Grandson #1 disappeared into the thicket of the crabapple tree. And so, yesterday’s gourd harvest had begun.
That last part I found surprising.
It doesn’t surprise me at all to find one Grandson or the Other up a tree in the yard at their rural home. Neither one can resist the challenge it seems, the adventure to be found in a well-grasped branch or a well-placed foot. (They grasp, and I gasp – whispering a worried prayer to their guardian angels for a safe return to the ground.)
But on this day there was more than tomfoolery afoot. An actual plan was unfolding, a scheme set in motion many months before when their parents had planted climbing vines beneath the crabapple’s branches…intending one day to harvest their resulting gourds.
That’s pretty cool, I thought, realizing that I hadn’t noticed the vines or their fruit invading the crabapple’s branches on my previous visits to the farm during the growing season. Now, in their ripened state, the gourds were obvious – dangling like humble ornaments on a gnarly low-rent tree.
And note this: There was beauty to be found in the harvest. An unexpected beauty, arising from unanticipated entanglement between climbing vine and knotted branch.
It seemed to me a bit like the mystery of our salvation story, the mystery which we encounter in Isaiah and Hebrews and Mark today: God-Incarnate, entangled in our suffering, mixed up (by God’s own choice) in our human misery:
For [in Christ], we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way…
It’s a surprising thing to look up and see this gift of God-made-low. But it seems to be exactly what Jesus desires to teach us on this sabbath day:
For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Soon to be hollowed out like a gourd, Jesus ever offers us from the cross a drink of his Living Water – the precious gift he descends from heaven to bring.
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 