“You are the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand this?”

You look, and you live. You do not first understand, and then live. The teacher came carrying everything he knew and was handed two things he could do nothing with: a birth he could not perform and a cross he could only behold. And even the looking is not the last small work left to his credit — the eyes that turn to the lifted Son are opened by the same Spirit who blows where He wills, the birth of water and the Spirit, not of the will of the flesh, not of any man's deciding. It is given the whole way down.