There is, in Jewish texts, the notion that the Shekinah–i.e. the physical, feminine, winged. divine presence (often equated with Wisdom)–takes up residence in places, and over or even in humans, speaking with the humans face-to-face (as with Moses or with the whole of Israel on Sinai), and even speaking through prophets. What if, I asked myself once, the words “Before Abraham was, I am” were the words of the Shekhina, spoken by Jesus? A person, seeing Jesus speak, would think: He (Jesus) is saying that He existed before Abraham, when–in fact, the Shekhina was saying that she existed before Abraham, but bystanders would not have been able to distinguish between the speakers: i.e. the Shekhinah and the pre-crucified Jesus. Such an understanding/interpretation of course would not be theologically standard, … but still I wonder sometimes.
Mmm hmm, in fact, surely the entire point is there are things we cannot understand.
I don’t think that’s what the OP video was saying.
it is certainly deeper than i can fathom… but at least it certainly means this:
in some sense, that what Christ “wanted” (“willed”) in that moment was in fact different than what his Father wanted (or “willed”).
hence, “not what i want, but what you want.”
But of course, the fact that he also said, not my will, but yours, meant that he was submitting and obeying or choosing to follow his father’s desire, rather than his own.
So simultaneously, in another sense, his will still remained “to do the will of him who sent me”, but in another real sense, his desire was obviously to avoid the cross.
i find it one of the deepest and most striking passages in the Bible… right up there next to God, incarnate, praying on the cross, “my God, why have you forsaken me…” to think we are praying to a God who literally knows what it feels like to be abandoned by God.
I truly enjoyed this meditation. Yes, indeed, Emmanuel.
Thanks.
Godly submission is maybe because of love? And loving trust. We are not going to get our heads around Gethsemane nor several other trinitarian mysteries, but maybe Jesus in his humanness and in the immediacy of his overwhelming suffering was submitting in love and trusting in his Father’s will above his own ‘short-sighted’ will in the existential moment.
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