“Consummator of the world: just as that which falls as rain upon the earth and the waters, carelessly, as chance would have it, rises once again from all things, even less visible than before, joyous by the law within, and ascends and is suspended and forms the heavens, so too from out of you there came the new arising of all that had fallen in us, and it domed the world with music.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

“Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”  He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one.

From the gospel of John, chapter 11

I often find myself in a quiet reverie of late, contemplating a passage from a book I have been reading off and on since last spring, “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”, by the poet Rilke. From the context and my reading of the passage, I think it is clear that Rilke was writing about the composer Beethoven. But as I read it, I cannot escape the feeling that it describes my own experience of Jesus. Perhaps, like the high priest Caiaphas, who unbeknownst to himself, prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish people, Rilke was writing about the tender and loving god who has remade all creation out of his own death and resurrection.