Pondering the Word
Marvelous in our eyes
By Mary H. Schertz
The theme for these Lent materials, Marvelous in Our Eyes, is paradoxical. A call to rejoice in our salvation sounds good. To recover the awe and wonder of our encounter with the living Christ is truly marvelous. But in my experience, spiritual growth most often happens in times of struggle and difficulty. I have more often kicked and screamed my way through my own conversions than regarded them with wonder and joy.
To be sure, after the fact, I can appreciate that I have come to know God better and to be more trusting. I can recognize that my heart and mind have been stretched, that I am the better for the stretching, and that God has been at work forming, reforming, and conforming me in the ways of love. But the journey through the wilderness toward seeing the transformative power of God as marvelous has certainly required the use of many metaphorical corrective lenses— which, of course is quite the point!
I take comfort, therefore, in the Gospel stories for this season of Lent—stories of people who also struggled to see the transformative power of God’s love as good news in their lives.
The first person who struggles to understand God’s activity in his life as good news is none other than Jesus himself. We often dismiss the texts that portray Jesus in turmoil—we think the temptations were not real temptations, or that the prayer he prayed before his execution was not a real prayer for deliverance. We let our own understandings of perfection and divinity get in the way of reading what is there.
As Matthew 4:1-11 describes it in the text for the first Sunday of Lent, the scene in the wilderness is Jesus’ attempt to come to terms with his baptism as the beloved Son. Does he, as the Son of God, have the right to act like God—to turn stones into bread to feed the people, to assert his superiority over even the temple, to command all the kingdoms of the world? Or will he understand his baptism to mean he has the responsibility to obey God, to entrust himself and his earthly purpose absolutely to the one who judges justly? There must have been times in those forty days when he struggled to define how he would use the power of his identity, when he wondered whether God’s activity in his life was marvelous.
Nicodemus, the elderly man who comes to Jesus by night, has a different sort of wilderness experience. His wilderness is a desert of the mind, a discussion with Jesus that defies the formal rules of logical reasoning as well as the formal rules of the organized religion by which he has lived his long life. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a leader of his people, a teacher of Israel—who still does not understand what God is doing in the world. For all his stature in public life he still struggles to fathom God’s love for the world. Understanding the magnitude of that love is a grace that only comes from above, as elusive as the desert wind blowing through the night of his conversation with Jesus.
The woman of Samaria, who comes upon Jesus at Jacob’s well, is lost in a tangle of relationships that is depleting her. Some of the mess in which she finds herself is her inheritance as a human being— bitter racism and formidable sexism. Some of the mess is likely an unfortunate combination of desperation and sexuality. But at the well she finds someone who takes her seriously as an intelligent woman and offers her living water, water for living in and through the struggle. Her relational desert fades in a testimony that brings her neighbors also to draw from this unique well.
The story of the man born blind in John 9 is as much a story about the religious community’s trouble with sight as it is about the blind man’s impairment. It is a wilderness of confusion about what constitutes real vision. In the end the man born blind receives both outer and inner comprehension of the most important reality—the man from God. But the religious leaders persist in their own struggle, their own peculiar wilderness— by denying that they are lost at all.
Lazarus and his family are wandering in the most desolate desert of all—the wilderness inhabited by illness, death and grief. It is a place in human experience that Jesus himself finds deeply disturbing and he cries. Belief and unbelief, hope and suspicion, pleading and recrimination, love and anger are all part of this most common and most strange human desert. There in the cave of death near Bethany, Jesus overcomes that last desolation— a giving of life, a miracle that brings joy and relieved belief to Lazarus’ family but also rouses such an opposition to his ministry that he is forced into hiding.
The last Gospel text for Lent, the enigmatic journey from Bethpage into Jerusalem, has its own struggle, it’s own desert of irony and illusion. The king rides on lowly farm animals. The crowds processing with him acclaim him, and the crowds in the city do not know what to make of him—they are perturbed. Triumph, joy, and acclamation are underlain with doom as Jesus comes home to God’s most holy city, where he will face his own most intense struggle and be put to death.
We do rejoice in the different aspects of salvation found in these stories, even the multilayered triumphal entry. The good news is that God is there in the midst of human struggle. God’s activity in the wilderness of human pain and pretension is marvelous in our eyes—not an easy marvel, perhaps, and not one that we can always embrace with eagerness. But the desert—with all its hardship, scarcity, difficult life and death choices—is also a place of rare and delicate beauty. It is the place where God meets human need most emphatically. It is the place where the human heart and the divine heart come together in the love that gives life out of death. It is marvelous in our eyes!Mary H. Schertz teaches New Testament at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana.