Easter 6—Kindly Reassurance

The context of Jesus’ farewell today is the last supper; the friends to whom he speaks are understandably confused and anxious. Earlier, they had questioned his allusions to leaving them. Temporarily? Or forever? He’d seen beneath Peter’s bravado (“Why can’t I follow you? I’ll lay down my life for you.”)

Under the arrogance, the needy, vulnerable child who desperately needs comfort. Jesus, not focused on his own imminent ordeal, looks fondly on his friends: bedraggled, flummoxed, sloppy, dear. And dreading more than anything, as most children do, being abandoned by those they love.

A similar situation is described by the marvelous poet and U. of Indiana professor Ross Gay in his book Inciting Joy, which traces the dance between sorrow and joy, the first state carving space for the second. His family, gathered around his dying father, leaves the hospital briefly for “a somber dinner…a pallor over us, edging toward the world without this person we loved.”

Like Jesus, his dad has been more focused on his loved ones than his own liver tumor. A week after the dad’s diagnosis, his son Ross gets sick. Dad cares for him, bringing a cold rag for his feverish neck, making lightly buttered toast, and when he feels up to eating more, a plate of supper he’s kept warm in the oven.

Ross doesn’t gloss over the fact that like most dads and teen-aged sons, they’d had a rough patch during his adolescence. But their relationship as adults shows how one can dwell in the other forever. They share a love for playing basketball, cooking, and smelling lilacs. “He would close his eyes to breathe [the fragrance] in, and I would do the same without noticing I do it, too.” Ross recognizes in himself the same bluster his dad shows when he’s “insecure, threatened, small, dumb, or not enough, which is not exactly infrequent.”

During their last goodbyes, Ross notices his father’s freckles, “like a gentle broadcast of carrot seeds… through my tears I saw my father was a garden… And from that what might grow.” Ross Gay’s community garden is a refuge from racism, and a deep source of joy, described in his Book of Delights. Another inheritance from his father, and a striking parallel to Jesus, who suffered and rose in a garden, bringing spring life. And how are we, maybe without even noticing, like him? From us, what might grow?