"O Lord, you relieve our necessity out of the abundance of your great riches: Grant that we may accept with joy the salvation you bestow, and manifest it to all the world by the quality of our lives: through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."
Psalm 18:1-7, Jeremiah 20:7-13, and John 10:31-42
The scenes depicted in John's gospel, and all the gospels really, of Jesus in the midst of crowds, especially hostile crowds, are always intriguing to me. The lesson for today makes me think of someone who is quick and sneaky when it states, "they tried to arrest him again, but he escaped from their hands." How did one man escape from the hands of many who wanted to arrest him? If we're too believe the account here, we're talking about a single person who resisted arrest from at least a few folks, and certainly he didn't just twist his arm to avoid them. I imagine the event that inspired this passage was much more energetic and intense than a simple reading can get across.
In this reading we have Jesus in front of a crowd that is prepared to stone him for blasphemy, and I can't imagine that being a low-key moment. Jesus asks if he'll be stoned for doing good deeds; he's told they will stone him for proclaiming to be God's Son. Of course this worried them; their world was being changed immediately before them by someone who was using their own texts to challenge them.
Even today, though, it can be easy to be hostile toward the teachings of Jesus. It's easy to pick and choose what parts we want to follow and how we want to follow them. Turning the other cheek, for example, is one that I'm willing to ignore; unfortunately, I can't.
Hopefully we can always find a way to be open to all of Jesus's teachings. If so, we just might realize that it will help to change the world around us.
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