Are you not the Christ?
He didn’t look like the King they were expecting, they had built an image of what Christ the king would be like and Jesus did not fit it, not one bit. Just like us they had been given everything they should have needed, the miracles, the healings, the wisdom, the fulfilment of scripture yet it never seemed enough to quash the doubt of a worldly mind.
Doubt can be a sharpened chisel leading us to question, seek and discover and finally shape our faith, but used by an apprentice without a formed and guided craftsman it gouges, destroys and disfigures. We are left with a flawed, false image of God that disappoints, primarily because it isn’t truth.
I was once preached to by a woman sat in a Pizza Hut doorway on a rainy night in November. She was homeless and had a cute dog as company. I used the dog as a means to start a conversation, I didn’t feel I could tell her how good my God was, she was sat wet, cold and homeless after all. I asked how come she ended up there, even the term “ended up” I realise denoted the lack of hope I saw for her. She told me she had regularly gone to church, had been very involved in her parish. Then her house had caught fire and she’d lost either her daughter or her dog in the fire, I could see the pain in the recollection so I didn’t ask for clarification. After this things had spiralled downwards, her church family had not really been there for her when she had started drinking to cope with the loss. I felt the weight of the guilt of that and I apologised, that no one had stood by her, that no one had stepped into her grief and walked with her.
I will never forget the next part of the conversation.
She looked me in the eyes and said, “Do you know the passage in John?” She said “ about the vine?…for a long time I had cut myself off from the vine, but now I know just How much God loves me, I am back, grafted on and I am telling all these other people on the streets just how much they too are loved by God, I can not bare fruit if I’m not on His vine”
I couldn’t reply back clearly. I, with my comfortable life, home and family didn’t really believe I was truly loved and here I was faced with a woman with nothing telling me just how she knew. I gave her a hug, told her that I’d pray for her and started to walk away. Just before I did she caught my arm. “Thankyou” She said “for the hug”.
This is my King, who can fill with hope and joy those in the most desperate situations, can humble those who have it all in the most touching and gentle of ways. This is my King who does not abide in the rich and powerful in such a way as he does in the poor and humble.
I want no king, no other image of a king except Him, May I always have the trust and hope in him as the lady in Pizza Hut doorway.