There are seasons more intense than others.
This has been a deep time for me. While my communion has enlarged, I am often left without words to express- the hard awful stuff has brought some completion and changes and I can feel the way I evaluate life changing. One thing the Lord has me doing is reading Scripture aloud to him. I am in the Gospel of John and am struck by how the changes in me have changed the way I read, the pace, the interpretation, the pondering.
Today I was in John 5. I had just heard Dr. Suuquina teach the Hebrew of the Pentateuch so the number 5 being highlighted as the number of porticos at the pool of Bethesda stopped me. How rich when the structure of a life points to God and His ways. Savoring. And I see how the man gets healed and the rulers are so bound by religion they cannot appreciate the miracle. Surely religion always needs to protect its laws lest it be threatened. I sigh. And then I stumble into Jesus response. I am struck that the Father judges no one, for he has given all authority to judge to the Son. And because the Son is now a man, the Father has given the Son the authority to judge the sins of all mankind. But he did not come to condemn. He came to seek and save that which was lost. And as I look at judging in that light, I see, he needed to judge my sin so that he could accurately divide between spirit and soul and die for what separated me from God. He judged my sin so he could assume the debt into his crucifixion.
What would it be like if we judged each other by that standard. If I looked at you and the places I saw your sin would only bring the awareness in me of how much you get to understand his life, his suffering, his death, and his resurrection. What if I did not condemn you for your deficits but it only brought the awe of what the completed picture of you might entail?
What a different picture than what we often do. Assess, judge, decide, opine.
It is funny that in the same passage Jesus notes it is not him that will incriminate me, but Moses. If I look to the law for my resurrection, the law has the power to proclaim my guilt before God.
I am undone by the truth that he looked at me, he saw me, he judged my sin so that he could assume my debt before God. I rest on that precipice today. All else seems smaller in comparison.