Thursday after Ash Wednesday

“And Peter answered, ‘The Christ of God’. But he charged and commanded them to tell this to no one, saying, ‘The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised’” (Luke 9:20-22).

When we think about who Jesus would have been to the people who knew him, we tend to think about all the big Technicolor stuff. Jesus HEALED THE SICK! Jesus MADE THE BLIND SEE! Jesus CAST OUT THE DEMONS! Jesus WALKED ON WATER! Jesus BEAT THE PHARISEES IN EVERY DEBATE THEY EVER HAD! And, best of all, JESUS TURNED WATER INTO WINE! All those miracles and he still knew how to party. To the people who hung out with him and followed him around like groupies, Jesus must have been a hip-and-happening dude, a super-powerful religious rockstar, the one who could do anything. That’s one heck of a Messiah-hood: like the Justin Bieber of the Galilee, Jesus was wandering around winning hearts and putting on an endless show.

That’s the picture we’d get if we saw Jesus through the eyes of his most loyal and star-struck disciples. It’s probably what Peter was thinking when he declared Jesus was the Christ.

But that isn’t what Jesus was thinking. He was thinking, don’t go around telling people that I’m the Christ, because they’ll misunderstand. He was saying, I am the Son of Man. The Son of Man is not seen in glory, or in the miraculous. He is not understood in his rockstar entertaining or in his witty remarks. He is the one who suffers, who is outcast, who dies. He is the Messiah, the one who is risen from the dead.

When we look for Jesus in our Lenten journey, we aren’t looking for him in the freakishly-charismatic preacher or in the man who cures the lepers. We’re looking for him among the rejected and the forsaken. On the road to Emmaus, the journey with Christ where we seek for and recognize him, we see that Jesus does not want us to find him in the midst of glory but in feeding the sick, visiting the imprisoned, clothing the poor, and walking among the rejected.