2023-12-22 A Meditation on Wearied

“37 And he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour?” (Mk 14:37 ESV)

Weighed down, caught up in the weary reality of anything sickly or that takes us away from the confident perch; we are a team, and are the first to say, I am in need of buttressing, of support, of make-over. Together, we weather the down time. Together we put A before B before C, still of prime evidentiary play-over. We are still duty-bound, still owning up to, still cautious and prayerful: today, if you hear His voice, harden not your hearts as in the wilderness. Today, if you hear His voice, be for each other that conscious glide and effusive workmanship, that smooth operator’s currency, that clarion Call this day to own the Name, the Good Name of our Lord, the Good Name of our post, the Good Name of our relative handing-over, this one for that one, this thought for that rarefied air of speech: we are less decrepit than we first thought. We are today called and made-over to walk the lame path, a little limping but overall good and true, a little weary but no worse for the wear. A little excitable around the patient thought-pattern and patient concluding reason, a little patient around the tectonic owned harbingers, plate-shift, and World to be discovered.

For the Gospel is owned and reasoned through, with nary a thought but that we draw Near to Him who lived it out, Himself weary and pleading on the Cross, Himself tired and in need of prayer at the very hour the crowds were approaching, Himself wondering why no one could stay awake as He prayed: I have legions of soldiers who might show up, but no, tonight it shall be a proof of legitimacy around the concept of army of One, solitary systematized staring down the implicit hatred of one’s Father above, who would allow His Son thus to be degraded and minimized.

The Gospel is a steady hand, a reasoned posture, a calm legitimacy: around our day’s tasks we no longer panic or get nervous; around our day’s tasks we no longer worry about who and what we are serving. He has made the good fight. He has made us lovable even in laughable perch; silly for the Lord, or rather, simply self-conscious of our get-up, wondrous and healed by a Love coming from outside. It is a love that puts paid to all worry and all self-conscious hanging of the head. We are strangely warmed, our hearts made over and untold legitimacies put to our person, marked paid and hard-fought, wrought in the furnace of Life’s Big Questions.

God made us over with dire expediency, with strange inspiration, with untold attack. God made us over so as to be those people patient and calmed, walking through our perch or status as Authors of His Might, in places of authority or somehow trusted and looked up to, we therefore share the burden on a day forlorn or hemmed up, but too we understand the genuine Authority of His quiet and reverent soul, of His person having an underappreciated plethora of mighty experience, or who works to be Time and Substance, Meaning and Revelation, Prophecy and Patience, to the disparate hoards. Yet we doubted. Yet we went back to our fishing. Yet we worried over the production of fish and bread. Yet we argued amongst ourselves as to who was greatest in the Kingdom Above.

Jesus patiently allowed the Spirit to make of His composure and sense of Presence, a worthy sacrifice and a wearied fasted Okay. It was no rambunctious diatribe or hop-to-the-rhythm, but a Lord tried and true, who breathed a few words just to reassure of: God the Father is asking this of Him. God the Father is charting a way, via pain and degradation. God the Father is asking the Believer to go down routes of wearied, sickened, disbelief, that we may all the more know His means and substance. He is substantial, He is meaningful, He is no patron of fine meals as a means to fine words, but of fasted sickly existence, as a means to urgent words and quieted sighing sermons. In all this, He is our Forerunner and Master of the Art of spiritual Arms.