The Grace Project

So I'm just doing some prep for this week's You Tube video for the Jesus that John Knew series and I was reflecting on the story of Nicodemus.  I could help but smile as I thought of him cast as he was in the role of the Teacher of Israel.  Here's our guy the best-of-the best. 

 The brightest and shiniest  brain in all of Israel.   Hence my dubbing him as being "The Gillette Christian" -- you know the advertising slogan: "The best a man can get" (it is of course an unfortunate twist of irony isn't it that Tiger Woods was Gillette's their poster-boy before his in-disgressions were so nakedly exposed.  I remember being interviewed about Tiger on the BBC news in my professional capacity when the scandal broke and I told them that his sponsors would run for cover unless he 'came to his senses -- anyway that's another story.)  

 

Anyway, I digress, the point here is that Nicodemus was the best a man's knowledge can get but how he struggled to --well -- get it!    Unlike Tiger, Nicodemus very much thought that the rules applied to him and worse that he could apply the rules to himself.

 

You see you can get all the knowledge you can and you can can all the knowledge that you get and you can call it what you will but there's no substitute for seeing.  

 

As Nicodemus discovered the mystery is not fathomed by virtue of our cognition, it is perceived by recognition. The heart is the first feature of working minds  As Charles H. Perkhurst so succinctly pointed out: 'The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of' hence Jesus was able to take a simple outcast and socially disgraced woman who happened into him by a well deeper into the mystery of inclusion than he could the teacher of Israel. 

 

Q: How could this be? 

 

Allow Helen Keller to provide the answer: The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

 

First comes the HEART, then the SOUL and then the MIND -- 

 

"And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’