Shepherd of Sheep

Readings: Acts 2:42-47, Psalm 23, 1 Peter 2:19-25, John 10:1-10

There is a midrash which relates the story of two rabbis walking through the countryside. One of these, as the day progressed, continually pointed to plots of land to comment, “That farm was mine once, but I sold it to devote myself to the study of Torah.” Or “That orchard.” By nightfall it had become apparent that this rabbi had once been very rich, but now retained none of his earthly holdings.


The second rabbi, realizing this, began to weep. His companion asked him why. “What about your security, your later years?” the crying rabbi wondered.

But the first rabbi scoffed. “I sold what it took six days to create and attained what took forty days and forty nights to reveal,” he said.

We don’t have much admiration for ascetics any longer. The mark of one’s earthly success does tend to exist somewhere in the realm of possessions. We share the concerned rabbi’s discomfort, falling into panic or despair when it occurs to us that we may not have enough.

Yet the gospel imperative has always been to be like the second rabbi: unconcerned with things worldly, absorbed in communion with revelation and in righteous living. We know that possessions are transient; we believe that what God gave and continues to give, in the instance of the Messiah, in the visitations of the Holy Spirit, is eternal and of limitless value.

Our readings this week return us to the idea of righteous living, and pull no punches in doing so. The passage from Acts is one bound to cause controversy in our sensitive days: it relates the story of the early Christian community, and reveals an economic plan of the sort that would certainly make many of our fellow citizens tremble. After all, the news that “all who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” sounds suspiciously like voluntary distribution of wealth (Acts 2:44-45).

Would the early Christians find dissidents among the most vocal protestors of our day, perhaps facing comparisons to those whose names have been reviled in Tiananmen Square? Or, a better question: would they have cared? The need-based-distribution in Acts reflects a core set of values: things do not matter, and while bodily needs must be addressed, our ultimate aim is God. They relinquished their possessions to follow the risen Christ because they recognized that life had more to offer than the attainment of stuff.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” declares the 23rd psalm. Its images are pastoral and its faith is in a God who ultimately provides. We deceive ourselves if we believe that still waters and green pastures are things we must chase after—as if eternal comfort can be bought at the rough price of an escape vacation to lush and verdant locales. Such places, the first rabbi reminds us, took six days for God to create; but the revelation of God’s word, the divine plan for our salvation, took 40 nights on Sinai, and an incarnation, to attain.

The first jubilant weeks of Easter are over, and we must descend from our high to the work of living as Christians again. Christianity is a system which we cannot cheat: when we promise to share, but withhold, God sees it, as is colorfully illustrated by Acts’ story of the couple who retains some of their property following a lie and to disastrous ends. God knows. There is no sneaking in; there in no holding off on relying on God, no basking in plentiful comforts of which God remains unaware.

Jesus speaks metaphorically of himself in John 10:1: “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit.” He asserts that he is the gate, and that the sheepfold consists of God’s people. A trespasser, he assures us, will be recognized. And so his way demands that we openly meet our best potentials, though such tasks rarely sound fun and hardly promise to be easy. And yet their reward is green pastures; their result is loving community; the image they project is of a happy and fulfilled people of God.

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Love and Dignity

Readings: Acts 2:14a, 36-41, Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35

A whispered suggestion came to the disciples, a rumor that Jesus had risen from the dead.


They would not believe it. “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel,” they said, and the tense was weighted with regret (Luke 24:21).

The disciples were in a pitiful state. They had shadowed Jesus faithfully throughout his ministry, fueled by anticipation: that he would fulfill the messianic prophecies, that he would turn the world on its ear.

Instead, he died.

On the third day after, they received Mary’s news of his rising. And yet they stood about, looking sad (Luke 24:17). These were not days in which people thwarted death, they thought; these were days in which people betrayed one another, and in which the innocent were crucified.

So they said to the risen Christ when he met them on the road.

Were they a foolish generation, or nondescriptly human? How are we to respond to them, standing oblivious before God?

Jesus revealed himself by layers once he was resurrected. He first directed the disciples’ attention to their own arrogance: “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” (Luke 24:25)

He next spoke to them in familiar ways, interpreting scripture as they walked together down the road, their rabbi, their teacher. And still they did not see.

It was not until he sat down with them and broke bread—“do this in remembrance of me!,” he had said—that their sight finally unclouded.

We can choose to dismiss them absurd; that interpretation is available. How could they not recognize him? But it’s probably more fruitful to work toward seeing--to do what we can to understand what is before our own eyes.

Our generation is foolish, too. We are haughty about what we think we know: we are speedy to moralize and quick to condemn.

Sometimes, we are right. We are very aware of some evils. We are quick to call them out. Terrorist actions, despots, third world poverty and inequalities: we see their flaws quite clearly.

But we also tend to treat evil as a virus to which we are immune. Such promises were never made: to love Jesus is not to become a redoubtable being.

We learn this from the disciples, as they grapple with the aftermath of the crucifixion. It is apparent in their confusion, just as it becomes apparent in our own: what we’ve signified as wrong in the behavior of others, we sometimes forget to remain free from ourselves.

Do we cheer in the streets when we hear news of a death? Do we gather at national sites and raise our voices to thank God for such “blessings”? Do we do this and still expect to remain credible in our faith?

We were disgusted to see footage of people celebrating abroad when the towers fell ten years ago. We sat steeped in our grief, counting our losses neighbor by neighbor, mourning those thousands of intrusions upon human dignity.

We became enraged with the perpetrators. We did not understand how anyone could celebrate the violent end of a human life. We still do not understand.

We know why we called the instigators “enemies”—they reviled the selfless love which is the vitality of our value system, which is the foremost imperative of Christ. We knew what their behavior should have been. Despite this detour, this unexpected “triumph for justice,” I’m sure we know what ours should be now.

We cannot allow our judgment to be clouded, even when we linger in our sadness on unanticipated roadsides. We must be better than the impulses which arise when we are grieved or provoked.

Easter is not just a gift, it is a charge. It is a call to exemplify “genuine mutual love, lov[ing] one another deeply from the heart” (1 Peter 1:22). We are asked to run the full gamut of our purest emotions in these days: to go from grief to celebration, to be brought lowly by Jesus’s death and then be raised to inestimable heights by his resurrection.

God so loved the world that Christ became human. The best of our potentialities were realized in Jesus. He was dignity, personified. Because there are always some among us who do not honor that, he was put to death on a cross. And because perfect dignity cannot be destroyed, God gave him new life.

We do not honor God by celebrating violent death. We cast our lot with the Romans of the Easter tale when we do so. There is little heroic about publicly rejoicing over cruelties visited upon our enemies.

Equivocation over the value of human life always begins this way: we find someone unlovable, someone who has displayed a penchant for evil, and we destroy them. We show no mercy, because they did not show any. We stand triumphant over the results.

Yet “one” is always a starting point. We forgive ourselves for not mourning a person who we’ve declared unmournable. But if we don’t recognize the horror and desperation—the inhumanity—of such choices, we begin down a path which does not lead to good, and which certainly avoids godliness.

We can look toward the risen Christ, or lose ourselves in the yawning abyss. Love characterizes one; dispassion and indifference, the other. The whole of scripture has preferenced love. If we linger too long in its opposite, we risk obscuring God’s grace.

There is nothing to celebrate this week which does not have its center in the example of Jesus. We have not stunted evil by killing someone for whom it was a tool; we may even have flirted with it by making a show of his death. There was no “victory for human dignity”; “human dignity” is a hollow concept if we do not allow that it exists in us all.

Even when we deny it in ourselves. Despite our best efforts at its obfuscation. No matter how caustic and relentless the attacks upon it. It is the light we should adjust our eyes to see; it is the truth that Jesus tried, again, to bring to our attention during that stroll down a Jerusalem road.


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Here I Am

Readings: Acts 2:14a, 22-32, Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19-31

What was different about the risen Christ?


We can infer from the gospels that there was something unfamiliar in his appearance. Last week, Mary Magdalene met him outside of his tomb and mistook him for a gardener. Not until he spoke did she recognize him, and then came the joy of being unexpectedly reunited.

This week we recall his encounter with the disciples, who similarly do not seem to know him at first. He greets them, but not until he offers a sign—the wounds of crucifixion—does the light of recognition dawn on them.

Jesus walks about in anonymity. A resurrected messiah, we know, would have been wild news—people would have wanted to see him. Certainly the crowds would have exceeded those he drew before, even when performing miracles. But the risen Christ is obscure.

Even Thomas, an apostle, does not believe the news. His brethren assure him, in their excitement, that they have seen Jesus, that he has been among them again; but Thomas scoffs, saying, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe" (John 20:25).

This seems a gruesome request. But then, Thomas has been asked to wrestle with an unprecedented idea: that death might be reversed.

Jesus is understanding; he responds to Thomas’s insistence upon tactile proof. Put your hand in my side, if you must; he says. It’s me. And Thomas knows him.

There’s something different about the risen Jesus. Those who walked with him before do not know him until he declares himself. They do not doubt him once he is revealed; but they are hapless until the anonymity is peeled back.

This seems, to me, to be such a powerful injunction to be kind to those who walk among us. It is disquieting that the apostles saw him without seeing him; if they, who had known him in life, were so sightless before him in his new life, how are we, who see him only in the gospels, to recognize him?

Jesus said, “What you do to the least of those among you, you do to me.” He suggested he could be sought in the meek, in those brought low by their circumstances, in the hungry and in the searching. In the eyes which we often avoid meeting, there he is. In the lonely corners we do not visit, he waits.

I read a story this week about a young girl who was taunted and physically abused in public because of her appearance. This young twenties person was shifting between genders, and something about that piqued her torturers; they decided to assault her. To teach her a lesson? To put her “in her place”? Such acts defy reason. We are so illogically prompted to be cruel to one another.

The mystery of Easter is this: Jesus was crucified. Jesus is risen. Jesus walks the world again. We do not see him when we look for the man who healed, who walked on water, who fed the masses and defied Roman authority; that figure has departed us forever.

But what about those from whom we shrink? In the teenager reviled by their peers for daring to be who they are internally compelled to be: can’t we look for Christ there? In the face of the girl who was beaten, do we sense a glimmer of recognition?

The lesson of this season is that God does not abandon us to our fallible flesh. The world, post-resurrection, is a dress rehearsal, is an unset stage awaiting the last revelation. What we do in this moment has bearing on that; we have to ready our eyes to see.

Through our faith, we anticipate clear sight: “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy” (1 Peter 1:8). By acts of loving kindness to those we encounter, we attest our belief.

Hands which need to feel torn flesh belong to those who have not yet seen. Hands which reach out to greet those who seem, at first, just strangers, trust in the resurrection. We give our love to others knowing that it will someday come back to us, that Christ will someday from them say, “Here I am.”

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"I have seen the Lord!"

Readings: Jeremiah 31:1-6, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Colossians 3:1-4, John 20:1-18, Matthew 28:1-10

Some two millennia ago, Mary of Magdala took a Sunday morning stroll to the tomb of her rabbi, the man they’d called “messiah”.


She walked through the streets of Jerusalem before the sun rose, John tells us, to get there. Maybe grief had jarred her from her sleep; maybe she’d never managed to capture sleep at all. The gospels don’t offer many details. We only know that she was suffering from the loss of him, as were all the disciples.

Perhaps she wanted to pay her respects. Perhaps she wanted to sit outside the tomb and question God: Why? Whatever her aim, she found that the bleak calm of the pre-dawn was shattered when she discovered that the stone which was used to seal the tomb had been rolled back.

The Gospel of John suggests that she ran to the disciples to beg their advice and supervision before proceeding. Other gospels present the moment differently: she and a companion are met by an angel alone, without the male disciples intervening. Whatever the case, Mary found herself before the open and empty tomb, and the whys? in her head were forced to morph.

It is Mary who is first privy to the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. The gospels, again, present the miracle with variations: in John, she encounters the risen Jesus but does not recognize him; in Matthew, an angel announces his resurrection and fills her with fear.

And then she experiences the first post-resurrection dawn: Jesus speaks her name, and she knows. Or: Jesus stops her flight, greets her, and she knows. Light enters earth once again.

This is the wonder of Easter. On the Friday of Jesus’ death, the hopes of all the apostles seemed hopelessly disappointed. Messiahs were not supposed to die; they were supposed to radically, politically and noticeably transform the earth. Yet he left in his wake a still tumultuous Rome, a world still plagued by persecutions and injustices, and followers who were, quite frankly, stumped.

And yet the deed had been done; Christ, the anointed one, had initiated a period of new life, a new kingdom of God. Mary of Magdala was the first to be gifted with a viewing of it that Sunday morning; each Easter subsequent, our eyes have searched for it, too. We wake up and wait for God to call our names. We hold our breaths, anticipating Jesus’ coming in glory.

How far are we beyond Rome? Our kingdoms still disappoint us. This Easter morning, peace will elude so many people. As war rages on in Libya, as shots continue to ring out in the direction of Syrian and Yemenis protestors, peace will seem a distant prospect. Japan will still be struggling to recover from a devastating earthquake and nuclear leaks. Egyptian women will still be wondering how it is that they, though they thought they’d secured their freedom by participating, frequently at the fore, in this year’s protests, have once again been relegated to second class citizens. Our gulf will still be polluted and the people who depend on it will remain out of work. Cubans will have traded dictators. Tibet will still not be free.

The earth will spin to face the sun on Sunday, and light will fall across the regions slowly, and so many will not know it as peace-filled dawn. So many will not see immediate evidence of the kingdom of God.

And yet, the mystery for us is, each year in succession: he has risen. Indeed, Christ has risen. Death was defied. Something new began.

We are promised peace in God’s kingdom, and are still waiting for clarification on how that will come. Two thousand years have taught us, as three days taught the disciples, that there will be nothing conventional or predictable about God’s ultimate gift. We do not get peace here because he died; we are charged to work for it because of his precepts. Our wars and troubles are, to the degree which we create them, our responsibility; our souls are his.

We come to church together on Easter to celebrate Jesus’ new life. We come anticipating new life in Jesus. We gather in the pews because a new light has dawned. We wait for the risen God to call our names. We trust that he will.


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Let Us Rejoice

Readings: Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29, Matthew 21:1-11

I’ve done some meditation lately around the prodigal son. His story is an interesting one: blessed with an abundance of wealth, he foregoes prudence and elects to gallivant about, indulging every whim and, promptly, depleting his gifts. He winds up destitute, alone, and far from home.


This parable of Jesus’s has always been a source of hope to me. The prodigal assesses his situation and elects to return home. He cannot possibly do so with much expectation; in fact, when he arrives at his father’s house, he begs even a lowly position. But his father, overjoyed to see him again, embraces him, draws him in, and throws a banquet in his honor.

My door is always open, I have imagined Jesus saying. Though we exhaust years resisting God’s love and generosity, it remains always available to us, if we but ask. Home in God is, indeed, a radical kind of home.

It strikes me this week how different Jesus’ return to his own earthly home was. By the time he returns to Jerusalem, he and the apostles have been all around Israel, they witnessing his great acts, he performing miracles and teaching. His fame precedes him into the city. He may have had every reason to expect a grand reception. And, indeed, he initially receives one; the gospel tells us that the crowd spread their cloaks on the road before him, made his path laden with palm branches, and exalted him as he rode in. These reverent acts seem much deserved; unlike the prodigal, he has not embarrassed his father’s household. Rather, he has made its name great.

And yet, for Jesus there is no fatted calf. There is no banquet. There is no happily ever after. Shortly after his arrival in the city, he is betrayed and murdered. The results of that have reverberated through our theology down through the ages.

One could claim that my distress over considering these stories side by side arises only because I’ve misunderstood them. The moral of the parable of the prodigal son is not that we deserve to be welcomed home no matter our transgressions; it is rather a story that praises the son’s eventual humility, the father’s boundless generosity and which cautions against the brother’s jealousy. Obviously, Jesus’ story is neither a painful lesson that, no matter how boundless our virtues, we are not guaranteed an easy go; his story, theologians have taught us, relates more to incarnation, atonement, and grace.

All of this is true. But beyond these truths are internalized readings; and, in connection to the approaching holidays, I can’t help but think about how both stories have much to say about the fragile nature of returning home.

We are, obviously, expected to be more like the father of the prodigal than we are to be like the Roman community which demanded the homecoming Jesus’ crucifixion. The scriptures enjoin us to maintain an open door, as well as an open heart. Jesus’ spirit is a generous one; he operates in a mode of grace. If we wish to call ourselves Christ-like, so too must we be generous, and channels for grace.

But these stories also have something to say about what we expect from one another. To enter a former home, or the home of another, cloaked in deference belies our equal dignity as co-humans; it inhibits hospitality for all involved, which does damage that requires correcting. If we are invited in to another’s space, it seems best to enter with an open spirit, relegating to back burners questions of whether we have earned such hospitality. Love, under heaven, is something that perhaps none of us have earned, but which the story of Jesus tells us we all deserve.

And yet the other side of this is that temperance is still required. To bustle back home with an inflated sense of self, expecting to have our path marked by flower petals and bordered by grateful hosts, is as irresponsible as instantaneous deference. It leaves us vulnerable to volatile situations which humility might illuminate; it, too is a barrier to hospitality. Learning this lesson does not imply blaming Christ for his fate; the gospels tell us that Jesus’s knowledge transcended our own, and so he did not enter Jerusalem, or any situation, unaware of impending situations. We receive Jesus’ grace but not his foresight. What he could anticipate, we cannot.

What both of these stories lack, and which makes homecoming, in theory, so worthwhile, is mutual trust. The prodigal, because he has not earned a warm reception, does not trust his father to give it; the Roman community, though Jesus has proven himself worthy of a hearty welcome, refuses to trust in his goodness enough to get it. While the prodigal son has the fortunate surprise of being granted unearned and conditionless love, Jesus falls victim to Rome’s suspicion. Their stories are extremes; but they also highlight the dangers of refusing intimate connections with others.

And so I offer an Easter prayer—for all of us, wherever we may find ourselves: may our tables be open, may access to them be freely and lovingly offered. And may our entrance into other circles be easy; may we find others as welcoming as we strive to be. May we exemplify grace. In no way can I imagine more thorough rejoicing; how better to convey our gladness in God.

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You Shall Live

Readings: Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45

It’s like a scene out of H.G. Wells. An army long reduced to dust is reconstituted at the mere utterance of a prophet. From ashes they rise; bone fuses to bone, sinew follows atop, until the former fleshly figure is restored. At the command of a deity, winds rush through them, and again they are animate.


Our wonder redoubles: this is not science fiction, but the vision of a prophet. It is not a vision of what could be if the laws of nature could be subdued or suspended; this is a real look at what God can do, in any here and now.

What Ezekiel speaks of is not possible; it strains credulity. That belief in the word of God alone could reverse the effects of death seems a stretch to us, in a world so used to the horrors of death that news of it becomes almost banal. God raises the dead? Fine. Then where is the hand of the Divine upon communities in Haiti, in Japan, in Libya?

Did God not make promises through Ezekiel that God’s yet to make good on? Did Ezekiel not channel the Divine’s words: “‘and you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act,’ says the LORD”? We wait to see it; we are impatient.

But perhaps we look forward to the wrong miracle. In Ezekiel, the vision is of the world’s graves opening at once, and of all humankind marching forth animate once more, revitalized by God. And that would be a sight, indeed. Yet the miracle foreseen is not of the many called forth; the miracle anticipated is God’s undoing of what we thought to be final, and irreversible. The unspoken awe in Ezekiel is of a God who can, out of the bleakest conditions, draw forth perfect life.

“You’ll know that I am God,” the Divine says in Ezekiel. Not when whole armies of our forbearers literally march forward into Israel, but when death, which still strikes us as the most final and irreversible of human conditions, is, despite expectations, reversed.

In John, this death is literal: Jesus raises Lazarus from the grave. Lazarus shakes of his shroud and returns to his daily activities. The ground doesn’t shake beneath the footfalls of all Israel’s deceased. Only one man is brought forth. One. Neither is he crowned in glory or given a place of prominence; he simply returns to the life he lived before.

Yet for his family, and for those who witness the miracle, this is all that is needed. Jesus reverses their despair; he fills their hearts with hope. God can repair anything; God can transform what is dire into what is grand, and instantaneously.

We want a sign; we want to know God’s greatness as Lazarus did, as Ezekiel expected to. Perhaps we yearn for the restitution of those cut bitterly down: we pray for God to take away the realities of war, and of natural disasters. Or maybe we want the gospel’s miracle: we want to keep our one, want just one interjection of God’s hand in our affairs to show us that our prayers are heard.

Who are the Lazarus’s of our world? Before our vision flit innumerable figures who seem caught up in the flow of fate, and on whose behalf we hope for interjection. Who is raised from the world’s worst ‘deaths’? Whose situations are transformed?

My own prayer this week is that Iman al-Obeidi will receive a little Lazarus treatment. Her story already defies what is standard. She’s cried out in Libya, naming and denouncing unspeakable violence visited upon her by a few who manipulated power. Her voice demands morality, and righteousness, and justice, out of an environment which otherwise seems to be, currently, an ethical vacuum.

Her story, amid the turmoil in Libya, might have been quickly hushed up, or led to her own punishment or shaming. Yet she has not been hustled away; she continues to cry out, she continues to fight against her own dehumanization, and she pushes for freedom.

Iman al-Obeidi is in a tug-of-war, caught between distressed and unforgiving social mores, and the dignity and resuscitation she knows she is inherently owed. So far, impossibly, her humanity is winning out: she has not slipped from the world’s sight into darkness, but continues to loudly and visibly appeal on her own behalf.

She has already survived the unspeakable; she persists despite continual indignities visited upon her by public officials. We can extend our empathy in human solidarity: her last days have been a nightmare, and we know that what she’s been through cuts many people off from who they used to be. Such things form gulfs that seem irreparable. Iman has, so far, resisted such ends.

She fights for life. She struggles to regain herself—the Iman she knew before, a home and family from which she is temporarily kept apart, the basic, the everyday. She is warring for the right to be. And I join so many others in praying that she wins.

It looks as though she might. And if she succeeds—if she finds her way home, if she escapes social reduction—we can see God in that. We may count it as an answered prayer. Flesh back on bones, or normalcy back to those who’s boundaries have been trespassed; our prayers ask for the actualization of seeming impossibilities.

Our readings tell us that prayers are heard; they assure us that God can do anything. But they also reveal the confounding nature of miracles, in that what is miraculous is usually unexpected. We cannot dictate how God works in the world. We can only know that God does work in it, and that when the Divine moves, the results are guaranteed to astound.

Heaven has always managed to put Wells, and the best of his colleagues, to shame. We await the next installment of the saga; our breath is baited, our eyes strain to see.

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I once was blind

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

We human beings have not infrequently been certain that we’ve got it all figured out. We find ourselves defining the inscrutable: categorizing things as good and bad, desirable or not, praiseworthy or contemptible. Certain qualities of each are outlined. We stick to those with remarkable alacrity—at least, until we decide to redefine them.


As common as false understandings of our reality are counter stories which contest them. In the seventies, one manifestation was Marlo Thomas’s “Free to Be You and Me” project, which sought to counter dualisms which placed man above woman, rich above poor, et cetera. Against popularly propagated fairy tales which suggested that one’s highest aspirations should be to find a prince and settle down, Thomas offered figures like Atalanta, a princess who wanted to be a scholar, a woman who wanted to be independent. The overarching message of “Free to Be You and Me” was that good is a more complex concept than we have traditionally allowed it to be.

Marlo Thomas’s project was stunning and important. It was conceptually also less than new. Where troublesome dualisms exist, counter-stories crop up to combat them. Examples of this are ancient: while some will always be content to view the world from an either/or perspective, others, perhaps even particularly among the religious, know that reality, like the God behind it, is more complex.

God is great; and yet to say that God is great imposes any number of connotations. By declaring God great, we imbue God with certain expectations, and burden God’s creation similarly. The same is true with much that we uphold as virtuous and desirable; we think we know what to expect of that which we align with grandeur. But as our chapters this week remind us: all things great defy our expectations and have the potential to surprise us in their full revelation, and this is especially true of what is God’s.

1 Samuel deals with kingship. More specifically, it deals with the throne in Judah, with the king in Jerusalem, with the anointed one, or messiah, on Israel’s throne. It recounts the story of the selection of the second king, one often thought of as Israel’s greatest: David himself. But what is interesting about 1 Samuel is that it introduces a David who predates the marvels and highs of his years as the monarch. We do not meet a man of great stature, an imposing or particularly impressive figure; he is not a prince decked out in princely attire. Rather, the David we meet is a mere shepherd. He’s so far from threatening that Saul doesn’t even enter the tale to express concern over maintaining the throne against him.

1 Samuel reduces messianic expectations to their barest form. Israel would later anticipate a great ruler of the late David variety: powerful, of great military prowess, visibly capable of protecting and upholding the nation. But in 1 Samuel God warns that such qualities are, at best, peripheral: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). However opulent David’s kingship became, however innumerable his kingly victories, we sense that his importance was never tied into his impressive position in the world; it was rather something central to his being, some inner inclination, some interior depth only he and God could comprehend. His “successes” as a monarch become almost secondary.

Who was the David who God selected to be anointed? Less the trickster who bested Uriah; less the weapon savvy boy who defeated Goliath. The David God loved did these things, of course; but the David God loved was first and foremost a tender of sheep, a “ruddy [boy], [who] had beautiful eyes, and was handsome” (1 Samuel 16:12). He was simple, good, and unexpected.

If 1 Samuel reminds us not to seek great world figures out in expected places, it also reminds us that those who enjoy blessings in life do not necessarily do so as a reward for implicit virtues. Assuming that happiness and comfort are deserved, and tribulations likewise, has been another misstep in religion. From biblical times through the dissemination of the “Protestant work ethic,” the myth that we reap the rewards and just desserts of our deeds in this life has been a sometimes failing within Christian life.

In John, we find the gospel writer indicting some Pharisees for such mistaken beliefs. Are the blind born blind because they are sinners, and those with sight given sight because they are good? Of course not, Jesus rebuffs. Not only God, but humanity, is more complex than that reduction.

Jesus, on the Sabbath, encounters a man who has been blind all of his life. His neighbors have further afflicted him with suspicion: his blindness is understood as a punishment, either for his own sins or because of his parents’. But Jesus says that his condition cannot be so easily understood: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (John 9:3). Just as we feel inclined to declare his blindness proof of either God’s inscrutability or injustice—what benevolence is implied by a God who does such a thing to an innocent man just to prove a point?—Jesus spits in the dirt, forms mud, rubs it on the man’s eyes and cures him.

Jesus calls himself the light of the world; he is certainly this man’s light (John 9:5). The man goes from being scorned as a certain sinner, to being in perfect control of his senses, and perfectly able to testify on Jesus’s behalf; he becomes, automatically, a figure of importance in his community. “Here is an astonishing thing!” he says, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (John (9:31-32).

Jesus gives him new life; more than this, because of what he had suffered, the formerly blind man is able to appreciate life and its gifts in a way those around him cannot.

And what of those who could see all along? Jesus reveals that it is they, because they take their blessing for granted, who have actually always been blind. He uses certain Pharisees as an example. They cannot understand why he has healed a man on the Sabbath. They cannot understand why he appears to reject God’s rules. But Jesus says: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind” (John 9:39).

He says this to those who think that the injunction against Sabbath work outweighs the good of healing the afflicted; they ask, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” (John 9:40) But Jesus finds their discomfort with his act proof enough that they are: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘we see,’ your sin remains.” You can see and be sightless; you can blind yourself to God by presuming to claim you’ve comprehended God’s ways. To have power is not proof of God’s favor; to be afflicted and yet trust in God—to maintain that ability to trust in God beyond reason—may be.

These are stories of reversals and divine surprises, and they may well serve as a reminder to us not to get complacent when it comes to understanding God and God’s ways. We should take care to avoid absolutes, to praise what is outwardly impressive as proof of God’s favor, to condemn that which seems different as necessarily bad.

If those who God anoints were found among shepherds and stone smiths, as each of this week’s messianic characters respectively were, than looking for God’s guidance from those who sit on thrones and live in high houses alone must certainly suspect. We must turn our eyes to all. We must believe that God’s beauty does not exclusively shine out from those who have had an easy life. God comes via the humble; God’s voice is on the lips of the meek. When whole communities are condemned as bad or sinful because they have not had it easy, we must understand that participating in that condemnation is not God’s work; refuting it is.

We have to also avoid discourse which equates creature comforts alone with blessings. If when we say our evening prayers, we find ourselves listing material things most among our praises or wants, there may be some convolution at work. Those who Jesus called blind in John had things; what they lacked was the ability to see beyond them to God. The greatest imaginable blessing, it seems, is standing in God’s light. To live life with ease is not proof of God’s love; to face difficulties is not proof of his rejection.

There are those among us who say that God hates some people, or another. We should read their injunctions alongside John, and see what happens when we compare them to those who are willfully blind. We should stand those called “hated” up alongside Jesus, who “breaks rules” by healing on the Sabbath: is the good of his mercy not similar to the good of their love? Aren’t love and mercy at the heart of all “rules”?

There are those who claim that natural disasters are acts of divine judgment. We should similarly read those claims against the ridicule coming from the blind man’s neighbors: was he blind because he sinned? Because his parents did? Can we not assume that greater burdens, then, are as disassociated from our deeds?

Our world is much more inscrutable than we’d like to believe. The Bible underscores this, though there are some among us who would claim that its worldview is simple, and attached to either/ors. Yet so much is still a mystery, and we risk blinding ourselves to the enigmatic divine by reducing all of it to so very little.

The greater task, and the more worthwhile one, is to dare to struggle to see: to locate God in humble places; the observe God’s grace at work where we have not always thought to look for it. Faith, in this way, is not a resting place but a constant search; we need only to adjust our eyes to the road.

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