Those who led the way rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Luke 18:39 (NIV)
When I was in college studying acting, my professor sent us on an unusual assignment. He sent us a few miles up the road to a busy shopping mall. We were told to sit in the middle of the mall for at least two hours.
Watch people. Really observe them. How they move. Their unusual tics. The particular way they behave with others.
The goal was to teach me as an actor about creating a realistic and believable character on stage. It’s more than memorizing lines and regurgitating them on stage. It’s about creating a real person.
With a particular gate to his walk. Mannerisms unique to his character. A specific way he reacts and responds physically.
That lesson profited me far beyond my training for the stage. The importance of observation was an entire life-lesson. It had spiritual implications.
In my daily life. On this chapter-a-day journey. I keep the eyes and ears of my heart open. Observing. Watching for patterns, repetition, and surprises.
As I read and meditated on today’s chapter, I noticed something.
The chapter is book-ended with a parable and an episode. There’s a connection.
The parable concerns a judge and an old widow. A widow in the culture of Jesus’ day was a nobody. Marginalized. Poor. Zero social status. Everyday she begged the judge to hear her case. Everyday. She made herself annoying. Until the judge heard the case just to shut her up.
At the end of the chapter, Jesus is walking through a crowd. On the side of the road was a blind man. A beggar. He shouts, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!” Again. And again. And again. Annoyed, those around him tell him to shut up. He yells louder. Jesus stops. Calls the man over, and heals him.
The widow knocked on the judge’s door. The blind man shouted into the crowd. Different scenes. Same audacity.
A week or so ago, I was struck by a similar parable Jesus told. The neighbor who begs for bread at midnight. Shameless audacity. Socially inappropriate.
What struck me as I meditated on these things this morning was that I was observing a pattern in the parables and stories that are lifting off the page for me in the quiet.
Prayer. Pleading. Persistence. A holy refusal to be ignored.
It’s a Holy Spirit whisper.
“Pray Tom. Keep praying. Be bold. Be audacious. Don’t stop. Try to annoy me.”
And so in the quiet this morning and observable pattern informs me of my marching orders.
And with that, I will finish this post.
I have some praying to do.
If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.
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Those who led the way rebuked [the blind man] and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Luke 18:39 (NIV)
Happy New Year!
One of the things I can expect every New Year in the media is the so-called experts’ picks of the “best” and “worst” things from the previous year. I’ve come to learn that my agreement with such lists is highly dependent on how aligned the “expert” and I am in the determination of what makes a good movie, song, or book.
When I was in college, there was quite a bit of consensus among movie critics and experts that Orson Welles’ classic Citizen Kane was the greatest movie ever made. If you’ve never seen it, it’s worth watching. The tale of a man who gains the whole world and loses his soul along the way is truly a masterpiece.
One of the things I love about both great movies and great books is the way that stories are crafted. The entire story of Charles Foster Kane is presented to us in the opening scene of Citizen Kane. As viewers, we simply don’t know it yet. I can watch great movies countless times because I can perpetually find things I’ve never seen before. The writers and directors placed things into scenes and dialogue that are hidden from me in plain sight.
In the same way, as I make my way over and over again through the Great Story, I perpetually see things that have been hiding in plain sight. I long ago realized that one of the mistakes I made for years was allowing myself to focus too intently on one word, one verse, or one passage a time that I missed the larger picture that the Author of Creation has connected throughout the Great Story. Today’s chapter is a great example.
In most modern Bibles, the text is broken up into chapters. Within each chapter, there are sections and verses. In today’s chapter, there are six different episodes or sections that the editors have called out for me with titles. This very paradigm of layout causes me to mentally compartmentalize as I’m reading and thinking. Yet, I’ve learned on this chapter-a-day journey that the meaning is often in the connection between the episodes just as there are connections between the books in the larger Great Story. I’ve had to train my brain to look at the larger story, books, chapters, and episodes for the connections between them.
Today’s chapter begins with a parable about a poor widow who pesters a Judge begging for justice. He ignores her at first, but her persistence leads to him taking her case just to shut her up. Jesus says prayer works like this. Keep praying, He says. Don’t give up.
In the very next episode, Jesus tells a parable contrasting a self-righteous religious leader who thinks he’s all that and a bag of chips with a poor wretch of a tax collector who knows the depth of his own sins and failures. The latter simply prays for the same thing over and over again (just like the persistent widow), “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Later in the chapter, Jesus once again tells The Twelve that He’s been a dead man walking on this trip to Jerusalem that they’ve been on since chapter nine. He’s going to Jerusalem to be betrayed, arrested, and executed, before rising from the dead. Luke then makes the observation that The Twelve did not get what Jesus was talking about even though this is the third time He has said it plainly. “Its meaning was hidden from them,” Luke writes.
In the final episode of the chapter, Jesus has a huge crowd around Him as He approaches the city of Jericho. Jericho is eighteen miles from Jerusalem, so Jesus is getting close to His destination. There is a blind man who is told that the commotion he’s hearing is because Jesus the Nazarene preacher everyone has been talking about is passing by. The blind man immediately begins shouting, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!“
Let’s connect the dots.
The blind man begins shouting the same thing over and over, just like the persistent widow, so that everyone around him is annoyed just like the judge in Jesus’ parable.
What this poor blind wretch shouts is “Have mercy on me” just like the tax collector in Jesus’ parable.
In his repeated cries, the blind man calls Jesus “Son of David.” In Jesus’ day, this was a term people used to refer to the coming Messiah because the prophets had declared the Messiah would come through the line of David (which Jesus did, btw, Luke established that in the genealogy he put into chapter three, yet another connection. In recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, the “Son of David,” this blind man on the side of the road saw what others couldn’t see just as we learned that things were “hidden” in plain sight from Jesus’ closest followers.
The blind man saw who Jesus was while the fullness of Jesus and His mission were hidden from those with 20-20 vision. Jesus heals the annoying man who was shouting his repeated prayer for mercy, showing mercy just as the Judge had done for the poor widow in His parable.
By the way, how fascinating that this happens in Jericho, where God once miraculously caused the walls to come a tumblin’ down. I find something prescient in this connection.
In the quiet this morning, I’m once again blown away by how the Great Story connects. I’m humbled to think that I am not persistent enough in my prayers, and for all my knowledge I acknowledge just how many spiritual realities of God’s kingdom are hiding from me in plain site just like the story ofCharles Foster Kane is hidden in a falling snow globe and the cryptic whisper, “Rosebud.”
As I enter a new year, a new work week, a new day – the echo of my heart is set on a persistent, repeating prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”
If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.
Jesus took the Twelve aside and told them, “We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. He will be delivered over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him and spit on him; they will flog him and kill him. On the third day he will rise again.” Luke 18:31-33 (NIV)
This past week Wendy and I watched a documentary about a local sports team that, 30 years ago, went undefeated and won the state championship. A good friend was on that team. In the middle of the documentary, one of the coaches spoke about our friend. “You’re not going to play much this year,” the coach told him. “But there’s something I need you to do. I need you and the others on the B team to bust your butts every practice and push the starters. You can make them better.” The coach then related our friend’s response: “You can count on me, coach.”
I’ve thought a lot about that the past few days. It’s easy to want the starring role, the starting position, or an office in the C-suite. It is an entirely different to willingly and joyfully embrace a role backstage, a job on the practice squad, or settle for a career in middle management if that’s what you’re needed to do.
In today’s chapter, Jesus predicts His suffering, death, and resurrection for the third time, and it falls on deaf ears. His followers have already started picking out their office wallpaper for their positions on the administration of Jesus’ earthly kingdom. Jesus, however, is quite honest and blunt about His role and the path He is calling them to follow. Jesus even points to the words of the prophets:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 53:2-6
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.
But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads. “He trusts in the Lord,” they say, “let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.”
Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.
Psalm 22:1-2, 6-8, 16-18
In the quiet this morning, I find myself thinking about my friend’s willingness, even joy, to take a role on the bench and the practice squad. I think about Jesus closest followers who will soon find that their honored roles in the Great Story have nothing to do with earthly glory, but rather will be those of sacrifice, suffering, and martyrdom – just like Jesus before them.
Am I a follower of Jesus simply because it really hasn’t required that much of me? Would I still be following if it had required sacrifice and suffering on the level of Peter and the other eleven members of Jesus’ A-team? Would I have the faith to follow like those believers in Nigeria, Pakistan, China, and other places of the globe who are suffering and being killed for being followers of Jesus?
Perhaps it’s impossible to answer. Nevertheless, I think it’s a good question for me to chew on as I enter another week. Perspective and context is always a good thing.
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought.And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think,yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’” Luke 18:1-5 (NIV)
Persistence reveals a persons true desires.
When our girls were small they would often come up with all sorts of crazy requests. They wanted this or that toy. They wanted these lessons or those lessons. They wanted this or that clothing to follow the latest fad fashion. I get it. I was a kid once. I remember trying to convince my parents to send me to a fancy boarding school.
What I’ve observed over time is that the human heart is fickle. We are so easily tossed about like a dinghy on the high seas. The internet and social media has made it even worse. What was trending yesterday is old news today. It’s so easy for our hearts to chase after the mania of the moment.
When a person persistently pursues one thing over a long period of time, I believe that it reveals something about that person’s heart. It may not be the right thing. It may not be the appropriate thing. It does, however, say something about the true nature of that person truly desires.
I learned as a parent that if I simply acknowledged then ignored my children’s crazy requests the vast majority of them simply went away with the changing of the wind. It was when I began hearing the same request repeated over a long period of time that I realized it was something I might want to really consider.
The lesson of Jesus’ parable (above) is pretty clear. A persistent prayer gets acknowledged. This morning I’m thinking about my own requests to God. I am the first to acknowledge that I am not always persistent in my prayers. Perhaps God is waiting for my persistence to find out what I truly desire.
Then [Jesus] said, “Do you hear what that judge, corrupt as he is, is saying? So what makes you think God won’t step in and work justice for his chosen people, who continue to cry out for help?” Luke 18:6 (MSG)
‘I am going to make for the Bucklebury Ferry as quickly as possible. I am not going out of the way, back to the road we left last night: I am going to cut straight across country from here.’
‘Then you are going to fly,’ said Pippin. ‘You won’t cut straight on foot anywhere in this country.’
‘We can cut straighter than the road anyway,’ answered Frodo. ‘We could save a quarter of the distance if we made a line for the Ferry from where we stand.’
‘Short cuts make long delays,’ argued Pippin.
Today’s chapter reminds me that there is a holy timing within the journey. I must confess that I get tired of the long road. I tire of asking “are we there yet, God?” Crying out makes me weary.
Patience is really hard for me, so like Frodo I’ve often attempted shortcuts in life to quickly get to where (or what) I want. Yet, when I look back at shortcuts and snap decisions intended to get what I wanted in the moment I wanted it, I inevitably learned Pippin’s wisdom the hard way.
Today, I’m once again reminded to trust God’s timing. I feel the frustrating encouragement to keep asking, seeking, and knocking. I am called to keep crying out.
