Main news for 14 March 2021

Sometimes the fullness of God's life in Jesus appears in an unusual and unexpected way. The crowd is ready to seize Him, but He somehow passes through it. Perhaps unnoticed, perhaps invulnerable. Perhaps both at once. The evangelist does not explain exactly how He manages to pass through the aggressive crowd. Most simply, He passed beside it.

He was moving in another dimension, in another space, in the space of His Kingdom, which was never closed to Him, even when outwardly He did not differ from other people. They did not see Him not because He used some special means of hiding Himself, like a fairy-tale cap of invisibility, but because He moved where those pursuing Him could not enter, though they still continued to see Him.

Much as after His resurrection He was visible to His disciples going to Emmaus while He was in the Kingdom, whose boundary with the untransformed world ran along the very road on which they were walking, so that He was on one side of the boundary and they on the other. As soon as He moved away from the boundary into the depth of the Kingdom, He disappeared from the apostles' sight. But near the boundary He was visible even to those who had not yet entered the Kingdom. So the crowd too could see Him without entering His Kingdom. But it was impossible to touch Him or seize Him.

Such invulnerability seems strange against the background of everything that happened later, when He was nevertheless arrested, tried, and executed. If He could become invulnerable to the crowd then, what kept Him from doing the same later? Technically, nothing. The words He spoke in the garden of Gethsemane about angelic legions were not an allegory at all; they were a statement of fact, an indication of a fully real possibility, which He could use only if He had decided to violate the will of His heavenly Father.

There was nothing forced or inevitable in Jesus' life in the sense in which such things exist for us. His life was determined only by His choice and by the decisions of His Father, which He accepted and perceived as His own. He could not fail to go to the cross, not because He had nowhere to go, but because otherwise He would not have accomplished what He came into the world to do. But then, in Nazareth, it was still too early for Him to die. And He left. He left the crowd, passing by the road of His Kingdom. That road, passing through our fallen world, then helped Him escape the hands of the hostile crowd. Later it led Him to the cross.