All the People Came to Hear Him
"Every day he was teaching in the temple, and at night he would go out and spend the night on the Mount of Olives, as it was called. And all the people would get up early in the morning to listen to him in the temple." Luke 21: 37-38
As a poem, Rabbi Jesus uses image and color, story, parable, gesture and location, children and coins, admonition and invitation...as ways of sending us back to ourselves, our own resourcefulness, to take responsibility for our own choices, to come alive as spiritual qand sentient beings.
Jesus is poetry in motion...in the Temple and on the mount called Olivet, in the village and at the well, on the road and in the home, on the cross and dancing from the tomb.
For Rabbi Jesus, the life of faith is not a matter of learning dogma by rote, but about our passionate and subjective engagement with the Source of life, the Author of the universe, the Creator of the whirling stars, the One who paints buttercups yellow, poppies a shocking orange and breaks the bonds of death.
In her poem, "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant," Emily Dickenson wrote "The truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind..."
Jesus is God's poem...God's best poem. He is God's slant-wise and dazzling truth...meant not to blind us, but to bind us, to God and to each other.
Jesus is God's poem... God's best poem. Let all the people come to hear him. Amen.
Nancy S. Taylor is Senior Minister at Old South Church in Boston, Massachusetts.
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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