“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”*
When I read that question, I am filled with tenderness towards my past self, a self so broken-hearted that I was contemplating walking away from Jesus. Like the followers in John’s gospel, I had been brought to a point where the truth was inescapable: there was a painfully sharp difference between the Jesus I wanted and the Jesus I had. It felt like betrayal.
Like me, the followers in the synagogue that morning had hopes. They came for healing-and-miracles Jesus; what they got instead was uncomfortably-cryptic-sayings Jesus. The Jesus they sought was missing. It was jarring, upsetting.
After all, they had heard what to expect: the one who turned water into wine, who challenged the powerful, healed the sick, fed the hungry, calmed the rough seas. But the Jesus who showed up that morning was different. He said things they did not like, could not understand. For some, the dissonance became too much. They walked away.
I certainly wanted to. But I found I had nowhere to take my grievances. I wanted to speak to Jesus’s manager but found that position did not exist. “Lord, to whom shall I go?” was not a rhetorical question. I hoped he would send me to someone who cared about my grief. But the only answer on offer was himself and so I wept to Jesus, even as I was unsure that he could be trusted.
During that time a wise friend handed me Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark. As I read, something in me shifted. It was a come-to-Jesus moment in the truest sense of those words. It was a moment of trusting that the Jesus I wanted was still there and would come again, so long as I kept hanging around. It meant accepting the Jesus I had, however baffling he was to me in that moment. I did not know all of who he was and somehow that was going to be okay.
These days, I am less and less surprised each time I’m reminded how little I understand. I am starting to see that, as the resurrected Jesus warns Mary in the garden, trying to hold on to him is a futile effort, like trying to grasp water in your hand. It’s a little scary, trying to love someone you don’t fully know. And yet — to whom would I go?
Questions for reflection:
- How has your understanding of who Jesus is changed over time?
- Are there times that the Jesus you wanted was absent? Was there anything you learned from that experience?
–Erica Lloyd, Seekers Church
