{"id":408,"date":"2009-04-09T18:23:56","date_gmt":"2009-04-09T18:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/what-is-it-like-to-let-jesus-s.html"},"modified":"2009-04-09T18:23:56","modified_gmt":"2009-04-09T18:23:56","slug":"what-is-it-like-to-let-jesus-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/what-is-it-like-to-let-jesus-s.html","title":{"rendered":"“What is it like to let Jesus serve you?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fr. Jim Martin poses that question at the America blog<\/a> in light of the painting below. He writes:<\/p>\n

\n

The answer is in the look on St. Peter’s face, in this my favorite painting, by Ford Madox Brown of the scene from the Gospels that is remembered on Holy Thursday.  Peter wants nothing<\/em> to do with this.  It is he, the disciple, who should be washing Jesus’s feet.  And yet that is what we do every day: we let God wash us, care for us and love us, in ways that do not depend on whether we feel “worthy” or not. <\/p>\n

In the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises<\/em> of St. Ignatius Loyola, retreatants are asked first to consider all the many blessings that God has bestowed on him or her.  After a few days of meditating on these blessings, sin comes to the fore.  Why?  Not because Christians are masochistic.  Rather, as one spiritual director once said to me, “In the bright sunshine of God’s love, our shadows become more evident.”  Thus, over time, the retreatant begins to understand himself as a “loved sinner.”  “Depart from me, Lord,” says Peter in another context, “for I am a sinful man.”  But Jesus does just the opposite–he stays with Peter and calls him to follow.<\/p>\n

This is why this remarkable painting has always been so powerful for me.  Not simply for the act of lovingkindness that the Son of God lavishes on Peter, but because of the look on the face of the other disciples, who don’t quite grasp that God’s love is freely given, not earned.  And most especially for the expression on St. Peter’s face–in full recognition of his identity as a “loved sinner.” <\/p>\n

\n\"Jesus<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fr. Jim Martin poses that question at the America blog in light of the painting below. He writes: The answer is in the look on St. Peter’s face, in this my favorite painting, by Ford Madox Brown of the scene from the Gospels that is remembered on Holy Thursday.  Peter wants nothing to do with this.  It…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\n"What is it like to let Jesus serve you?" - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/what-is-it-like-to-let-jesus-s.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""What is it like to let Jesus serve you?" - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Fr. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}