In the long-ago days of my childhood, when a show came on TV you had to stop everything in order to watch it. Kids finished up their play and their chores, rushing back home in time for Gilligan’s Island. There was something unifying in the communal pause. Netflix, DVR, Tevo and VHS recordings changed all that. We’re all on our own now.
Easter weekend we and every other Judeo-Christian family clustered around the TV at exactly 7 pm to watch The Ten Commandments or the Greatest Story Ever Told. Either one was essentially a date with Charlton Heston.
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| Moses in The Ten Commandments |
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| John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told |
The movies recount in Technicolor the events of the Bible; the Ten Commandments telling the story of Moses and The Greatest Story Ever Told interpreting the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Both shows fit in that particular weekend because the Christian Easter holiday often falls in the calendar at the same time as Jewish Passover. It’s no coincidence that they often fall at the same time, relative to the Paschal moon. It’s central in the divine design.
My friend Carla and I recently began attending a religion class on Wednesday mornings, sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our instructor is not only an awesome teacher, he is also a well-grounded scholar of ancient and modern scripture. This year he’s been discussing the four Gospels of Christ. Lately we’ve studied the Temple of Solomon, and we’ve discussed the parable of the Vine. We have visited the upper-room where Jesus and his apostles received what is now known as the Last Supper. It’s been a powerful and wonderful thing to have this Wednesday morning feast with Jack Helgesen and a couple hundred other students.
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| Search for Virtual New Testament in your app store. It's free. |
There’s a free phone app called Virtual New Testament that shows the layout of the Temple of Solomon, among other things (created by BYU). I can pretend I am actually walking there. I imagine being in the marketplace outside the temple, and in the Women’s Court, and the Holy of Holies, and I imagine seeing the veil rent in twain at that particular moment when Jesus died. It’s awesome for me, because I never outgrew pretending.
I can visit the altar where animals were sacrificed. It takes me to a place where I am either a priest sacrificing, or I am a believer, bringing a lamb.
Jack the teacher told us that on the day Jesus died, in the city of Jerusalem, there would have been 256,000 lambs sacrificed at the holy altar of the temple. (reference is Jesus the Christ, pg.162) It’s simple math, multiplying the number of families living there at the time and the pilgrims coming to the holy city for the holy day. That’s a lot of lambs! This is high season for shepherds.The marketplace surrounding the temple must have had a mighty chorus of bleating lambs! And since I am in the mode of pretending I am a lamb and a shepherd this week, it’s a pivotal time. I am thinking about the delicate balance it would take to be a good shepherd. I love and own my sheep. But they are also my business. I make my living by selling my sheep. I sustain my own life by eating my wares. An attempt to reconcile protecting the life of my lambs in order to sell them into death is the crux of Easter to me this year. (Pretending can be just so exhausting.)
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| He is both perfect lamb and good shepherd. |
When I think about Jesus being the Good Shepherd I find it perfectly fitting. He loves us, perfectly. But we are also his business. And this is why he fulfills his task in the Garden of Gethsemane, accepting every ounce of our sins and sorrows, our illnesses, our weaknesses. He lifts our dirty feet at the doorstep of our mutual Father’s mansion and cleans them with the drops of blood shed in that moment of divine atonement. He labors away, like our mothers did in giving us birth, hinged on the hope of what would come of it. As powerful as he was, it had to have been so awful for him, or he would not have asked his father to remove this cup from him if there were any other way to get the work done. And, of course, we know now that this was the way.
I’ve read scholarly explanations about how the various cups of that last evening of the Savior’s life allude to the four cups of the Passover Sader, the Passover supper that had been revisited since the time of Moses. This last cup Jesus held up, just as he had at the supper table. He was willing to drink from it for the sake of his Lambs, who laid unawares on the altar of sacrifice.
We refer to Jesus as the sacrificial Lamb, and we are correct. While the blood of hundreds of thousands of unblemished lambs spilled onto the temple floor, Jesus himself hung on the cross that first Good Friday.
But he is also the Good Shepherd, and because of his sacrifice, no longer would lambs need to lose their lives on the altars of the Lord. His own sacrifice ended the law of sacrifice, replacing it with the law of Love and consecration.
We are His sheep. He has earned us, and he owns us. Otherwise, we would all be goners.
I imagine myself as a new lamb, born in the Spring of that holy year, sold to a law abiding family, waiting in line for my turn at the altar. But the skies grow dark, and the earth shakes as the Maker of the earth himself gives up the ghost, his own blood spilling over the earth like a sacrament. In that monumental sacrifice, the law is changed, and I am no longer needed at the altar, He bought my life. I am purchased, and set free.
As I gather my final thoughts, turning the page of this year’s exercise in writing for each day of Lent, I turn to the last words of King David in the 23rdPsalm:
I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Because he has purchased me, and called me his own, I hold in my virtual pocket an invitation to come Home. The date is written in invisible ink. He knows it, but I don't. I have green meadows to romp in yet, and other sheep to live among for a season. But when the moment comes and I am released from my flesh, I have unbridled hope in the notion of returning to a place I once knew as home.
There is relatively little that I know for a surety. It’s all hope. But I will be surprised beyond imagination if, when I die, I am not brought to a place that feels familiar, to a light that feels familiar, and to people I know and love. I will know then, as I know now, that my capacity to be there is facilitated by my Shepherd, whose own sacrifice released me from the altar of permanent death. He has saved me from myself, and I am forever in his house and in his debt. I can never repay him. That’s how it should be.
But I can love him. I can love him according to his definition of love, which is the truest way to love:
If ye love me, keep my commandments.
It’s no more complicated than that.
