Any week in the news could be Holy Week. Any week in the news we are just as likely to see the dastardly worst of ourselves on display in the larger machinations of our politics and in the crush of public and private cruelties. We must learn to look directly at these things, not to look away, and to find even there in the hurt and meanness, God present in the scrum.
As we more and more see the world around us through the eyes of Jesus, we too are often moved to weep. Our tears are not only signs of our humanity, but are signs of our participation in Jesus’ divinity. The tears we shed join his tears in becoming the seeds of new life.
Could we learn to look at the stranger, the sinner, the heretic, the outsider we’ve been conditioned to ignore or worse … could we learn to pay attention to the likes of these just as Jesus and this woman paid attention to each other in spite of everything? I think we can.
John 3:16 didn’t resolve the mystery of God’s redeeming love for Nicodemus. It didn’t settle things instantly like a first-century search engine result. The last words he speaks in the chapter are, “How can this be?” He’s still empty of understanding. But there is reason to believe that the emptying of Nicodemus was a beginning, not an end because he stayed. He stayed with Jesus in spite of his confusion and disbelief.