How Quickly We Turn: A Passion Week Narrative

The young man had been hunted his entire life. At first, it was mere shepherds who had witnessed visions of angels late one night. They were an uneducated lot, common outcasts who did work that no one else wanted to. Scholars arrived soon afterward; men from the East who traveled long and hard to witness for themselves the signs they had foreseen in the heavens. They brought with them gifts and tokens of adoration that could very well have overshadowed the enthusiasm of the uneducated herdsmen had the child's parents been from a different stock.

Dark enemies soon gave chase. Armed with death, they searched for the child on an evil King’s behalf, slaughtering infants who still clung to their mothers' breasts. But the child’s father was a man of vision and his family escaped the sword as they fled to Egypt.

Years passed. And the child grew older.

When he turned twelve, his parents were the hunters. Searching through family and friends they turned Jerusalem upside-down looking for their boy. But he was hunting too, for answers, in the House of the Lord. He called it his Father’s house and his parents were astonished.

When he was thirty, his mother sought him out to fix the wine problem his friends were having at their wedding. And when he began hanging around with fishermen, tax collectors, and zealots- she went looking again and begged him to come home.

During the day, men of religious influence laid out tricks and traps to trip him up. But at night, some of them would seek him out in secret to learn more about his ideas, while others plotted to kill him in dark rooms lit by fine candles.

Soldiers overtook him one day to request a miracle on behalf of their commander. Later they overtook him in the garden with a warrant for his arrest.

Was it the same men?

Oh, how quickly we turn from wonder to violence.