The Boy in the Desert

     There is a scene from Ben Hur, a movie about biblical events in the first centuty, which moves nearly everyone who sees it.  Ben Hur is being roughly taken by some Roman centurions across some desert land.  He is choking with thirst but his captors will not help him.  When the travelers come to an oasis, a brown-skinned boy of about twelve leans down and gives Ben Hur the life-saving water he craves.  We see only the boy's back, not His face.  But we know who it is.  A centurion approaches to strike Him.  Their eyes meet very briefly, the mounted centurion and the boy in the desert.  The centurion sees something in the boy's eyes which men and women have been seeing for over two thousand years in their best dreams and their best moments.  Whatever it is that the centurion sees in the boy's eyes makes him back off, though he seems to understand that the boy does not despise him, means him no harm, has no visible means of doing him harm anyway, and in fact somehow seems to be quietly blessing him.  We Christians properly concern ourselves with churches and denominations, theories and dogma, the details of communion, whether it is best to have total immersion in baptism or if a sprinkle on the head will do, or how to tithe when bill collectors are knocking on the door, or the order of worship.   But can anyone fail to feel that the brown-skinned boy in the desert, coming to the resecue of a suffering man, touches the heart while the powder-dry details discussed in church board meetings can be deadly dull, even if they are necessary?  Or that the boy become a man and dying on a Cross for the sake of suffering, sinful humanity  trumps any interest we may have in the comings and goings of all the deacons, elders, priests, preachers or popes there ever were?  When we finally see Him  will we be concerned with whether to have mass in Latin or English or what some 'church leader's' slant on the meaning of Communion may be?  Would we choose to dig to the depths of Calvin's theories on Total Depravity if we knew we were about to meet the boy in the desert?  Don't all those mundane concerns, even if important in the world we inhabit, fade into insignificance when faced with Him about whom they exist?  Is there not good reason to envy the rough Centurion?  After all, he actually did meet the Boy in the Desert, and saw directly into those eyes, and for an instant perhaps he knew that he had seen the windows into Heaven.      When I was about twelve I remember squirming in church and playing around with the tie my mother made me wear,  and wishing that she and my father had just let me sleep in my nice warm bed while they went to church with my blessing.   I have in fact come to appreciate churches more as an adult than I did then, but I would walk through the door and out of any church in a flash to look face to face into the eyes of the boy in the desert.