The church where I belong has a very active Women’s Ministry. It has been exciting for me to be embraced by all these women, the circle growing each time I attend a new event or show up for weekly prayer together. Recently I encountered a whole new thing. These women not only reach out to wrap their arms around one another, but they also reach out to other women. The ones outside the circle.

Yesterday I heard some of their stories. The woman just out of jail since last week. The woman who declared she was told her whole life that she was unlovable - only to experience now being loved deeply by God. The woman who shared the photograph taken on her wedding day, after coming out of a ten-year spiral of heroin and homelessness. The woman who begged another to sing for her and sobbed with her head down as she sang the loving words of the Savior.

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We tiptoe around each other these days, careful not to offend. I have found myself stumbling into a land mine more than once over the past year or two. Those encounters have left me cautious, taking a step back from others I once held close, trying to calculate what is safe conversation and what is likely to be met with a sharp retort. “Sorry,” I think in surprise, pulled up short.

A new friend of mine prayed from across the room recently, “Lord, do not let me be easily offended!” Ah, I thought. There we have it. If we follow that God-man Jesus, we must not be easily offended. We must be filled with love and gentleness and self-control, not pride that is easily offended. Easily wounded. Fragile on our own little pedestals.

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It is a story you may know well. I thought I did. It is about a paralyzed man’s sins being forgiven. But it is also about the love and the faith of his friends. These men cared so much, they believed so much that no obstacle would prevent them from carrying their friend into the healing arms of Jesus. Am I that determined, that passionate about the life of my friends?

Thursday morning I listened as Toria Peterson taught this scripture of the paralyzed man lowered through the ceiling tiles, hoping for a miracle. It is an important story, showing up not only in Luke but also in the Gospels of Matthew (9:1-8) and Mark (2:1-12). I am in the process of writing the story of Jesus and I had written about this exact passage last spring. I posted that writing in March of this year, but I had missed something. I missed the faith of the friends!

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I am walking on the beach at Tybee Island with my husband, teenage son, and daughter. It is August 2007. We are waiting for sunset this late Saturday afternoon. I am listening intently on the phone as my sister's best friend Carol quotes this scripture passage. She is telling me that my sister, who has been throwing up for three days as her body rejects the nutrients she has been receiving through a catheter during this last-ditch effort to prolong her life for just a few more months, has claimed this scripture as her comfort.

First, let me tell you, I am not the person who talks on the phone when I am with other people. I pour all my attention into the people I am with. But this was a major exception. My sister was Jewish. My sister was dying. And now, in the space of four days, my mother, and now Kathy’s best friend both were telling me that Kathy had accepted Jesus as her Savior.

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There was something God always wanted to make clear; He created us for a great and wonderful purpose. He breathed the air into our lungs and gave us life. Precious and valuable, each person is made in the image of God. It is too amazing to comprehend.

As I study the life of Jesus, I am reminded that the world Jesus entered into was very different from our world today. He was born into a very Jewish world. Yeah, the enemy walked their streets dressed in the power and might of Rome, but the dirt they stood on was a promised land filled with the Jewish people and their Jewish customs and their Jewish law, and their Temple and their God. There was no forgetting that.

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They were offended. And they had every reason to be. He was arrogant and blasphemous, claiming the Holy things of God as his own. And they didn’t even know the half of it. Yeah, they knew about what he was teaching the crowds in the Temple, (of all places!), but they didn’t have a clue about what he had said to that woman by Jacob’s well. And they would have been even more appalled that he had been talking to her in the first place.

Jesus was a problem. He was offensive. He was teaching without their authority. Worse, he seemed to know things they didn’t know – and they were the experts. The elite. The educated. The sanctified. And they alone knew how to balance this tight rope walk with the Romans. Jesus was not only a problem, but he could also prove to be dangerous if the crowds took it upon themselves to think he was something more than a common Jewish teacher.

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If the world wants to hate us, this should be the reason;

He will swallow up death forever;

and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,

for the Lord has spoken. Isaiah 25:8 ESV

This should be the offensive heart of the problem.

We believe this,

we believe this is true.

We believe God is a Truth-Giver and a Promise Keeper.

A Man of His Word, you might say.

He told His beloved Chosen People,

and they wrote it down through the Prophet voice of Isaiah

that there would come a day on the mountain of Jerusalem

when death would be swallowed up forever.

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The girl child sat in my lap as I flipped through the children’s book of bible stories to the telling of Passover. She was excited because she and her family had attended Passover Seder on Saturday night at a friend’s house and she had been given the privilege of perhaps finding the “afikoman.” It has hard to get the exact details from her. She is three. That should be enough explanation.

I grew up in a Christian home so our traditions were more of the egg hiding kind than the traditional matzo hiding kind but I knew what she was talking about.

When my kids were little, my daughter wanted us to celebrate Passover, so my Jewish business partner graciously invited us to join her family. Before that, I had celebrated a Passover meal lead by Murray Tilles. His ministry, Light of Messiah, connects Jewish people to Jesus and Christians to their Jewish roots – so that is where I had first encountered a true Seder.

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I have been trying to get Jesus and his life straight in my mind. Oh, I know all the stories written about him; the parables of wheat and vineyards and the miracles of lame men dancing and the woman holding her breath as she touches the bottom of his robe. But there is just so much to take in and I can’t get it organized and flowing in a nice sequential order that will really land in a solid and sure place in my thoughts. The problem is I am reading it all – the stories of Matthew and Mark and Luke and John. Trying to get myself ready to enter the gates of Jerusalem before the week of Passover. And I am running out of time.

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The crowds squeezed into the house in Capernaum where Jesus was staying. They looked in through the doorway and windows; they overflowed into the streets straining to catch any word that would drift their way. People had come from all over to hear God’s Word taught by God’s own son. They didn’t realize that was what they were experiencing – they only knew this Jesus knew things they didn’t know about God and His Kingdom.

There in the front row sat a handful of their religious leaders: the Pharisees and the teachers of the Jewish law. They had come to hear this man’s teaching for themselves. Rumors of this unusual rabbi pulling rabbits out of hats had spread far and wide. If they were lucky, they just might see him perform one of his unusual tricks for themselves.

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He was a mess. Completely insane, living on the street and sleeping in the rain. He had broken every fine law of society and every shackle placed on his arms and legs. Blood scabbed on his skin from his own marks of self-hatred and he cried out with pain and rage. There was no containing him.

When Jesus showed up, on the wrong side of town, the opposite shore of the sea, this was his greeting party – dangerous and certifiably crazy. He shouted at Jesus: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most-High God?”

I think in our heart-of-hearts we all cry this out into our dark nights. Why in the world would the Son of the Most-High God come across the sea for us? Can't He see we are bleeding and broken? The chains meant to keep us in line are broken and dangling uselessly. The good fine folks of the town make sure they don't come too close.

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Is it time to think about Jesus again?

You know the drill. December: we think about the tiny precious baby being born in a manger because there was no room in the Inn. And we think about presents because of the Wisemen coming over from the East. And then we go shopping.

And then sometime after Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday if you are of that upbringing, you think about giving something up for Lent, with churches posting notices about Easter services when everyone will need a new outfit and a new hat. I think I even wore gloves when I was a child. Maybe we don’t do that anymore.

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