Knowing more...seeing farther

O Jerusalem, Greg Olsen, oil on canvas

Entering into John 13 and the subsequent tumble of Christ's final days, I'm fascinated by the fixed purposefulness of his actions.  Earlier on, Luke tells us that  Jesus "steadfastly set his face toward Jerusalem." (Luke 9:51)  He knows the path before him.  He's ready.  In striking contrast, his disciples are not---working in the dark, oblivious, trying to make sense of the events in medias res, in the very moment.  It's such a handicap.

Our role as parents is strangely similar in that the adult knowledge that we possess--ours won from hard-edged experience rather than omniscience---always trumps our children's finite experiences and youthful idealism.  The very limited scope of their lives is delightful specifically because it is limited.  It suffers not from the caution and cynicism that results from navigating the many twists and turns that we know lie ahead.  Of course we don't know the particulars of their journey, but boy can we testify that the road will be wild and unexpected at times.  It's rarely true to our expectations.

Our children's joys are charming and familiar because we've looked at life through their eyes. Like Wendy in Peter Pan, childhood echos yet.  Ironically, their very joy is a key source of our frustration when counseling and teaching them.  We hold some of their answers, have seen more of the answer key, yet our children don't listen well; they don't even want to look carefully at the questions sometimes.  And when they do, they tend to figure the problem in their strength, to "do the math" by their own method.  It's maddening.

It's the burden of the mantle of each generation---casting off the wisdom of the previous generation, remaking the mantle in their own fashion, and after some success and much failure, realizing that the old mantle wasn't so badly wrought--- their elders were indeed right about many, many things.

And Christ was right.  He knew what had to be done.  He was willing to do it.

May His grace be on all of us: on parents in our still limited knowledge, failing in our own ways, though trying to do better by our children; on children, blissfully unaware of the fixed nature of certain things, of their eventually diminishing ability to confront them in their own might.

I am thankful that He steadfastly set his face toward the difficult choice, that He went before us, that He still goes before us all.