Lent #3 Behold the Man
Antonio Cisero, Ecce Homo (Behold the Man)
Scripture
John 19: 1-6 So Pilate took Jesus and had him whipped. The soldiers, having braided a crown from thorns, set it on his head, threw a purple robe over him, and approached him with, “Hail, King of the Jews!” Then they greeted him with slaps in the face. Pilate went back out again and said to them, “I present him to you, but I want you to know that I do not find him guilty of any crime.” Just then Jesus came out wearing the thorn crown and purple robe.
Pilate announced, “Here he is: the Man.” When the high priests and police saw him, they shouted in a frenzy, “Crucify! Crucify!”
Reflection
This is a picture by Antonio Ciseri, called Ecce Homo (Behold the Man). A scourged, crowned and bound Jesus is presented to the hostile crowd by Pilate. Should this man live or should he die?
We all know we are going to die, yet that moment seems far distant most of the time, and it comes as a dizzy blow if a physician gives us only a few months to live. Jesus is here given only a few hours to live. Though he had known of this in advance, and forecast it repeatedly to his friends, we can imagine that the moment of signing the death warrant must still have had a stunning and disorientating power. (Margaret Hebblethwaite, he Stations of the Cross)
Acorn story
Once upon a time, in a not-so-faraway land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their business with purposeful energy; and since they were midlife, baby-boomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. Here were seminars called “Getting All You Can out of Your Shell.” There were woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their original fall from the tree. There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and well-being.
One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped “out of the blue” by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns. And crouched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing upward at the tree, he said, “We…are…that!”
Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but one of them continued to engage him in conversation: “So tell us, how would we become that tree?” “Well,” said he, pointing downward, “it has something to do with going into the ground…and cracking open the shell.” “Insane,” they responded. “Totally morbid! Why, then we wouldn’t be acorns anymore.”
(Version by Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing)
Scripture
John 12: 24-25″Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it