Easter Eggs Part III

I missed writing about Luke last week, so this post is from John.

My favorite find in all the Gospels was another one presented by Rick James and it comes from the story of the adulterous woman in John 8. There has been debate whether that story was actually written by the apostle John; some early manuscripts do not include it. And before I was always indifferent to whether it was the genuine article, but knowing this about the story makes me really hope it was written by him.

While the Pharisees come and present the woman caught in adultery before Jesus, it says twice in the account that Jesus writes with his finger in the dirt. And many people speculate about what he might have written. But if the writing were important, John would have given it to us. What is actually important in that phrase is the mention of Jesus' finger, because it is a reference to the book of Exodus: "When God had finished speaking with Moses upon Mount Sinai, He gave him the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God" (Ex. 31:18).

The Pharisees bring the woman to Jesus to put Him in a predicament: excuse the woman and He is breaking the Law of Moses that says adultery is punishable by death. Condemn the woman and they can find a reason to get Him in trouble. And there is some suspense in the story about what Jesus will decide. How will He get out of this one? But in the middle of the suspense comes John's reference to Exodus, which brings out the delightful irony of the situation: the Pharisees are trying to catch Jesus in a loophole of the Law, when He Himself is its author.

Knowing this reference makes the ending of the story even more poignant. While Moses' Law condemns the woman to death because of her adultery, Jesus, the originator of that Law, says to her, and to us, "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more."

Easter Eggs Part II

In Mark, whenever I read the passage when Jesus was asleep in the boat and then calms the storm when the disciples get scared, I always thought that was a regular nature miracle. And yes, control over the weather is definitely miraculous, but after all, Moses parted the Red Sea and Joshua parted the Jordan River and stopped the sun in the sky, so nature miracles aren't entirely proof of actual God-hood. The very interesting thing, though, is what I learned from the lecture by Rick James about the reason why Jesus happened to be asleep at that time, besides the fact that he was human and tired. In Isaiah chapter 51, it says this:

"Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord;
Awake as in the days of old, the generations of long ago...
Was it not You who dried up the sea,
The waters of the great deep;
Who made the depths of the sea a pathway
For the redeemed to cross over?" (vv. 9-10)

As the prophet cried out to God to wake and assert His control over the ocean, so the disciples cried out to Jesus. And I love God's response:

"Rouse yourself! Rouse yourself! Arise, O Jerusalem" (v. 17)

You can see in the Isaiah passage and in Mark the same pattern: we cry out to God for help because we know He has the power over our circumstances, and God turns it back to us, trying to help us to realize that what we thought was an external problem was actually an internal one, a matter of our own hearts.