

The disciples went out for fish. Knowing themselves sent [20:21], even if they weren’t yet sure to whom or for what, they went. Maybe they hoped to encounter again their Lord; maybe they hoped only to be found faithful to his sending. They know resurrection is real. They may not be sure of what comes next, but they move forward as if towards it. Their movement towards the next-thing draws the next-thing in. The long night of fruitless fishing is not fruitless. Day breaks and joy stands on the shore and calls to them even when they do not realize it is he. Awareness is retrospective — It is joy who has called to us! — then, eyes opened, they are able to remain for a time eating and drinking the awareness that God is present to them and they are present to God. On that dazzling bright morning, breaking fast after a long night, muscles aching with prior effort and present rest, realizing again as if for the first time, that resurrection does not end the story but begins it.

And God makes more cakes for us to share.

Let’s do it again!