John 12:1-11 (premeditation)

In the first part of John 12, the religious power brokers are so afraid of Jesus and Lazarus that they begin to plot their murders in earnest. Why? It makes sense that they’d be irate at Jesus for exposing the emptiness of their illusion. And I can see why they’d want to destroy the evidence, so to speak, by erasing the resurrected Lazarus from the scene.

But I don’t see how they could unequivocally dismiss the possibility that Jesus was telling (and living) the truth. How could they be so sold out to their own propaganda that they couldn’t see the sense-making beauty in what Jesus was saying and doing?

One of the reasons I’m so bothered by this riddle is my uneasy feeling that I could do the same thing. What am I guarding? What am I dismissing? What are the fears in me that skew my perceptions? Whose ideas am I ready to erase in order to protect my own?



Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

Eucatastrosphere

The twin piercings of humanness are the Incarnation & Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. One interrupts human life; the other, human death.

According to J.R.R. Tolkien,
The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.

Tolkien created the term eucatastrophe to fill a hole in the English lexicon. It’s meant to convey the notion that God has planted a seed of infinitely concentrated joy in the soil of human existence. It is a potent goodness, always becoming thinkable, visible, tangible through people saying yes to the Spirit.

The-way-things-ought-to-be exploding redemptively outward into the void of the-way-things-ought-not-to-be like a Big Bang of meaning, beauty, honor, grace...

The space created by this phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the Kingdom of God. Building upon Tolkien’s word, I've started thinking of it as the Eucatastrosphere -- a soul-scape shaped in the ripples of divine interruption...