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Bulletin 122 Date : 10th Jan 2008
Did Jesus have a diary?

When we started back to work in the new year, no doubt many of us were grateful to Santa for having brought us a crisp, new diary with absolutely nothing written on any page. How wonderful it would be to keep it that way but sadly most of us will have bombarded the pages with many entries already.

This made me wonder whether Jesus would have used a diary. Did He think and plan ahead or was His agenda set in a different way from ours. If He did have a diary, I wonder if it might look like this:-

Monday am : Write the parable of the Prodigal Son
Monday pm : Visit Simon Peter’s mother-in-law
Tuesday am : Practice my reading for the synagogue (Isaiah 61)
Tuesday pm : Prepare the Sermon on the Mount
Tuesday eve : Tea with Zacchaeus
etc. etc.

It strikes me as I read the pages of the gospels that Jesus had a clear agenda but with no fixed dates. At Capernaum he was met by Jairus, the leader of the local synagogue and immediately responded to his plea for help (Mark 5:22). En-route to Jairus’ house, a woman interrupts Him, again seeking healing (Mark 5:25). At Jericho, Jesus spots a tax collector peering down from his tree and they went for tea together (Luke 19:5). I really can’t see Jesus as someone who would first consult His diary before agreeing to these appointments. It seems His day-to-day agenda was set by the needs of the people around Him.

And yet, there is a sense in which Jesus had a very clear understanding of what had to be done and was prepared to forego lesser demands. In Luke 9:51 Jesus ‘set His face to Jerusalem’. He knew exactly where he was going and what trials awaited Him there.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) both a priest and a Levite walked passed a man who had been robbed. Was it a fear of becoming ritually unclean or was it that they looked in their diaries, saw an appointment looming and hurried off, leaving the man to fend for himself? Jesus’ command to the lawyer whose question had prompted the parable was not ‘just check your diary to see if you can move appointments to help those in need’. He pointed to the example for the Samaritan who dropped everything in order to help and said, ‘go and do likewise’ (v37).

I hope that during this year I don’t get so bound by my diary that I fail to spend time with those in need. I hope I can follow Jesus’ example of stopping to heal the woman who touched His garment, even though there is a more pressing engagement and people are impatiently waiting for me to come to them.

Happy New Year to you all.