It’s here that I want to take a detour, a bypass that in a sense is the true path we have been walking all along. The path of Jesus’s human life, and death, and life after death. I know there’s just as much of a chance that you care nothing about Jesus as that you care everything. If that’s you, stay with me. This bypass is a shortcut.

The story of Jesus is bewildering. It’s so different from what the Jewish nation had expected that few of them have chosen since then to see him as the Messiah they have long awaited. In his own time, his story was so different from what his own disciples and followers thought he had come to do that they frequently ask him when the coup will begin, and who will get to sit where after the dust has settled.[1]

Of course, Jesus has a keener sense of dramatic suspense than we do. And of otherness, which is sometimes called holiness. He’s also far more comfortable with silence. It is silence that most curiously marks the life of Someone we all expected to arrive like a Marvel superhero.

“Silent night, holy night,” the Christmas song goes. “All is calm. All is bright.” And even though Mary would of course have been something other than silent while giving birth, Jesus’s coming into the world is far more secretive than any of us would have planned. This is the incarnation, after all, where the one who made every atom of this universe somehow climbs into it. Not just into the story but into this living artwork, the Earth itself, without destroying it in the process. Kings are born in palaces, not backwater towns. The mythic conquerors of supernatural proportions hit the earth like asteroids. But not Jesus. “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given. So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven. No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.”[2]

This silence, this kind, respectful silence, the life of the omnipotent on silent mode so that he might not destroy us by his presence but instead bring life itself, continues not just in the birth but also into the life of Jesus. You can see it throughout the Gospels. Time and again, Jesus performs a miracle (will be himself in technicolor) but will then whisper into the healed person’s ear, “Please don’t tell anyone about this.” In other words, this is for you. For you.[3]

It is Jesus who disappears from his followers without warning, sometimes at the very moment when they want him to show off. When he reaches a distant place, he prays, sending out the radio signals of his heart to the other dimension, maybe hearing back and maybe not, sending them anyway. It is Jesus who gladly falls asleep on a boat in a storm. And who reminds the storm, once he is awake again, of what silence feels like, how it calms others and even helps them to grow as people.[4]

When he is arrested on trumped-up charges, Pilate demands of Jesus, “What is the truth?” And Jesus, who of course knows the answer and could have simply pointed to himself, gives Pilate instead only his silence, a silence so confounding that Pilate freaks out and literally washes his hands of any participation in his death.[5]

Then, in a series of unfortunate events from his disciple’s perspective, Jesus ends up pinned to a cross, as mute as a lamb before its shearers. And out of that silence, he calls out to his father. “Why oh why have you forsaken me?”[6] Though God had spoken audibly from heaven at his baptism three years earlier, here, when seemingly Jesus and the surrounding others need his words the most, God gives only his silence. And we know, we suspect, that there’s a reason for it. Is this the silence of a father listening to his son? Listening, and listening, with a tear stain running down his cheek? Is he giving Jesus a canvas to do his creative work, allowing him to paint the open space of this chapter with his silent suffering and blood, making something new? Is God’s silence respect, the kind you would give to a king if you recognized him when no one else did? Is it rest, looking on in astonishment and even gratitude as Jesus does the work? Is it an answer, one that reminds the son softly yet unflinchingly, “You know. You know why I have forsaken you.” And here we suspect that there’s even secret-keeping in the answer. They both know what they are anticipating in this silence, this painful, torn-apart silence. We don’t know yet. Jesus is living in the in-between, the moment when none of the others watching know whether this dramatic pause will end in tragedy or something much more satisfying.

But Jesus knows. This is why he has chosen the silent mode of incarnation to begin with. He chose the long anticipation because of the joy that was set before him. This is why he has endured. In the best sense, the good news he came to deliver was not words, but himself, present in the flesh and written onto his own creation in a clearer, more visceral way than we had ever seen or heard before. In that sense, the good news becomes comedy, not laughter maybe at first, but relief, our healing, our marriage—as ancient comedies always end.[7]

After this moment of silence (perhaps the first ever to be observed before someone’s death), when he does die an actual, physical death, he gives himself up, allows himself to be silenced for three days. Or at least, that’s what it appears. Many of his followers believe he had simply taken the light saber of his good news into another dimension. But that realization would come later. During those three days, the silence for them means that he was as good as gone. It may even have suggested that he wasn’t what he was cracked up to be after all. That all the evidence up to that point had been misunderstood, or followed only out of fanaticism or deception.[8]

After three days, Jesus comes back to set that record straight. Yet even when he returns from his own death, Jesus returns with incredible restraint, with silence. Enough that, when he appears to his old friend Mary Magdalene in the garden, he is such a quiet figure that she mistakes him for the gardener. Silent enough on his return that he patiently listens, and listens, and listens to those on the road to Emmaus, before giving them a tour of the Scriptures as a map of his own person and disappearing into thin air in the same moment that they recognized him for himself.[9]

This is part of what we celebrate during Lent and during any season when we remember Jesus as he is: we celebrate his breathtaking silence. His silence, which is not just one of his abilities but also one of his gifts to us. We identify with him in his silent mode. We meet him there, and we meet ourselves too, as new friends do when they are able to navigate through questions so personal that they actually grow the listener and the teller through that silence, twining them both together. There are Lent questions appropriate for us on any day of the year, ones that might help us to grow and grow closer: What are we willing to give up in identifying with him? How will we incarnate in our own lives his willingness to lay aside, to put down, to mute, to resist the things that cling so closely to us, even those things we mistakenly believe are our identity?

Here in the silence, here is the still small voice. It is his voice, and it has been all along. It is looking into our lives and asking us a question: “What are you doing here?”

[1] Though Jesus’s disciples ask questions frequently that betray their belief that he will overthrow the Roman empire, select passages include Mark 10:35-45 and Matthew 20:20-22.

[2] The lyrics of “Silent Night” can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Night, while the lyrics of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” can be seen here: https://hymnary.org/text/o_little_town_of_bethlehem.

[3] Jesus’s repeated request for a healed person not to tell anyone is discussed here: https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4555.

[4] A discussion of Jesus’s habit of leaving his followers to go and pray alone is discussed here: https://wau.org/resources/article/re_jesus_sets_out_alone_to_pray/.

[5] Pilate’s question that Jesus doesn’t answer is found in John 18:38, excerpted here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+18&version=NLT.

[6] A discussion of Jesus’s cry of abandonment from the cross—and its origin in Psalm 22—can be found here: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/psalm-22-my-god-my-god-why-have-you-forsaken-me/.

[7] A discussion of traditional comedies, and how Shakespeare’s late “romances” enhance the category, as well as the endings of marriage or healing, can be found here: http://cola.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/engl339/romance.html.

[8] A discussion of Jesus’s descent into “hell” (or Sheol) can be found here: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/he-descended-into-hell.

[9] A discussion of Jesus’s appearance to Mary Magdalene (along with several depictions of the meeting in art) can be found here: https://artandtheology.org/2016/04/05/she-mistook-him-for-the-gardener/, and an overview of Jesus’s appearance to the disciples on the road to Emmaus can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Emmaus_appearance.

Selah

Take a few minutes and let that last chapter echo, however it is wanting to echo off the chambers of your own heart. If it’s wanting to settle and come to rest inside you, let it.