Scarifying…Enabling Healthy Growth

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been scarifying my lawn. My electric scarifier, with vicious looking metal blades that spin round, digs into the lawn and removes significant amounts moss and dead thatch (brown stuff beneath the green grass)

By scarifying my lawn, I encourage the growth of new grass, and enable water and nutrients to reach the grass roots…

As a parent and a teacher my challenge was always to get the balance right between praising and encouraging, and correcting and reproving. Children who are only praised and never corrected can be spoilt; children who are corrected and never praised can be abused… If we love our children we will seek to get the balance right.

Getting this balance is at the heart of a healthy society and Christian teaching.

King David says: ‘Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.’

His prayer is that his ‘offensive ways’ should be searched out and removed – scarified; only then can he progress… If I’m to grow, enable nutrients and water to reach my roots, be my best self, I must first be scarified.

In the events of Holy Week…

…Peter says to Jesus, ‘I’m ready to go with you to prison and to death’. Jesus says, ‘Before the cock crows you’ll deny me three times.’ Jesus says that Peter will be, ‘sifted like wheat’; it’s the principle of scarifying. In the coming hours and days painful blades would cut into Peter to remove the debris, so that in the future he could grow strong and healthy.

…In Jesus’ trial the authorities try to dig the dirt, accuse Him of various crimes; they try to scarify Him… Pilate concludes, ‘He has done nothing to deserve death.’  Unsuccessful moral and spiritual scarifying leads to a brutal physical scarifying…

Musing… Jesus’ scarifying… Peter’s scarifying… David’s scarifying… My need for scarifying… ‘Search me O God.’