On the Move with Jesus

I’ve been a follower of Jesus for a long time now.  That’s one of the advantages of getting older.

By this point in my life, I could follow Jesus sitting down, you could say.  No problem.

Actually, I learned about Jesus sitting down.  In Sunday School my teachers tried hard to keep me in my seat.  Later we all sat in rows in our catechism classes.  I sat through a lot of bible classes in the Christian schools that I attended along the way.  When I headed to seminary to become a pastor, it seems like that’s all we did.

If I think about it, much of what I’ve learned about Jesus I learned with my backside firmly planted in some chair somewhere.  My posterior has been foundational, you could say.

That’s why I found it interesting to discover that that’s not how Jesus’ disciples learned about him.  They weren’t sitting down, they walked around with him for three years.  Jesus himself was pretty upfront about their format:  both Matthew 8 and Luke 9 record Jesus explaining that “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests,  but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”. 

Jesus never had the luxury of recording a presentation on his laptop for his followers to view at their convenience.  They just talked together as they spent hours walking those dusty Palestine roads.

Granted, that was the pattern in religious education in those days.  It would have seemed weird if Jesus had lined his disciples up in little Formica desk-chairs like we had in seminary.  But I suspect it wasn’t by accident that God sent his son in a peripatetic age where education happened by walking around, not in group chats or Zoom calls.

And I can imagine that that pattern deeply affected their experience of Jesus.  They saw him in the morning before his first cup of coffee, they knew how he laughed when a joke was a little bit too funny, and they knew what his eyes looked like when he was really angry.   Their experience wasn’t limited to a dressed-up video version with the lights just right.  They saw Jesus  as he really was.  

I’m a lot older now than I used to be.  I’ve done a lot of walking since then.  Through decades of marriage to the neighbor girl whose house I used to walk over to.  Through years of going for walks with my children and now grandchildren.  I’ve gone on thousands of walks with the two dogs we’ve had along the way.  And I’ve walked through the doors of almost a dozen different homes that my wife and I have lived in.

During some of those seasons, I was very aware that I was walking with Jesus.  I could tell he was with me, and I treasured that.  At other time, honestly, I was probably distracted or weary enough that I just didn’t look in his direction quite as often as I stumbled along.  In addition, I suspect there were times when he may have just been silent for a while to see if I would keep on heading in his direction anyway.

In any case, I’m very aware that he’s been walking alongside me all the way.  Not just when I’ve sat down for my quiet time with him in the morning, but as I’ve stumbled through the various activities that I’ve found on my calendar for the day.  I’ve seen again and again that, as God promises in Proverbs 3:5,6:  if we trust in the Lord, ”He will make (our) paths straight.”

This is the time of year when our thoughts go back to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.  I encourage you to find a chair to sit quietly with the reality of his presence.  Let him remind you that he’s sitting with you.

And then get up and start walking… with him.