The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”
Today marks the crushing of Christ in the Garden of the Oil Press, Gethsemane.
“Gethsemane” means “oil press” –a place of olive trees treasured for the fine oil delivered from their fruit. And so, on this Thursday night, the pressure is turned up high on the disciples, not just on Jesus.
The disciples are expected, indeed commanded, to keep watch alongside the Master, to be filled with prayer, to avoid the temptation of weakened flesh thrown at them at every turn.
But they fail pressure testing and fall apart.
Like them, I am easily lulled by complacency, by my over-indulged satiety for material comforts that do not truly fill hunger or quench thirst, by my belief that being called a follower of Jesus is enough.
It is not enough.
I fail the pressure test as well.
I fall asleep through His anguish.
I dream, oblivious, while He sweats blood.
I might even deny I know Him when pressed hard.
Yet, the moment of betrayal becomes the moment He is glorified,
thereby God is glorified.
Crushed, bleeding, poured out over the world
— from precious loving wings that brood and cover us —
He becomes the sacrifice that anoints us.
Incredibly,
indeed miraculously,
He, the crushed, loves us,
bent and flattened as we are –
anyway.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.
Luke 13:34
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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