The tickets came this week for Fitzroy’s Uganda trip this summer and it immediately caught my eye. The second leg of our flight from Addis Ababa to Entebbe is at 10:10.
For those who know me, that is my number - twice! I am a 10:10 man. It is my birthday. It is John 10 verse 10 when Jesus says, “I have come that they might have life and have it to the full.” It is Fitzroy’s motto. It was this week’s Lectionary reading!
What I did with it this morning was to set it in the Biblical context. John 10 is Jesus discourse after the dialogue and sign of John 9. The fifth of Jesus eight signs of the Kingdom in John’s Gospel is Jesus giving sight to a man born blind.
The chapter break again hinders us a little but we need to see John 10 as a continuation of that story. So… the question was was what does Jesus 10:10 life look like to the man born blind? It is a bit of a clash with the expectations of life in all its fulness in the 21st century.
You can only imagine todays advertising agencies with the 10:10 concept. Bungee jumps or motorbikes over 35 buses might express the spectacular of what we now see as life in its fulness. When Jesus interrupts the blind man’s life with grace, the shepherd gives him protection, provision and presence. It is not that spectacular.
As I look out at my community and share these words of 10:10 I wonder if many of them are feeling that they cannot live this spectacular life. Yet, Jesus 10:10 is an ordinary fulness of who we are born and redeemed to be. One of the keys to unlock this whole two chapter filled passage is John 10:11, “The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”
So, in conclusion I read a poem that I had found this past week in Anne Lamott’s new book Hallelujah Anyway. Here’s the last part: -
…
The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
The poem is by Naomi Shihab Nye and those last words are my longing for myself and my community this week. The shepherd laid down his life for a 10:10 life that is not so much spectacular as ordinary yet full! Like buttonholes we must not forget what we can do.
The fulness of what God created us and Jesus redeemed us to do. Now that is 10:10!
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