The Deeper The Loving…..The Darker The Experience

Luke 22: 3,31, 40,46, Psalm 27

“The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom then shall I fear?

Though a host of men were laid against me, yet shall not my heart be afraid

And though there rose up war against me, yet will I put my trust in him!

The deeper your loving is, the darker the experience becomes.

It sounds a bit of a contradiction, but it is a truth we must acknowledge right at the heart  of His passion.

From our Gospel reading we get a sense of evil gathering momentum.

The closer Jesus gets to expressing the fullness of God’s love for the world, the more aggressive the opposition against him becomes.

At his birth, the violence of Herod was a sign of things to come.

Satan did his best to blow the saviour off course during the forty days in the wilderness.

When Jesus healed people, it was often the demon from within who rose up to taunt him.

An innocent outburst from Peter gets the retort “Get thee behind me Satan.”

And now as the cross approaches, all that rumoured opposition begins to circle in full force.

All fuelled by the triple desires of reputation, control and comfort which Jesus came to challenge.

The Chief priests and the scribes seek how they might kill him “for fear of the people”

Satan enters into Judas, corrupted by power and the love of money.

He “sifts Peter like wheat” to the point where he would deny his Lord.

An unnamed multitude armed with swords and cudgels have come to track him down as a criminal, when once he had been hailed as their king.

Human beings of all descriptions are hemming our Lord in from all angles.

Because the deeper your loving is, the darker the experience becomes.

In this passion reading this morning, Jesus becomes an isolated figure before our very eyes.

A prayer like that of Psalm 27 – trusting in the Lord – was surely not far from his lips.

It’s a prayer of a king going out to battle unsure of the strength of his army.

It’s is the prayer of an innocent man facing accusations for something he did not do.

It is the only place in the entire Old Testament when the Lord is describes as light.

It comes at the point when things seems especially desperate.

We enter into his passion to the extent that we have known how dangerous it can be to love – and to challenge that which is not love.

To love in spite of scarce resources.

We have all known times when we have tried with all our hearts to act out of goodness and the more we try, the harder it becomes.

When we seek to witness and fall flat on our faces.

When irritation and annoyance dominate our spirit when we know we should give room for peace.

The passion of Jesus shows us how dangerous and difficult authentic love can be, and far from putting our Lord ast a distance, it is through the shared agony of loving that we can drawn near.

The way to draw near is through prayer.

We see in this passion narrative that prayer was the only way forward for our Lord and is for us too.

The deeper the darkness about him, the more fervent his prayer becomes.

This part of the passion story is drenched in it.

Prayer over the bread and wine for all mankind.

Prayer for the disciples as Jesus predicts that they will be sifted like wheat.

Prayer in the garden for his own soul.

An exhortation to the disciples to pray that they might not enter into temptation.

Prayer on the cross for forgiveness for his enemies and for the Father not to forsake him.

Once the passion begins there is very little that Jesus says which is not prayer.

Here he puts into practice the words of the psalmist that no matter what assail me – in God I will trust and have no fear.

The deeper the loving, the darker the experience.

It is perhaps fear of this which keeps our faith so neatly under wraps.

We learn from this week that there may be no evading of suffering if we are true to our faith.

Yet we also learn that perseverance and ultimate triumph is possible in only one way.

In prayer that seeks to cast out fear and trust in the redeeming work of Christ.

“Hearken unto my voice O Lord when I cry unto thee, have mercy upon me and hear me. Teach me thy way O Lord and lead me in the right way because of my enemies.

O tarry thou the Lord’s leisure, be strong and he shall comfort thine heart, and put thou thy trust in the Lord.”

RH 19.03.08