Friday, December 10, 2004
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
12.08.04 Joy! Joy! Joy!
Joy! Joy! Joy!
It’s a Christmas theme for sure.
It may be, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.”
It could even be a 12-day long lavish flurry of exotic gifts from a love-blinded suitor.
However it’s packaged, joy is one of the promises of Christmas. It has always been. The message of the Angel the shepherds saw was, “I bring you Good News of great joy!”
Not all who hear this agree with it. Christmas, many believe, is a tale of contradictions. Rumors of adultery. Near scandal surrounding the shady nature of his Mother’s pregnancy. An oppressive census that left Jesus Family virtually homeless on the night of his birth and for years later. Skeptics can build a very strong case for the dark side of the birth narrative. If this is not a tale of contradictions it is certainly filled with paradox.
One of the finest thinkers and writers of our era has opened my eyes to the profound nature of joy and helped me understand how, to our limited vision, it is paradoxical. In the process he has made its meaning for us, particularly at Christmas, virtually boundless.
C.S. Lewis suggests that, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” I understand “serious” here to be “weighty.” “Joy,” in the ultimate sense, as God understands it, you could say, is “heavy” stuff. (To help distinguish between our finite joy, and what Lewis is speaking of, I will use quotations and a capital J whenever referring to “Joy” as he perceived it.) The Christmas story, taken realistically, is “heavy stuff.” A much different event than is suggested by the embellished, sanitized narrative we’ve grown up with. Lewis helps us get inside the paradox of Christmas by taking us beyond what we are inclined to understand joy as, in purely material, here-and-now terms. Speaking of this “weighty,” “Joy,” he writes, “It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me: Milton’s ‘enormous bliss’ of Eden comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation of course, of desire, but desire for what? … before I knew what I desired the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had happened to me was insignificant in comparison.” It was, he said, “surprise.” There was a “sense,” with it, “of incalculable importance.” “Joy,” he notes, was “something quite different from ordinary life … even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension.’” I desired,” he writes, “with almost sickening intensity something never to be described … and then, … found myself at the very moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.” This was, for Lewis a sensual experience that “must be sharply distinguished from Happiness and Pleasure. “Joy,” in my sense, “has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. The paradox of it is that “it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.” You can readily see how highly and “wholly other,” this thing he’d tasted was for him in his insistence that, “I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.” “At once I knew, he confesses, “that to ‘have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.”
“Surprised by Joy,” is the autobiographical story of Lewis spiritual journey. It is filled with accounts of his encounters with this “Joy.” “Stabs of joy,” he called them.
The reader of Lewis story inevitably recognizes that it is an account of encounters, which, in the end, lead to a transforming final engagement with the infinite. “Joy,” in his narrative, is recognized as a “taste” of; “pointers” to; something “other and outer,” something “other dimensional,” and ultimate. Each encounter is filled with a new and equally compelling sense of this “other;” this cosmic reality, which alone has in it what all of our longings desire. “Enormous bliss,” it is, as we’ve seen, completely distinct from and more desirable than any happiness or pleasure we know. It is a sensation of desire, of longing that is unsatisfied in us. The longing is almost sickening in its intensity. We cannot define it. It is mysterious even ominous. It seems at times to have an unhappiness or grief about it but “of a kind we want.” Everything else is now insignificant by comparison. To have “Joy,” again is, in Lewis understanding, the supreme and only object of desire.
Every time I read or think about “Joy” in this sense I feel the “longing” Lewis is describing. There is a reality in the universe that entices us, by these “stabs of ‘Joy,’” toward it. The weight of it, its intensity, its enormousness, is overwhelming, even painful to experience, as well as to long for. I think I’ve experienced it. Driving in the coastal mountain canyons North of Los Angeles I’ve felt it. As the winding road breaks out of its rocky walls the vast seascape of the Pacific flashes into view. Myriad tiny diamonds glimmering on an endless sea of brilliance reflecting the light of countless suns. Ecstasy! I want to stake out a claim on the land that provides such a vision. I want to hold that moment forever. But even as I reach out to hold onto it I remember – I grieve – that it cannot be, for every moment, what it is in that moment. To hold it would be to make it familiar and finally ordinary. The longing is not for it but for something of which it is only a splendid reflection. I’ve felt it reading a book. Stories of the companionship of a man with his dog leave me weak with longing for an affection that no creature can fully provide. My tireless longing is that, somewhere, with someone, such love can be found. There is grief for its elusiveness but the painful desire to find it moves me to weep. The longing is so intense. The boy who tells the story of inseparable friends in the “The Sandlot,” is me. I feel their terror at the beast. I revel in their quest to overcome their adversary. I cheer Benny with every stride as he outruns the “Beast.” My heart swells with joy when his loyalty and courage prevail and the “Beast” becomes a friend. My longing for happy endings is, for a moment, satisfied. The desire for a true and lasting love in which loneliness will one day be deposed in the reign of true, and lasting friendship is for a moment relieved. A fearsome ogre of a man turns out to be consummately human. Sidelined from his beloved baseball and blinded by a wild pitch, he is just another guy who only wants a friend; someone who will listen and enjoy with him his telling of a life when baseball was really all that it had in it to be. Benny’s loyalty to his friends, his game, and his courage opened the door into the old man’s solitude and gave him a taste of what he longed for. When, in the end, Benny, “The Jet,” steals home – I get teary recalling it – I dance with his friend as he shouts ecstatically, “The Jet stole home! The Jet stole home!” The moment has something more in it than it is in itself. It has ecstasy. It also has desire. Desire that somewhere, sometime, the ultimate conquest will be played out in the kind of cosmic proportions that will forever satisfy our longing for true courage, and loyalty, friendship, compassion and the freedom from ourselves that empowers us to revel in the triumph of another. I felt “Joy,” on the shores of a beautiful lake in Canada deep in the blended forests of South Eastern Ontario. Another never-to-be-forgotten week with Students, a Staff made up of some very special friends, and our Lord, was coming to an end. It was truly bittersweet. We were worshipping on the lakeshore. There was not a ripple anywhere. Pristine in its morning calm it seemed like a mirror of every beautiful thing around us. I felt the love of my friends. The admiration of the Students who’d boisterously demonstrated their appreciation the night before still warmed my heart. It seemed as if it really could not ever be any better than this. We were singing of Jesus unmatched love. “Like a rose, trampled on the ground, you took the fall, and thought of me, above all!” Tears flowed freely. I wanted, like the friends of Jesus on the Mountain where, for a moment they saw his celestial splendor, to build a sanctuary and stay there forever. But the poignancy of the moment was also the pain of it. For I knew that this was only a taste. With lumps in our hearts we would say our good byes soon. And this would, also, be a memory. But we had tasted something we could never forget and would never be happy until we had tasted again in its fullness, ultimately and finally.
Lewis is right. “Joy,” is besides its “enormous bliss,” a “longing.” A longing so painful yet so powerful that we can never be satisfied until we’ve found it.
This, I believe, is the “Joy,” of which the angel spoke that first Christmas night.
Nowhere is it more vividly demonstrated than in the life of Mary, Jesus’ Mother.
Imagine what it must have been like to have Gabriel himself appear, right before her eyes, in her own home. Surprise! Bliss! Other dimensional! What words do we have to describe even what we imagine it being? We are tempted, in light of the angel’s reassuring, “Do not be afraid,” to think that she was terrified at his appearance. No, she was “troubled at his words.” “Mary,” Luke, the story teller says, was “greatly troubled, because she wondered what kind of greeting this might be.” To be surprised by the celestial was for Mary what Lewis says is peculiar to being surprised by “Joy.” It is shrouded in mystery. To be in the presence of the celestial is to be exposed to something beyond the ordinary. Hearing the voice of angels, even when they tell us God, “favors us highly;” that he is “with us,” can be terrifying. We do not understand it. What we do not understand we fear. Mary’s “Joy,” in this heavenly moment was at once “bliss,” and terrifying in its “otherness.” This is the paradox of “Joy.” She trembled as she marveled.
From that day on Mary’s life would be filled with “stabs of Joy.” Bliss intermingled with more and more experiences of something from another dimension; wholly other. Rapturous, at times, yet fleeting and painful in its elusiveness. Her joy was unrestrained as she sang, “my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” In her ecstasy she felt, for a moment that she understood the meaning of God’s “favor.” “From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me … .”
Mary’s story is no different from anyone else’s though. She had to return to reality. She came home to find her soon-to-be Husband preparing to quietly dissolve their engagement. He had been completely faithful to her. He’d respected her virginity. Hearing of her pregnancy broke his heart. He wasn’t going to make a scene. He loved her too much for that. But she’d betrayed him. Her story about immaculate conception was as difficult for him to believe as it is for us. The crushing weight of his rejection fell on her heart with such massive force she felt she would die. “Joy,” was gone. Is this the “favor” of God? Is this what God brings when he comes near? Her heart was ready to break with grief!
But the angel appeared again. This time to Joseph. Accepting the celestial visitor’s explanation that, yes, God had, by his own hand, placed his life within Mary, Joseph immediately took her to be his Wife. He loved her. His love went beyond the limits of ordinary love. It embraced her despite the cost. Whether his reputation might suffer from his choice he loved her anyway. The “Joy,” she’d tasted as she pondered the favor of God had surprised her again. Now in the generous, love and restraint of a good man, she felt it. Yet just as quickly it was gone. Gone in the clatter of a multitude of questions. “Why could the angel not have come to Joseph when he came to me? For that matter, couldn’t God have saved the miracle until Joseph and I were married? Why this disgrace? Why this maelstrom of pain and relief?” There was so much that just didn’t make sense. It was agony to feel Joseph’s rejection. It might have been prevented had the “Most High” done a few things differently. On the other hand, could it be that she understood the generosity of Joseph’s love more clearly, having seen the look of hurt on his face at the news of her inexplicable pregnancy? Would she have understood such love had she not seen his agony at the thought of being betrayed by what he believed to be a true love? Perhaps her own despair in the moment of abandonment gave her a keener sense of the nature of love that so readily forgives. Could “Joy,” be both excruciating pain and enormous ecstasy? Would she, really, want it to be any different?
Her next “stab of ‘Joy’” would be even more revealing.
Little is known about the events that followed. We know, of course, of the Roman census. The story of the journey to Bethlehem Joseph’s hometown is the stuff of legend. And we know about the starkly vivid detail in the backdrop for Mary’s first encounter with childbirth. The birth, itself, is filled with paradox. This baby was God’s child. Could not the “Most High,” the one “who rules in the Kingdoms of men,” as he himself declared, have used a bit of his leverage to postpone the census? Did it have to be now? The time of year; the distance; the sheer mass of people going to the same town; it was all so unfortunate. We’ve so sanitized the story that we’ve lost all sense of what it was like. Childbirth, under any circumstances, is as painful as it gets. Mary had to be cold. The stable may have been warmed somewhat by the overheated bodies of the many travel weary beasts crowded into it. But cold winds capriciously played around this open nitch in the hillside. No amount of straw could make the ground as soft as she needed it to be. This was not the place or the time for anyone to have a baby. But, yes, it was the time. She did give birth. There, that night, bone tired, and aching from the rigors of walking, and riding a donkey, for endless hours, while pregnant, this little girl had a baby. Any of you who’ve witnessed childbirth know how desperately painful it is. You also know that, if ever excruciating pain and ecstasy are common threads in the fiber of “Joy,” it is here. How someone’s tears of agony can so suddenly; so dramatically become cries of “Joy” is a mystery. This is paradox. Would Mary; would any Mother really want it to be any different. Would their love be as dramatically different from all other human loves were it not so costly?
Travail and birth, are, perhaps, of all our earthly experiences, the most purely “Joyous.” Pain resolved in sheer “bliss.” From that day onward Mary’s life was characterized by this mysterious paradox. Twice Luke tells us that she “kept in her heart her personal record of all that went on and pondered its meaning.” In the Temple eight days after the baby’s birth, a prophet raised her soul to ecstasy with his words of promise, and then crushed her heart ‘til it ached insufferably with his stern warning of political intrigue, and swords, and the piercing of her already scarred heart. The surprise visit of a distinguished, regal entourage from a far-off land, determined to affirm the royalty of her Son and pay homage to him with their obeisance and lavish gifts, was turned tragic by the barbaric murder of dozens of baby boys, and her, and her Family’s frantic flight to safety in a foreign country. There were certainly moments of pure “Joy,” watching this baby grow; learning with him; seeing his delight with the simplest things. Noticing how he loved people and how they loved him in return. Feeling pride at his exceptional understanding of life, its simplicities, along with its complexities. He loved his Father, God, with such sincerity and deep devotion. But, for her, so much mystery surrounded this Father. At times she felt her Son loved him more than her and she wondered why. She wondered why it mattered so much to her. There were anxious moments. He got lost once. His Father died. How would she have gotten along without him? Then he left home. Yes his siblings were there. But how would she get along without him? She heard of his fame. What “Joy,” to see him now! A man with a heart like his was a rare find. He came home for a visit. “Joy” filled her heart seeing him again! But they hated him! The people of his hometown tried to throw him off the cliff. What does it all mean?
The answer came wrapped in travail far more painful than any human experience before or since. The paradox was resolved in ultimate barbarism. The crucifixion of Mary’s Son answered the question, “What does all of this mean?” She was there. She witnessed the whole thing. No labor ever hurt like this. Agony, the wrenching spasms of a breaking heart, tore at her until there were no more tears. “How could they do this?!” He noticed her that day in the way he used to. He cared for her. He asked his friend to look out for her. She felt a slight brush of the “Joy,” when, in the past, he told her he loved her. But the sweetness of it was quickly drowned in his piercing cry from the cross. He was gone. Could she have thought, in that terrible moment, that Gabriel’s promise had been a sick joke played by a sadistic deity that found pleasure in another’s agony? There wasn’t even a trace of joy to be found anywhere in her story. The skeptics were right. It was all “a tale told by a fool.”
Some fifty-five or so hours later she was huddled, with some of her Son’s friends, in an upstairs room on the back streets of Jerusalem. The doors were locked. Any friend of her Son was wanted now. The authorities were bent on ridding all Israel of the least suggestion that this man was anything but a troublemaker. Night had fallen. It was dark. Everything was dark. They had hoped. They didn’t hope now. What did all of this mean? Someone said they’d seen him alive. They were quite adamant about it. Peter and John had gone to the tomb and found it empty. Mary, the one from Magdala, insisted she’d seen him. She said he told her he was, “going to his Father and our Father; to our God and his God.” Could it be? Oh, if only … And then he was there! The doors were still shut. But there he was. Jesus was standing in the room. He was alive. A songwriter reliving it all in a moment of inspiration captures Mary’s “Joy” powerfully. “Suddenly the room was filled with strange and sweet perfume! Light that came from everywhere drove shadows from the room! He stood there beside me with his arms held open wide. I fell down on my knees and just clung to him and cried. He’s alive! Heaven’s gates are opened wide! He’s alive!” This was “Joy!” There were traitors in that room; friends who had fled from her Son in his darkest hour. They had betrayed him. But he had not forgotten them. He had come to find them. “Guilt and my confusion,” the songwriter exults, “disappeared in sweet release. And every fear I’d ever felt just melted into peace!”
A travail beyond all travail, God crushed under the weight of all sin and evil, dieing, heartbroken by the guilt and shame of all humankind, has come out from under it, throwing it all off, throwing off death itself. The race has been reborn. ‘Til that night Mary had only tasted “Joy.” Her experiences of it had been as painful as they were blissful. But the pain was of the sort that she could not completely forsake. She couldn’t understand it. But neither could she take another path. Now she understood. Joseph’s agony at her apparent infidelity; the dreadful pain at the birth of her child; the terrorized Families around Bethlehem; her anxiety on the journey to Egypt; the fear that she’d lost her Son on the Eve of his Bar Mitzvah; the despair at the foot of the cross; would she ever truly know the magnanimous love of this God man whom she had birthed if she had not seen how severely his coming clashed with a world gone mad? On this day of “Joy” beyond words she saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt something beyond even the angelic presence. She caught a glimpse of the celestial. Her Son, at once God and man; splendid, loving, regal, gracious, triumphant, gentle, someone in whom the paradox is resolved, who though dead yet lives. Never again would there be any confusion for her. She knew now, even as she was sure this Son of hers knew her, that the path “Joy” lead her to was the path to her own immortality. And in that moment she loved her Son and his mysterious Father so much that she was content in knowing that, now, “all generations will call him blessed.”
This is the “Joy,” the angel promised to the shepherds that first Christmas night.
Lewis acknowledges, in the closing paragraphs of his story, that his experiences of “Joy,” became less important to him once he became a convert to Christianity. They were not less frequent necessarily; just less important. He explains. “Joy, … as a state of (his) own mind was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in (his) thoughts.” “When we are lost in the woods,” he says, “the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, ‘Look!’ The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering gold. ‘We would be at Jerusalem.’” This Jerusalem, I assure you, is the New Jerusalem, spoken of in the final paragraphs of the Bible. It is here that all sensation finds its fullest experience. Here all vision; every color of a new and infinite spectrum fills the heart with a wonder of which all shimmering earthly seas are but a dim reflection. Here the fragrance of infinite scents soothes every cell of the glorified body, each in its own timeless moment of endless ecstasy. Sounds soft and sonorous echo through one’s whole being soothingly, stirringly. The gentle touch of unbridled strength brings a peace that only consummate love provides. Here, in this wonder filled place, we are at home!
This is the Christmas promise, made through a Hebrew Prophet named Isaiah, hundreds of years before that first Christmas. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given. The government will be on his shoulders. He will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.”
It’s a Christmas theme for sure.
It may be, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.”
It could even be a 12-day long lavish flurry of exotic gifts from a love-blinded suitor.
However it’s packaged, joy is one of the promises of Christmas. It has always been. The message of the Angel the shepherds saw was, “I bring you Good News of great joy!”
Not all who hear this agree with it. Christmas, many believe, is a tale of contradictions. Rumors of adultery. Near scandal surrounding the shady nature of his Mother’s pregnancy. An oppressive census that left Jesus Family virtually homeless on the night of his birth and for years later. Skeptics can build a very strong case for the dark side of the birth narrative. If this is not a tale of contradictions it is certainly filled with paradox.
One of the finest thinkers and writers of our era has opened my eyes to the profound nature of joy and helped me understand how, to our limited vision, it is paradoxical. In the process he has made its meaning for us, particularly at Christmas, virtually boundless.
C.S. Lewis suggests that, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” I understand “serious” here to be “weighty.” “Joy,” in the ultimate sense, as God understands it, you could say, is “heavy” stuff. (To help distinguish between our finite joy, and what Lewis is speaking of, I will use quotations and a capital J whenever referring to “Joy” as he perceived it.) The Christmas story, taken realistically, is “heavy stuff.” A much different event than is suggested by the embellished, sanitized narrative we’ve grown up with. Lewis helps us get inside the paradox of Christmas by taking us beyond what we are inclined to understand joy as, in purely material, here-and-now terms. Speaking of this “weighty,” “Joy,” he writes, “It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me: Milton’s ‘enormous bliss’ of Eden comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation of course, of desire, but desire for what? … before I knew what I desired the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had happened to me was insignificant in comparison.” It was, he said, “surprise.” There was a “sense,” with it, “of incalculable importance.” “Joy,” he notes, was “something quite different from ordinary life … even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension.’” I desired,” he writes, “with almost sickening intensity something never to be described … and then, … found myself at the very moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.” This was, for Lewis a sensual experience that “must be sharply distinguished from Happiness and Pleasure. “Joy,” in my sense, “has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. The paradox of it is that “it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.” You can readily see how highly and “wholly other,” this thing he’d tasted was for him in his insistence that, “I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.” “At once I knew, he confesses, “that to ‘have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.”
“Surprised by Joy,” is the autobiographical story of Lewis spiritual journey. It is filled with accounts of his encounters with this “Joy.” “Stabs of joy,” he called them.
The reader of Lewis story inevitably recognizes that it is an account of encounters, which, in the end, lead to a transforming final engagement with the infinite. “Joy,” in his narrative, is recognized as a “taste” of; “pointers” to; something “other and outer,” something “other dimensional,” and ultimate. Each encounter is filled with a new and equally compelling sense of this “other;” this cosmic reality, which alone has in it what all of our longings desire. “Enormous bliss,” it is, as we’ve seen, completely distinct from and more desirable than any happiness or pleasure we know. It is a sensation of desire, of longing that is unsatisfied in us. The longing is almost sickening in its intensity. We cannot define it. It is mysterious even ominous. It seems at times to have an unhappiness or grief about it but “of a kind we want.” Everything else is now insignificant by comparison. To have “Joy,” again is, in Lewis understanding, the supreme and only object of desire.
Every time I read or think about “Joy” in this sense I feel the “longing” Lewis is describing. There is a reality in the universe that entices us, by these “stabs of ‘Joy,’” toward it. The weight of it, its intensity, its enormousness, is overwhelming, even painful to experience, as well as to long for. I think I’ve experienced it. Driving in the coastal mountain canyons North of Los Angeles I’ve felt it. As the winding road breaks out of its rocky walls the vast seascape of the Pacific flashes into view. Myriad tiny diamonds glimmering on an endless sea of brilliance reflecting the light of countless suns. Ecstasy! I want to stake out a claim on the land that provides such a vision. I want to hold that moment forever. But even as I reach out to hold onto it I remember – I grieve – that it cannot be, for every moment, what it is in that moment. To hold it would be to make it familiar and finally ordinary. The longing is not for it but for something of which it is only a splendid reflection. I’ve felt it reading a book. Stories of the companionship of a man with his dog leave me weak with longing for an affection that no creature can fully provide. My tireless longing is that, somewhere, with someone, such love can be found. There is grief for its elusiveness but the painful desire to find it moves me to weep. The longing is so intense. The boy who tells the story of inseparable friends in the “The Sandlot,” is me. I feel their terror at the beast. I revel in their quest to overcome their adversary. I cheer Benny with every stride as he outruns the “Beast.” My heart swells with joy when his loyalty and courage prevail and the “Beast” becomes a friend. My longing for happy endings is, for a moment, satisfied. The desire for a true and lasting love in which loneliness will one day be deposed in the reign of true, and lasting friendship is for a moment relieved. A fearsome ogre of a man turns out to be consummately human. Sidelined from his beloved baseball and blinded by a wild pitch, he is just another guy who only wants a friend; someone who will listen and enjoy with him his telling of a life when baseball was really all that it had in it to be. Benny’s loyalty to his friends, his game, and his courage opened the door into the old man’s solitude and gave him a taste of what he longed for. When, in the end, Benny, “The Jet,” steals home – I get teary recalling it – I dance with his friend as he shouts ecstatically, “The Jet stole home! The Jet stole home!” The moment has something more in it than it is in itself. It has ecstasy. It also has desire. Desire that somewhere, sometime, the ultimate conquest will be played out in the kind of cosmic proportions that will forever satisfy our longing for true courage, and loyalty, friendship, compassion and the freedom from ourselves that empowers us to revel in the triumph of another. I felt “Joy,” on the shores of a beautiful lake in Canada deep in the blended forests of South Eastern Ontario. Another never-to-be-forgotten week with Students, a Staff made up of some very special friends, and our Lord, was coming to an end. It was truly bittersweet. We were worshipping on the lakeshore. There was not a ripple anywhere. Pristine in its morning calm it seemed like a mirror of every beautiful thing around us. I felt the love of my friends. The admiration of the Students who’d boisterously demonstrated their appreciation the night before still warmed my heart. It seemed as if it really could not ever be any better than this. We were singing of Jesus unmatched love. “Like a rose, trampled on the ground, you took the fall, and thought of me, above all!” Tears flowed freely. I wanted, like the friends of Jesus on the Mountain where, for a moment they saw his celestial splendor, to build a sanctuary and stay there forever. But the poignancy of the moment was also the pain of it. For I knew that this was only a taste. With lumps in our hearts we would say our good byes soon. And this would, also, be a memory. But we had tasted something we could never forget and would never be happy until we had tasted again in its fullness, ultimately and finally.
Lewis is right. “Joy,” is besides its “enormous bliss,” a “longing.” A longing so painful yet so powerful that we can never be satisfied until we’ve found it.
This, I believe, is the “Joy,” of which the angel spoke that first Christmas night.
Nowhere is it more vividly demonstrated than in the life of Mary, Jesus’ Mother.
Imagine what it must have been like to have Gabriel himself appear, right before her eyes, in her own home. Surprise! Bliss! Other dimensional! What words do we have to describe even what we imagine it being? We are tempted, in light of the angel’s reassuring, “Do not be afraid,” to think that she was terrified at his appearance. No, she was “troubled at his words.” “Mary,” Luke, the story teller says, was “greatly troubled, because she wondered what kind of greeting this might be.” To be surprised by the celestial was for Mary what Lewis says is peculiar to being surprised by “Joy.” It is shrouded in mystery. To be in the presence of the celestial is to be exposed to something beyond the ordinary. Hearing the voice of angels, even when they tell us God, “favors us highly;” that he is “with us,” can be terrifying. We do not understand it. What we do not understand we fear. Mary’s “Joy,” in this heavenly moment was at once “bliss,” and terrifying in its “otherness.” This is the paradox of “Joy.” She trembled as she marveled.
From that day on Mary’s life would be filled with “stabs of Joy.” Bliss intermingled with more and more experiences of something from another dimension; wholly other. Rapturous, at times, yet fleeting and painful in its elusiveness. Her joy was unrestrained as she sang, “my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” In her ecstasy she felt, for a moment that she understood the meaning of God’s “favor.” “From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me … .”
Mary’s story is no different from anyone else’s though. She had to return to reality. She came home to find her soon-to-be Husband preparing to quietly dissolve their engagement. He had been completely faithful to her. He’d respected her virginity. Hearing of her pregnancy broke his heart. He wasn’t going to make a scene. He loved her too much for that. But she’d betrayed him. Her story about immaculate conception was as difficult for him to believe as it is for us. The crushing weight of his rejection fell on her heart with such massive force she felt she would die. “Joy,” was gone. Is this the “favor” of God? Is this what God brings when he comes near? Her heart was ready to break with grief!
But the angel appeared again. This time to Joseph. Accepting the celestial visitor’s explanation that, yes, God had, by his own hand, placed his life within Mary, Joseph immediately took her to be his Wife. He loved her. His love went beyond the limits of ordinary love. It embraced her despite the cost. Whether his reputation might suffer from his choice he loved her anyway. The “Joy,” she’d tasted as she pondered the favor of God had surprised her again. Now in the generous, love and restraint of a good man, she felt it. Yet just as quickly it was gone. Gone in the clatter of a multitude of questions. “Why could the angel not have come to Joseph when he came to me? For that matter, couldn’t God have saved the miracle until Joseph and I were married? Why this disgrace? Why this maelstrom of pain and relief?” There was so much that just didn’t make sense. It was agony to feel Joseph’s rejection. It might have been prevented had the “Most High” done a few things differently. On the other hand, could it be that she understood the generosity of Joseph’s love more clearly, having seen the look of hurt on his face at the news of her inexplicable pregnancy? Would she have understood such love had she not seen his agony at the thought of being betrayed by what he believed to be a true love? Perhaps her own despair in the moment of abandonment gave her a keener sense of the nature of love that so readily forgives. Could “Joy,” be both excruciating pain and enormous ecstasy? Would she, really, want it to be any different?
Her next “stab of ‘Joy’” would be even more revealing.
Little is known about the events that followed. We know, of course, of the Roman census. The story of the journey to Bethlehem Joseph’s hometown is the stuff of legend. And we know about the starkly vivid detail in the backdrop for Mary’s first encounter with childbirth. The birth, itself, is filled with paradox. This baby was God’s child. Could not the “Most High,” the one “who rules in the Kingdoms of men,” as he himself declared, have used a bit of his leverage to postpone the census? Did it have to be now? The time of year; the distance; the sheer mass of people going to the same town; it was all so unfortunate. We’ve so sanitized the story that we’ve lost all sense of what it was like. Childbirth, under any circumstances, is as painful as it gets. Mary had to be cold. The stable may have been warmed somewhat by the overheated bodies of the many travel weary beasts crowded into it. But cold winds capriciously played around this open nitch in the hillside. No amount of straw could make the ground as soft as she needed it to be. This was not the place or the time for anyone to have a baby. But, yes, it was the time. She did give birth. There, that night, bone tired, and aching from the rigors of walking, and riding a donkey, for endless hours, while pregnant, this little girl had a baby. Any of you who’ve witnessed childbirth know how desperately painful it is. You also know that, if ever excruciating pain and ecstasy are common threads in the fiber of “Joy,” it is here. How someone’s tears of agony can so suddenly; so dramatically become cries of “Joy” is a mystery. This is paradox. Would Mary; would any Mother really want it to be any different. Would their love be as dramatically different from all other human loves were it not so costly?
Travail and birth, are, perhaps, of all our earthly experiences, the most purely “Joyous.” Pain resolved in sheer “bliss.” From that day onward Mary’s life was characterized by this mysterious paradox. Twice Luke tells us that she “kept in her heart her personal record of all that went on and pondered its meaning.” In the Temple eight days after the baby’s birth, a prophet raised her soul to ecstasy with his words of promise, and then crushed her heart ‘til it ached insufferably with his stern warning of political intrigue, and swords, and the piercing of her already scarred heart. The surprise visit of a distinguished, regal entourage from a far-off land, determined to affirm the royalty of her Son and pay homage to him with their obeisance and lavish gifts, was turned tragic by the barbaric murder of dozens of baby boys, and her, and her Family’s frantic flight to safety in a foreign country. There were certainly moments of pure “Joy,” watching this baby grow; learning with him; seeing his delight with the simplest things. Noticing how he loved people and how they loved him in return. Feeling pride at his exceptional understanding of life, its simplicities, along with its complexities. He loved his Father, God, with such sincerity and deep devotion. But, for her, so much mystery surrounded this Father. At times she felt her Son loved him more than her and she wondered why. She wondered why it mattered so much to her. There were anxious moments. He got lost once. His Father died. How would she have gotten along without him? Then he left home. Yes his siblings were there. But how would she get along without him? She heard of his fame. What “Joy,” to see him now! A man with a heart like his was a rare find. He came home for a visit. “Joy” filled her heart seeing him again! But they hated him! The people of his hometown tried to throw him off the cliff. What does it all mean?
The answer came wrapped in travail far more painful than any human experience before or since. The paradox was resolved in ultimate barbarism. The crucifixion of Mary’s Son answered the question, “What does all of this mean?” She was there. She witnessed the whole thing. No labor ever hurt like this. Agony, the wrenching spasms of a breaking heart, tore at her until there were no more tears. “How could they do this?!” He noticed her that day in the way he used to. He cared for her. He asked his friend to look out for her. She felt a slight brush of the “Joy,” when, in the past, he told her he loved her. But the sweetness of it was quickly drowned in his piercing cry from the cross. He was gone. Could she have thought, in that terrible moment, that Gabriel’s promise had been a sick joke played by a sadistic deity that found pleasure in another’s agony? There wasn’t even a trace of joy to be found anywhere in her story. The skeptics were right. It was all “a tale told by a fool.”
Some fifty-five or so hours later she was huddled, with some of her Son’s friends, in an upstairs room on the back streets of Jerusalem. The doors were locked. Any friend of her Son was wanted now. The authorities were bent on ridding all Israel of the least suggestion that this man was anything but a troublemaker. Night had fallen. It was dark. Everything was dark. They had hoped. They didn’t hope now. What did all of this mean? Someone said they’d seen him alive. They were quite adamant about it. Peter and John had gone to the tomb and found it empty. Mary, the one from Magdala, insisted she’d seen him. She said he told her he was, “going to his Father and our Father; to our God and his God.” Could it be? Oh, if only … And then he was there! The doors were still shut. But there he was. Jesus was standing in the room. He was alive. A songwriter reliving it all in a moment of inspiration captures Mary’s “Joy” powerfully. “Suddenly the room was filled with strange and sweet perfume! Light that came from everywhere drove shadows from the room! He stood there beside me with his arms held open wide. I fell down on my knees and just clung to him and cried. He’s alive! Heaven’s gates are opened wide! He’s alive!” This was “Joy!” There were traitors in that room; friends who had fled from her Son in his darkest hour. They had betrayed him. But he had not forgotten them. He had come to find them. “Guilt and my confusion,” the songwriter exults, “disappeared in sweet release. And every fear I’d ever felt just melted into peace!”
A travail beyond all travail, God crushed under the weight of all sin and evil, dieing, heartbroken by the guilt and shame of all humankind, has come out from under it, throwing it all off, throwing off death itself. The race has been reborn. ‘Til that night Mary had only tasted “Joy.” Her experiences of it had been as painful as they were blissful. But the pain was of the sort that she could not completely forsake. She couldn’t understand it. But neither could she take another path. Now she understood. Joseph’s agony at her apparent infidelity; the dreadful pain at the birth of her child; the terrorized Families around Bethlehem; her anxiety on the journey to Egypt; the fear that she’d lost her Son on the Eve of his Bar Mitzvah; the despair at the foot of the cross; would she ever truly know the magnanimous love of this God man whom she had birthed if she had not seen how severely his coming clashed with a world gone mad? On this day of “Joy” beyond words she saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt something beyond even the angelic presence. She caught a glimpse of the celestial. Her Son, at once God and man; splendid, loving, regal, gracious, triumphant, gentle, someone in whom the paradox is resolved, who though dead yet lives. Never again would there be any confusion for her. She knew now, even as she was sure this Son of hers knew her, that the path “Joy” lead her to was the path to her own immortality. And in that moment she loved her Son and his mysterious Father so much that she was content in knowing that, now, “all generations will call him blessed.”
This is the “Joy,” the angel promised to the shepherds that first Christmas night.
Lewis acknowledges, in the closing paragraphs of his story, that his experiences of “Joy,” became less important to him once he became a convert to Christianity. They were not less frequent necessarily; just less important. He explains. “Joy, … as a state of (his) own mind was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in (his) thoughts.” “When we are lost in the woods,” he says, “the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, ‘Look!’ The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering gold. ‘We would be at Jerusalem.’” This Jerusalem, I assure you, is the New Jerusalem, spoken of in the final paragraphs of the Bible. It is here that all sensation finds its fullest experience. Here all vision; every color of a new and infinite spectrum fills the heart with a wonder of which all shimmering earthly seas are but a dim reflection. Here the fragrance of infinite scents soothes every cell of the glorified body, each in its own timeless moment of endless ecstasy. Sounds soft and sonorous echo through one’s whole being soothingly, stirringly. The gentle touch of unbridled strength brings a peace that only consummate love provides. Here, in this wonder filled place, we are at home!
This is the Christmas promise, made through a Hebrew Prophet named Isaiah, hundreds of years before that first Christmas. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given. The government will be on his shoulders. He will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.”
Monday, November 29, 2004
11.29.04 "Brother Bear and Christmas Love"
Have you seen the Disney animated feature “Brother Bear?”
If it weren’t for my recent transformation into a “Grandpa,” I probably wouldn’t have.
Now that I’m somebody’s “Grampa” I’m seein’ a lot of fascinating stuff.
Can you believe I’d never seen “Lady and the Tramp”? We’ll I hadn’t. That is until Marissa and Maddie showed up at our door with a DVD of it. Got me all choked up. I’m a sap when it comes to dog stories.
This “Brother Bear” isn’t among the better stories Marissa and Maddie have brought for me to see. They didn’t seem all that thrilled about it either. Marissa – five – preferred Shrek. Maddie – 3 – seemed more into princesses. Samuel, our three-year-old Grandson from England, got me into “Nemo.” Oh he loved Nemo. I think we saw it a dozen times while he was here.
But “Brother Bear” intrigued me. There is something in the spirituality of the natives, who are the human characters in the story, that has profound significance I think.
Some reviewers with a Christian worldview were concerned about these things. I’m not. Don’t get me wrong. I have no illusions that the bear and I are brothers in the same sense that our Sons are. One reviewer thinks we are. They – this is a reviewing Team – write, “This message of the connections that link us to others, even across species lines, is not new to Native Americans. They have been trying to get it across to other cultures for centuries.” My immediate response is to suggest that these reviewers visit the “Head-smashed-in Buffalo Jump” in Southern Alberta, Canada. Here they will quickly recognize that, though the natives of North America held the Buffalo, and other animals, in the highest regard they were in no way confused about who was ultimately “the greater” and “the lesser.”
The Buffalo and the Bear and other species of animal were valuable to Native Americans. They revered them and sought a respectful co-existence. But they did not hesitate, when the time for replenishment of food supplies came ‘round, to run a whole herd of Buffalo off a cliff for a mass butchering.
What I see in Brother Bear is the suggestion that love seeks to enter into the experience of another in ways that will enrich both loved and lover. I see the writers even toying with the idea that this is true whether he/she/it is one of us or not. The more subtle, and much more important, suggestion is that all life will be better for any attempt at love in the end.
I resonate with that. We don’t need to adopt the ancient myths that assume a solidarity with other species and ignores the superiority of humans. We must, though, recognize that the desire for cosmic harmony is not just wishful thinking; the desperate, futile imaginings of people caught in a very complex web of darkness, fear, and alienation.
The “totem” which makes a fearsome creature into a symbol of love, in this movie, is reminiscent of practices observed in many earlier civilizations. Peoples across the world and spanning many centuries of human existence came to believe that such a thing could really happen. Fearsome things, even gods, could be reconciled with their human counterparts. Man and bear could live together in harmony.
Christians believe this. In fact we believe it more profoundly than people of any other faith.
We, who embrace Jesus as the exclusive hope of all humankind, and “the whole creation” for that matter, must not forget that many of the great truths we’ve learned at the feet of our Master are also available to people who’ve never heard of Jesus. We have been taught repeatedly, in the Bible, that things about God can be learned simply by observing what he has made. People from primitive civilizations learned most, if not all, they know about the Divine in that way. And the mythical elements in “Brother Bear” tell us that somehow, in their meditations on these things in the natural world, they have come to believe that it would be a noble and good thing for a superior being to bring love, the most powerful force in the universe, to a lesser life form. Do we, who’ve had the privilege of sitting at the feet of the Master, believe such things happen? Other civilizations do. They even have myths about gods becoming human; gods dieing for some higher purpose.
Are you getting it? Don’t we followers of Jesus believe such things actually do happen? Our faith is founded on the fact that the one true God became a man. That he entered the human experience with what some felt was reckless abandon; “scandalous.” We further believe that he called what he was doing “love.” He said it was the most important; most powerful thing he could give us. We believe this God/man has lifted – is lifting – us humans, and the entire cosmos, up to a higher life form by doing so. He is empowering us to love with the kind of love he demonstrated in assuming the form of one of us. He is making it possible for us to fulfill the longing of all living things even the “cosmos” itself. An early Christian writer exulted in the incredible possibilities. “The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.” (See the Bible … New Testament … Letter to Romans … chapter 8 … verses 22 – 25 … THE MESSAGE version.)
The empty cross, once an embarrassing disgrace to our race, now the grandest of all symbols, is a reminder that when contemplation of God’s world moves someone to believe that cosmic harmony – the final reconciliation of all reality - is possible, they are not deluded or deceived. They have discovered in the nuances of this world the love, which is its Creator’s nature. Seeing and understanding what took place on that cross they will finally know that the reconciliation they’ve come to expect is the very reason our God became a man.
What a “teachable moment” for our kids … and grandkids! Especially at this Season when, once again, we celebrate the birth of this GOD who became … A MAN!
If it weren’t for my recent transformation into a “Grandpa,” I probably wouldn’t have.
Now that I’m somebody’s “Grampa” I’m seein’ a lot of fascinating stuff.
Can you believe I’d never seen “Lady and the Tramp”? We’ll I hadn’t. That is until Marissa and Maddie showed up at our door with a DVD of it. Got me all choked up. I’m a sap when it comes to dog stories.
This “Brother Bear” isn’t among the better stories Marissa and Maddie have brought for me to see. They didn’t seem all that thrilled about it either. Marissa – five – preferred Shrek. Maddie – 3 – seemed more into princesses. Samuel, our three-year-old Grandson from England, got me into “Nemo.” Oh he loved Nemo. I think we saw it a dozen times while he was here.
But “Brother Bear” intrigued me. There is something in the spirituality of the natives, who are the human characters in the story, that has profound significance I think.
Some reviewers with a Christian worldview were concerned about these things. I’m not. Don’t get me wrong. I have no illusions that the bear and I are brothers in the same sense that our Sons are. One reviewer thinks we are. They – this is a reviewing Team – write, “This message of the connections that link us to others, even across species lines, is not new to Native Americans. They have been trying to get it across to other cultures for centuries.” My immediate response is to suggest that these reviewers visit the “Head-smashed-in Buffalo Jump” in Southern Alberta, Canada. Here they will quickly recognize that, though the natives of North America held the Buffalo, and other animals, in the highest regard they were in no way confused about who was ultimately “the greater” and “the lesser.”
The Buffalo and the Bear and other species of animal were valuable to Native Americans. They revered them and sought a respectful co-existence. But they did not hesitate, when the time for replenishment of food supplies came ‘round, to run a whole herd of Buffalo off a cliff for a mass butchering.
What I see in Brother Bear is the suggestion that love seeks to enter into the experience of another in ways that will enrich both loved and lover. I see the writers even toying with the idea that this is true whether he/she/it is one of us or not. The more subtle, and much more important, suggestion is that all life will be better for any attempt at love in the end.
I resonate with that. We don’t need to adopt the ancient myths that assume a solidarity with other species and ignores the superiority of humans. We must, though, recognize that the desire for cosmic harmony is not just wishful thinking; the desperate, futile imaginings of people caught in a very complex web of darkness, fear, and alienation.
The “totem” which makes a fearsome creature into a symbol of love, in this movie, is reminiscent of practices observed in many earlier civilizations. Peoples across the world and spanning many centuries of human existence came to believe that such a thing could really happen. Fearsome things, even gods, could be reconciled with their human counterparts. Man and bear could live together in harmony.
Christians believe this. In fact we believe it more profoundly than people of any other faith.
We, who embrace Jesus as the exclusive hope of all humankind, and “the whole creation” for that matter, must not forget that many of the great truths we’ve learned at the feet of our Master are also available to people who’ve never heard of Jesus. We have been taught repeatedly, in the Bible, that things about God can be learned simply by observing what he has made. People from primitive civilizations learned most, if not all, they know about the Divine in that way. And the mythical elements in “Brother Bear” tell us that somehow, in their meditations on these things in the natural world, they have come to believe that it would be a noble and good thing for a superior being to bring love, the most powerful force in the universe, to a lesser life form. Do we, who’ve had the privilege of sitting at the feet of the Master, believe such things happen? Other civilizations do. They even have myths about gods becoming human; gods dieing for some higher purpose.
Are you getting it? Don’t we followers of Jesus believe such things actually do happen? Our faith is founded on the fact that the one true God became a man. That he entered the human experience with what some felt was reckless abandon; “scandalous.” We further believe that he called what he was doing “love.” He said it was the most important; most powerful thing he could give us. We believe this God/man has lifted – is lifting – us humans, and the entire cosmos, up to a higher life form by doing so. He is empowering us to love with the kind of love he demonstrated in assuming the form of one of us. He is making it possible for us to fulfill the longing of all living things even the “cosmos” itself. An early Christian writer exulted in the incredible possibilities. “The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.” (See the Bible … New Testament … Letter to Romans … chapter 8 … verses 22 – 25 … THE MESSAGE version.)
The empty cross, once an embarrassing disgrace to our race, now the grandest of all symbols, is a reminder that when contemplation of God’s world moves someone to believe that cosmic harmony – the final reconciliation of all reality - is possible, they are not deluded or deceived. They have discovered in the nuances of this world the love, which is its Creator’s nature. Seeing and understanding what took place on that cross they will finally know that the reconciliation they’ve come to expect is the very reason our God became a man.
What a “teachable moment” for our kids … and grandkids! Especially at this Season when, once again, we celebrate the birth of this GOD who became … A MAN!
11.25.04
It’s Thanksgiving Weekend 2004. Quite late in the Weekend I must admit. Still I cannot let the clock run off the closing hours of this final day without some sort of public acknowledgement of the abundance I and those I love enjoy.
Our lives truly have been full. We really do enjoy the status of “highly favored.” Our God continues to reveal himself to us in more and more profound ways. We are routinely enriched with deeper and ever more enlightening knowledge of him. His purposes for our race seem clearer and clearer to us. Our Family is growing and giving us much joy. We are being challenged and are growing professionally. Our circle of influence is expanding. New friendships are being formed regularly.
Jesus said, “This is life! More and better life than anything humans can imagine. This is life that exceeds the bounds of mortality. Knowing you Father God. Knowing me the rescuer; the consummate human being whom you have personally sent, from beyond time, into time and space, where, for now, all humans live.” I take that to mean that the greatest achievement in this life we live is to know God. Any insight our Father provides into his nature and ways is invaluable to me. So I am especially thankful this Weekend for three insights he is making more and more clear to me as this year progresses.
The first is a statement Dallas Willard makes in his book, “The Divine Conspiracy.” It is nothing new. I have quite likely claimed more than once to believe it myself. These days, though, it has become the stuff of conviction. Willard says that we must come, “to the point,” as apprentices of Jesus the supreme Teacher, “where (we) dearly love and constantly delight in that ‘heavenly Father’ made real to earth in Jesus and are quite certain that there is no ‘catch,’ no limit to the goodness of his intentions or to his power to carry them out.” We probably all agree that this is something we ought to have believed early in our faith journey. Now though I’m beginning to get it. To believe that our God is a “heavenly Father,” of the kind Jesus talked about incessantly while he was here, and portrayed so poignantly in the story of the Prodigal, means we believe he is good. We are convinced he desires nothing but “good” for us and has all the power necessary to insure it will be so.
The second insight I’m grateful for is one I’ve held onto for a long time. Jesus said it. St. John records it in the 10th chapter of his biography. It’s part of the 10th verse of that chapter. THE MESSAGE interpretation of it is especially clear. “I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.” “They,” of course are you and I. It is readily apparent how closely this assertion of Jesus and the statement Willard has made are to each other. In short they insist that, regardless of how it may appear, our life, under the rule of the God we see most completely in Jesus, will be supremely right for us. Do we really believe this?
The third insight comes from the writings of Isaiah. One of the most articulate of the Hebrew prophets whose words are recorded in the Judeo Christian Scriptures, Isaiah is bringing a Divine scolding to Israel for their incorrigible insistence on managing their own destiny. He summarizes God’s alternative for them this way. “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength … .” (Isaiah 30:15)
As I’ve engaged in thoughtful meditation on these three insights over the past year the message becomes increasingly pointed. God, our Supreme Sovereign is determined that we experience nothing but well being. Any need we may have to qualify or modify that idea is presumptive. Much like a nation, that has been assured of his protection, running out and finding alliances with other nations they believe to be more powerful and therefore able to insure their security. Repenting of such arrogance and resting in his assurances will lead to our deliverance from any evil real or imagined. Choosing to cease resisting or protesting and waiting quietly we find a new strength and courage emerging. “Those persons who wait on God,” really do find, “their strength being renewed in ever increasing degrees.”
Of all the things I am thankful for today, these insights are at the top of the list.
Hot on the heels of my gratitude for this growing intimacy with Father God is heart swelling thankfulness for Family. Shirley, my Wife of nearly 37 years, is not only the most important human being in my life. She is the most devoted, loving, and giving person I’ve ever known. We’ve come through some very dense and dark woods this year. We’ve stumbled into most of them because of choices I have made. She has walked through every valley and over every treacherous mountain with me. When it has been appropriate she has challenged my decisions and insisted on changes where changes need to be made. I do not always feel worthy of her loyalty. But she offers it tirelessly. I thank God for my Wife. And together we thank God for our three Sons, their Wives, and their kids. This year two new Grandkids came into our lives. Ethan was born on March 22. Jonah came along 3 months and 8 days later. Sitting around the Thanksgiving table in our youngest Son’s Home this past Thursday our only regret was that our England contingent, the Jim Denison Jr. Family, was missing. Knowing they are carrying out the mission our Lord has for them in this season of their lives softens the “missing them” enough to make it tolerable.
This has been a year of professional growth for us as well. With the onset of 2004 we entered the second year of life without a formal assignment. The obvious first implication of that for us was the absence of a contract and assured income. Our belief in God’s best intentions for us was tested as week after week obligations piled up with no idea of how they would be met. Repeatedly we submitted resumes, wrote letters of intent, telephoned contact people we thought might have leads for us, and stormed the gates of heaven pleading for guidance to our Father’s next assignment. While this search was going on a small group of friends with whom we’ve met for the past nearly 10 years kept pushing us to establish an independent organization through which to continue our work. Mel & Marcia, Larry & Carol, we thank our Lord for you guys!
Reluctantly we began the process of gathering a group of people who would become our Board of Directors and assist in the launching and initial support for this ministry. We first made our proposal to eight men. After they had prayerfully pondered our proposal for one month I personally met with them to discuss our proposal. Seven of them, and one of their wives, agreed to become the Board of Directors for destiny:Life! This Team has provided literally thousands of dollars worth of legal, marketing, advertising, and web design services as well as several thousand dollars in support. They are developing an expanding support base. They have given us invaluable prayer support. They are providing a level of accountability that we are finding immeasurably helpful. Mel, Larry, JT, Tim, Gene, Steve, Denny & Jill, we are thanking God for you daily and especially on this Thanksgiving Weekend.
“destiny:Life!” has already enlarged the scope of our influence. Our parish is now, literally, international. This past Summer I was privileged to speak at a Family Camp in North Central Ontario, Canada. The Severn Bridge Camp is located within an easy day’s drive of my boyhood home. Being there among the lush forests of maple, oak, elm, and conifer, mineral rich rock formations jutting randomly out of the soil, I felt as if I’d come home. Scores of new friendships were formed during the 12 days I was there. And I am confident our Lord used my efforts to enrich their lives just as they did mine. Shirley and I, together, returned to South Eastern Ontario in late August to work in a Youth Camp where I have spoken every third year since 1987. Few things I do are more rewarding than working at Echo Lake Camp. This year was no exception. Anyone who fears the future of the modern West needs only to be around the kids we hung out with for that week to have their hope in our Young and their capacity to make our world a better place under the Lordship of Jesus Christ restored. Just two Weekends ago Shirley and I conducted a Marriage Conference near Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. We presented a view of Christian Marriage that we believe puts this primary relationship back on the level our Lord intended when he first established it. “A Covenant of Intimacy: Jesus’ Design for Your Marriage,” is a medium we intend to use in a variety of venues over the next several years. Our aim is to demonstrate how, in this aspect of our life together Jesus really does offer us something, “more and better than (we’ve) ever dreamed.” In Pennsylvania November 12 – 14 we experienced just how powerfully that can be accomplished. And we are thankful.
Much remains to be accomplished through “destiny:Life!” but we are trusting our Lord to empower every aspect of what it is and will become in the days, and months, and years ahead.
We are, of all people, most richly blessed. In the words of a guest speaker we heard at Church on the Way a few weeks ago, we are, “Wonderfully well, and blessed, and highly favored of the Lord!”
Our gratitude, this Thanksgiving 2004, is passionately and profoundly felt!
Our lives truly have been full. We really do enjoy the status of “highly favored.” Our God continues to reveal himself to us in more and more profound ways. We are routinely enriched with deeper and ever more enlightening knowledge of him. His purposes for our race seem clearer and clearer to us. Our Family is growing and giving us much joy. We are being challenged and are growing professionally. Our circle of influence is expanding. New friendships are being formed regularly.
Jesus said, “This is life! More and better life than anything humans can imagine. This is life that exceeds the bounds of mortality. Knowing you Father God. Knowing me the rescuer; the consummate human being whom you have personally sent, from beyond time, into time and space, where, for now, all humans live.” I take that to mean that the greatest achievement in this life we live is to know God. Any insight our Father provides into his nature and ways is invaluable to me. So I am especially thankful this Weekend for three insights he is making more and more clear to me as this year progresses.
The first is a statement Dallas Willard makes in his book, “The Divine Conspiracy.” It is nothing new. I have quite likely claimed more than once to believe it myself. These days, though, it has become the stuff of conviction. Willard says that we must come, “to the point,” as apprentices of Jesus the supreme Teacher, “where (we) dearly love and constantly delight in that ‘heavenly Father’ made real to earth in Jesus and are quite certain that there is no ‘catch,’ no limit to the goodness of his intentions or to his power to carry them out.” We probably all agree that this is something we ought to have believed early in our faith journey. Now though I’m beginning to get it. To believe that our God is a “heavenly Father,” of the kind Jesus talked about incessantly while he was here, and portrayed so poignantly in the story of the Prodigal, means we believe he is good. We are convinced he desires nothing but “good” for us and has all the power necessary to insure it will be so.
The second insight I’m grateful for is one I’ve held onto for a long time. Jesus said it. St. John records it in the 10th chapter of his biography. It’s part of the 10th verse of that chapter. THE MESSAGE interpretation of it is especially clear. “I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.” “They,” of course are you and I. It is readily apparent how closely this assertion of Jesus and the statement Willard has made are to each other. In short they insist that, regardless of how it may appear, our life, under the rule of the God we see most completely in Jesus, will be supremely right for us. Do we really believe this?
The third insight comes from the writings of Isaiah. One of the most articulate of the Hebrew prophets whose words are recorded in the Judeo Christian Scriptures, Isaiah is bringing a Divine scolding to Israel for their incorrigible insistence on managing their own destiny. He summarizes God’s alternative for them this way. “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength … .” (Isaiah 30:15)
As I’ve engaged in thoughtful meditation on these three insights over the past year the message becomes increasingly pointed. God, our Supreme Sovereign is determined that we experience nothing but well being. Any need we may have to qualify or modify that idea is presumptive. Much like a nation, that has been assured of his protection, running out and finding alliances with other nations they believe to be more powerful and therefore able to insure their security. Repenting of such arrogance and resting in his assurances will lead to our deliverance from any evil real or imagined. Choosing to cease resisting or protesting and waiting quietly we find a new strength and courage emerging. “Those persons who wait on God,” really do find, “their strength being renewed in ever increasing degrees.”
Of all the things I am thankful for today, these insights are at the top of the list.
Hot on the heels of my gratitude for this growing intimacy with Father God is heart swelling thankfulness for Family. Shirley, my Wife of nearly 37 years, is not only the most important human being in my life. She is the most devoted, loving, and giving person I’ve ever known. We’ve come through some very dense and dark woods this year. We’ve stumbled into most of them because of choices I have made. She has walked through every valley and over every treacherous mountain with me. When it has been appropriate she has challenged my decisions and insisted on changes where changes need to be made. I do not always feel worthy of her loyalty. But she offers it tirelessly. I thank God for my Wife. And together we thank God for our three Sons, their Wives, and their kids. This year two new Grandkids came into our lives. Ethan was born on March 22. Jonah came along 3 months and 8 days later. Sitting around the Thanksgiving table in our youngest Son’s Home this past Thursday our only regret was that our England contingent, the Jim Denison Jr. Family, was missing. Knowing they are carrying out the mission our Lord has for them in this season of their lives softens the “missing them” enough to make it tolerable.
This has been a year of professional growth for us as well. With the onset of 2004 we entered the second year of life without a formal assignment. The obvious first implication of that for us was the absence of a contract and assured income. Our belief in God’s best intentions for us was tested as week after week obligations piled up with no idea of how they would be met. Repeatedly we submitted resumes, wrote letters of intent, telephoned contact people we thought might have leads for us, and stormed the gates of heaven pleading for guidance to our Father’s next assignment. While this search was going on a small group of friends with whom we’ve met for the past nearly 10 years kept pushing us to establish an independent organization through which to continue our work. Mel & Marcia, Larry & Carol, we thank our Lord for you guys!
Reluctantly we began the process of gathering a group of people who would become our Board of Directors and assist in the launching and initial support for this ministry. We first made our proposal to eight men. After they had prayerfully pondered our proposal for one month I personally met with them to discuss our proposal. Seven of them, and one of their wives, agreed to become the Board of Directors for destiny:Life! This Team has provided literally thousands of dollars worth of legal, marketing, advertising, and web design services as well as several thousand dollars in support. They are developing an expanding support base. They have given us invaluable prayer support. They are providing a level of accountability that we are finding immeasurably helpful. Mel, Larry, JT, Tim, Gene, Steve, Denny & Jill, we are thanking God for you daily and especially on this Thanksgiving Weekend.
“destiny:Life!” has already enlarged the scope of our influence. Our parish is now, literally, international. This past Summer I was privileged to speak at a Family Camp in North Central Ontario, Canada. The Severn Bridge Camp is located within an easy day’s drive of my boyhood home. Being there among the lush forests of maple, oak, elm, and conifer, mineral rich rock formations jutting randomly out of the soil, I felt as if I’d come home. Scores of new friendships were formed during the 12 days I was there. And I am confident our Lord used my efforts to enrich their lives just as they did mine. Shirley and I, together, returned to South Eastern Ontario in late August to work in a Youth Camp where I have spoken every third year since 1987. Few things I do are more rewarding than working at Echo Lake Camp. This year was no exception. Anyone who fears the future of the modern West needs only to be around the kids we hung out with for that week to have their hope in our Young and their capacity to make our world a better place under the Lordship of Jesus Christ restored. Just two Weekends ago Shirley and I conducted a Marriage Conference near Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. We presented a view of Christian Marriage that we believe puts this primary relationship back on the level our Lord intended when he first established it. “A Covenant of Intimacy: Jesus’ Design for Your Marriage,” is a medium we intend to use in a variety of venues over the next several years. Our aim is to demonstrate how, in this aspect of our life together Jesus really does offer us something, “more and better than (we’ve) ever dreamed.” In Pennsylvania November 12 – 14 we experienced just how powerfully that can be accomplished. And we are thankful.
Much remains to be accomplished through “destiny:Life!” but we are trusting our Lord to empower every aspect of what it is and will become in the days, and months, and years ahead.
We are, of all people, most richly blessed. In the words of a guest speaker we heard at Church on the Way a few weeks ago, we are, “Wonderfully well, and blessed, and highly favored of the Lord!”
Our gratitude, this Thanksgiving 2004, is passionately and profoundly felt!
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
IdeaLog Illumidate - 05.26.04 - Frenzy of Blood
Maundy Thursday … the day the Chief Potentate of the Roman Catholic Church washes the feet of the poor in obedience to instructions from Jesus. “I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:14) The day Jesus transformed Passover into the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion. The day that ended in his arrest and trumped up trial.
Without doubt this has been one of the most dramatic commemorations of Christ’s walk to Golgotha that I can remember. A lot of the drama, for me, centers on the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” Extreme elitist reaction to this movie, even before its release, has been nothing short of circus. The box office stats are amazing eve to the most optimistic of us. The movie itself is a creative, moving re-enactment of the most pivotal event in cosmic history.
My Wife Shirley and I watched the movie with friends almost three weeks ago. We were moved deeply. The love for Jesus that is growing in me deepened as I saw, in graphic detail, the humiliation and devastation he chose so that I would not have to suffer these consequences of my own sin. Shirley and I both saw a man, who, though appearing to be at the mercy of his accusers and tormentors, deliberately chose every intricate detail of his death so that he could “carry the sins of the entire world in his body with that cross, and to it, enabling us to die to sins and live for righteousness; so that we may be healed by those wounds.” (See 1 Peter 2:24.)
Reflecting now on the movie and the flurry of media attempts to catch this “wave of religious enthusiasm” – another Peter Jennings attempt (this one three hours in prime time) to reduce it all to a secular event no different than any other historical social event in antiquity; a TIME cover story; opinion upon opinion appearing in the most unexpected places there is much about this circus that troubles me. Still, whether well or poorly represented, Jesus really is, as he should be, front row center during this Holiest of all Holy Weeks.
One commentary on the movie has lurked in the background and frequently played across the foreground of my mind. This critique appeared in The New Republic on March 8. Written by Leon Wieseltier, TNR’s literary editor it is, without question a scathing review. “The Passion of the Christ is intoxicated by blood,” Wieleltier opines. “The bloodthirstiness of Gibson's film is startling, and quickly sickening. The fluid is everywhere. It drips, it runs, it spatters, it jumps. It trickles down the post at which Jesus is flagellated … down the cross upon which he is crucified, … . The flagellation scene and the crucifixion scene are frenzies of blood. When Jesus is nailed to the wood, the drops of blood that spring from his wound are filmed in slow-motion, with a twisted tenderness … It all concludes in the shower of blood that issues from the corpse of Jesus when it is pierced by the Roman soldier's spear.” Gibson’s achievement, Wieseltier concludes, is the “verisimilitude of filmed violence.” “The viewing of The Passion of the Christ,” is, for this critic, “a profoundly brutalizing experience … This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life.” Acknowledging the subjectivity of the sentiment he writes, “it leaves you desperate to escape its standpoint, to find another way of regarding the horror that you have just observed.” Just in case you’re not quite sure of his assessment he, at one point, in passing, alludes to it as Gibson’s, “slasher movie.” After several lines of insistence that the movie is, “without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie,” he concludes with this. “… the loathing of Jews in Mel Gibson's film is really not its worst degradation … . Its loathing of Jews is subsumed in its loathing of spirituality, in its loathing of existence. If there is a kingdom of heaven, The Passion of the Christ is shutting it in men's faces.”
After several readings and much reflection on this piece I am still troubled by not only the critique but the reasons for such animosity to the vivid re-telling of a real event of colossal, even cosmic proportions. Granted this shouldn’t surprise me. Less than 20 years after it took place St. Paul noted that it had become an event “scandalous” to the Jews, and “foolishness” to the Gentiles. (See 1 Corinthians 1:23.) It certainly is both of these to Wieseltier. It is “repulsive,” “fantasy” to him.
Perhaps the roots of such disgust and disdain can be attributed to the general uneasiness, even denial with which all of us encounter suffering and death. This “uneasiness” has been credibly substantiated in the work of Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist and a 1974 Pulitzer Prize recipient. In his Pulitzer applauded work, “The Denial of Death,” Becker writes this. “We might call this existential paradox (a Kierkegaardian category) the condition of individuality within finitude. Man … is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality … gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.
“Yet at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body … a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways – the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die.” Later, summarizing his work in “… Denial …” for a subsequent book, “Escape from Evil,” Becker observes that “man’s innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man’s natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image is the root cause of human evil.”
My contention here is that Wieseltier and, for that matter, all of us are so uncomfortable with the unparalleled suffering of Jesus the Christ because of what we must face about ourselves in it. This is how we, humankind, treat good men. The preposterous claim that this good man was, at the same time God, even goes so far as to suggest that this is how we, humankind, treat God when he comes to visit. Deeply offended by such denigrating inferences we ignore the event or convene councils to remove the offensive elements of it. When we protest or deny it, sometimes the ink, with which we record our protest is pure vitriol. But the blood won’t go away. We have been a species of blood since the beginning of time. Within a generation after our preposterous assumption that we could master our own destiny one man killed another. And the killing has gone on, and on, and on.
Something else Wieseltier wrote reminded me how pervasively the blood stains our race. “I do not agree,” he protested, “that Jesus is my savior or anybody else's.” This sounded to me gravely like the protest of the Humanist Manifesto. “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves,” the framers assert in the closing sentence of the First of their “common principles.” Few documents approach the heights of this Manifesto. And yet, hidden even in these heroic aspirations of the “mind that soars,” are dark reminders of our bloodiness. Principle Eight, insisting that, “All persons should have a voice in developing the values and goals that determine their lives,” then states, “Alienating forces should be modified or eradicated … .” There appears to be a contradiction here. “All persons should have a voice.” That is except “Alienating forces.” They, whoever they might be, should have no voice. In fact they must be modified. I can only imagine how that might be done. They must, if necessary, be eradicated. However you imagine this being done one thing is painfully apparent. Here, in the blueprint for a humanist utopia, are stains of blood.
Wieseltier, concerned as he is for spirituality and existence, has failed to reckon with the grim fact that he is every bit as complicit in the bloody history of our race as any of the rest of us. His vitriolic reaction to Mel Gibson’s work is a chilling reminder that it is often the elite, religious, political, or intellectual; those who have found in their creeds, their power, and their intelligence a temporary shroud for their mortality and a case for their superiority, who identify the alienating forces, and determine how best to modify or eliminate them. For all of recorded history it has been so.
But now, in Jesus of Nazareth, we find an exception. A man, with direct access to infinite power, who manipulates or eliminates no one. He chooses, rather, to love all; every member of the human race. He chooses to give himself for the sake of each and every one. He will suffer at the bloodstained hands of everyman so that he, now one of us, can forever change the course of our inglorious history. He forgoes the superiority and privileges of ultimate sovereignty and becomes one of us. He does not deny the truth that to be human means to die. He does not run from it. He does not use his power or the privilege it offers him to get around it. He does not manipulate or eliminate those who are a threat to him. Like the Father has done from before time he risks life in a world of free creatures; people who can scorn and reject him. Love can exist only in such a world. So he risks. As expected he suffers and dies. At first glance it seems he has lost everything. Existence really does seem to be profaned in this darkest of all moments. Look again. Something quite remarkable happens. Life explodes from the bloody ground around the cross. There is a Kingdom of Heaven. And the King has just thrown open the door to any and every human who will permit him to be their Savior/King.
From long before recorded history it has been written into the fiber of things that life is perpetuated in death. “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies it remains a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds.” And so it is. So it is now for all of us because Jesus is the “first of many, who, having died, will live on.” And the spirit of this person who dies, ignominiously, so that the many may live, is the passion – the deeply felt, tirelessly patient, no strings love – of the Christ.
Jim Denison
Without doubt this has been one of the most dramatic commemorations of Christ’s walk to Golgotha that I can remember. A lot of the drama, for me, centers on the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” Extreme elitist reaction to this movie, even before its release, has been nothing short of circus. The box office stats are amazing eve to the most optimistic of us. The movie itself is a creative, moving re-enactment of the most pivotal event in cosmic history.
My Wife Shirley and I watched the movie with friends almost three weeks ago. We were moved deeply. The love for Jesus that is growing in me deepened as I saw, in graphic detail, the humiliation and devastation he chose so that I would not have to suffer these consequences of my own sin. Shirley and I both saw a man, who, though appearing to be at the mercy of his accusers and tormentors, deliberately chose every intricate detail of his death so that he could “carry the sins of the entire world in his body with that cross, and to it, enabling us to die to sins and live for righteousness; so that we may be healed by those wounds.” (See 1 Peter 2:24.)
Reflecting now on the movie and the flurry of media attempts to catch this “wave of religious enthusiasm” – another Peter Jennings attempt (this one three hours in prime time) to reduce it all to a secular event no different than any other historical social event in antiquity; a TIME cover story; opinion upon opinion appearing in the most unexpected places there is much about this circus that troubles me. Still, whether well or poorly represented, Jesus really is, as he should be, front row center during this Holiest of all Holy Weeks.
One commentary on the movie has lurked in the background and frequently played across the foreground of my mind. This critique appeared in The New Republic on March 8. Written by Leon Wieseltier, TNR’s literary editor it is, without question a scathing review. “The Passion of the Christ is intoxicated by blood,” Wieleltier opines. “The bloodthirstiness of Gibson's film is startling, and quickly sickening. The fluid is everywhere. It drips, it runs, it spatters, it jumps. It trickles down the post at which Jesus is flagellated … down the cross upon which he is crucified, … . The flagellation scene and the crucifixion scene are frenzies of blood. When Jesus is nailed to the wood, the drops of blood that spring from his wound are filmed in slow-motion, with a twisted tenderness … It all concludes in the shower of blood that issues from the corpse of Jesus when it is pierced by the Roman soldier's spear.” Gibson’s achievement, Wieseltier concludes, is the “verisimilitude of filmed violence.” “The viewing of The Passion of the Christ,” is, for this critic, “a profoundly brutalizing experience … This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life.” Acknowledging the subjectivity of the sentiment he writes, “it leaves you desperate to escape its standpoint, to find another way of regarding the horror that you have just observed.” Just in case you’re not quite sure of his assessment he, at one point, in passing, alludes to it as Gibson’s, “slasher movie.” After several lines of insistence that the movie is, “without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie,” he concludes with this. “… the loathing of Jews in Mel Gibson's film is really not its worst degradation … . Its loathing of Jews is subsumed in its loathing of spirituality, in its loathing of existence. If there is a kingdom of heaven, The Passion of the Christ is shutting it in men's faces.”
After several readings and much reflection on this piece I am still troubled by not only the critique but the reasons for such animosity to the vivid re-telling of a real event of colossal, even cosmic proportions. Granted this shouldn’t surprise me. Less than 20 years after it took place St. Paul noted that it had become an event “scandalous” to the Jews, and “foolishness” to the Gentiles. (See 1 Corinthians 1:23.) It certainly is both of these to Wieseltier. It is “repulsive,” “fantasy” to him.
Perhaps the roots of such disgust and disdain can be attributed to the general uneasiness, even denial with which all of us encounter suffering and death. This “uneasiness” has been credibly substantiated in the work of Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist and a 1974 Pulitzer Prize recipient. In his Pulitzer applauded work, “The Denial of Death,” Becker writes this. “We might call this existential paradox (a Kierkegaardian category) the condition of individuality within finitude. Man … is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality … gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.
“Yet at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body … a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways – the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die.” Later, summarizing his work in “… Denial …” for a subsequent book, “Escape from Evil,” Becker observes that “man’s innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man’s natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image is the root cause of human evil.”
My contention here is that Wieseltier and, for that matter, all of us are so uncomfortable with the unparalleled suffering of Jesus the Christ because of what we must face about ourselves in it. This is how we, humankind, treat good men. The preposterous claim that this good man was, at the same time God, even goes so far as to suggest that this is how we, humankind, treat God when he comes to visit. Deeply offended by such denigrating inferences we ignore the event or convene councils to remove the offensive elements of it. When we protest or deny it, sometimes the ink, with which we record our protest is pure vitriol. But the blood won’t go away. We have been a species of blood since the beginning of time. Within a generation after our preposterous assumption that we could master our own destiny one man killed another. And the killing has gone on, and on, and on.
Something else Wieseltier wrote reminded me how pervasively the blood stains our race. “I do not agree,” he protested, “that Jesus is my savior or anybody else's.” This sounded to me gravely like the protest of the Humanist Manifesto. “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves,” the framers assert in the closing sentence of the First of their “common principles.” Few documents approach the heights of this Manifesto. And yet, hidden even in these heroic aspirations of the “mind that soars,” are dark reminders of our bloodiness. Principle Eight, insisting that, “All persons should have a voice in developing the values and goals that determine their lives,” then states, “Alienating forces should be modified or eradicated … .” There appears to be a contradiction here. “All persons should have a voice.” That is except “Alienating forces.” They, whoever they might be, should have no voice. In fact they must be modified. I can only imagine how that might be done. They must, if necessary, be eradicated. However you imagine this being done one thing is painfully apparent. Here, in the blueprint for a humanist utopia, are stains of blood.
Wieseltier, concerned as he is for spirituality and existence, has failed to reckon with the grim fact that he is every bit as complicit in the bloody history of our race as any of the rest of us. His vitriolic reaction to Mel Gibson’s work is a chilling reminder that it is often the elite, religious, political, or intellectual; those who have found in their creeds, their power, and their intelligence a temporary shroud for their mortality and a case for their superiority, who identify the alienating forces, and determine how best to modify or eliminate them. For all of recorded history it has been so.
But now, in Jesus of Nazareth, we find an exception. A man, with direct access to infinite power, who manipulates or eliminates no one. He chooses, rather, to love all; every member of the human race. He chooses to give himself for the sake of each and every one. He will suffer at the bloodstained hands of everyman so that he, now one of us, can forever change the course of our inglorious history. He forgoes the superiority and privileges of ultimate sovereignty and becomes one of us. He does not deny the truth that to be human means to die. He does not run from it. He does not use his power or the privilege it offers him to get around it. He does not manipulate or eliminate those who are a threat to him. Like the Father has done from before time he risks life in a world of free creatures; people who can scorn and reject him. Love can exist only in such a world. So he risks. As expected he suffers and dies. At first glance it seems he has lost everything. Existence really does seem to be profaned in this darkest of all moments. Look again. Something quite remarkable happens. Life explodes from the bloody ground around the cross. There is a Kingdom of Heaven. And the King has just thrown open the door to any and every human who will permit him to be their Savior/King.
From long before recorded history it has been written into the fiber of things that life is perpetuated in death. “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies it remains a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds.” And so it is. So it is now for all of us because Jesus is the “first of many, who, having died, will live on.” And the spirit of this person who dies, ignominiously, so that the many may live, is the passion – the deeply felt, tirelessly patient, no strings love – of the Christ.
Jim Denison
IdeaLog - Illumidate 05.26.04 - Why Did They Have to be So Mean to Him
This past Weekend, Easter Weekend, a colleague told me about his and his Wife’s experience with Mel Gibson’s, “The Passion of the Christ.” Reflecting back on the conversation since one thing he said stands out in my memory. As they left the movie his Wife said, “Why did they have to be so mean to him?”
This deeply pained identification with Jesus’ suffering is one of the more common responses to this dramatic portrayal of his crucifixion. Cascading down a third of the cover of none other than TIME magazine is emblazoned the question, “Why Did Jesus Have to Die?” Kids wonder. Journalists speculate. Scholars pontificate. Pastors elaborate. One Pastor has published a short work titled, “The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty Reasons Why He Came to Die.” A High School Teacher prepared a 3 page point-by-point summary of Biblical answers to this pressing question in response to the endless pleading of his Students for an explanation of what they perceived to be an atrocity.
So, WHY DID HE HAVE TO DIE?
At the risk of appearing presumptuous I’d like to weigh in. Without pretending to provide an exhaustive summary of what the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures teach about the death of Jesus I suggest the following reasons I consider to be critical to us.
1. This is the way we humans treat someone who is truly better than we are.
2. Someone had to reconcile us with each other and with our God.
3. Someone had to defeat sin and its perpetrators.
4. We need a pardon.
5. Somebody had to get us out of debt.
6. We’re dieing someone has to save our lives.
7. We are enslaved to a lot of things and need deliverance.
8. We don’t really know God.
9. We were made to rule and need someone to restore us to our rightful status.
O.K. … I don’t have fifty reasons. Still these are a lot. Theodore Jennings Jr., of Chicago Theological Seminary probably thinks there are too many. “The New Testament,” he commented in an interview with the writers of the TIME article, “is just all over the map … something really drastic, fundamental and dramatic has happened and they’re pulling together all kinds of ways to understand that.” He seems to be saying that if we really understood what we believed here we’d be much more concise and orderly in our answers to the big questions Jesus life and death pose.
Well, maybe we don’t understand it. We are, after all, trying to explain something that has been conceived and carried out in the mind of an infinite God before ever any of it came to our sphere of existence. The nine reasons I’ve chosen are matters I recognize in Scripture and recognize as not only reasons for his suffering but aspects of it that underscore our complicity. You see, he really was “Wounded for our transgressions … .”
1. This is the Way We Humans Treat Someone Who is Truly Better Than We Are.
Have you ever thought about how we came up with the term Nerd and why the sort of person you picture as you read the word ever got branded with such a term of derision? This is a common instance of a self-indicting practice. We have ways of bringing down, or at least down to a little below the level we’ve defined to be our own, people who are, or are perceived as, better than ourselves. And my colleague’s Wife saw that playing out in the life of a man whom she perceived to be guiltless. “He never did one thing wrong,
Not once said anything amiss. They called him every name in the book and he said nothing back. He suffered in silence …” That’s how his friend Peter describes him. Frankly, the more I learn about Jesus the more accurate I find this description to be. What it is about us that leaves us so touchy in the presence of goodness will have to wait for another discussion. The fact remains. We don’t treat good people well around here.
2. Someone Had to Reconcile Us With Each Other and With Our God
Read the first three chapters of Genesis.
Consider this. Our choice to disobey God resulted in alienation from literally everyone and every thing in our world including ourselves. The first couple’s immediate awareness of their nakedness is stark evidence of immediate self-consciousness and shame. Their hiding, ostensibly from each other but most certainly from God, confirms alienation from each other and from God. The killing of animals for clothing, the feud that began with serpents that day, the cursed ground, the oppression of woman by man. Rifts that have divided us to this very day were torn in the fiber of our existence the day we presumed to be our own God.
The New Testament writers use the term “reconciliation” to speak of the bridge that has been rebuilt between God and man, and between us and our fellows, through Jesus. Is there any greater incident of the realization of this possibility than Christ’s compassionate prayer for his tormentors, “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”?
The love of God demonstrated in Jesus is God’s first step in the journey to reconcile all the rifts that exist because of our sin.
3. Someone Had to Defeat Sin and Its Perpetrators
Our greatest liability is our sin. The presumptive notion that we could take a course different from the one God designed for us spelled our doom. The burden of God, which we assumed when we chose to define our own destiny, is too heavy for us and we are overwhelmed by its weight. The decision to ignore God and defer to ourselves is called sin in the Bible. Our inability to live up to our own press, our constantly failing to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves, our “missing the mark,” our shortcomings are the outgrowth of that sin. We are incapable of fulfilling the mission we’ve given ourselves.
Most of the blame for this rests with us.
There is however an accomplice. The tempter is in it with us.
St. Paul wrote this about our sin and our accomplice. “When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive—right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross. He stripped all the spiritual tyrants (our accomplice and his ilk) in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.” The cross was a battlefield. Jesus won. He now has the resources to declare you and me forgiven and to set about the lifelong work of recreating us; making us like the God in whose image we were originally made.
4. We Need a Pardon
Think about it! You’re guilty. The execution is about to be carried out. The apparatus has been prepared. The “guard and the sad old Padre” have come to escort you to the chamber of death. You’re “Dead Man Walkin’.”
Suddenly it all comes to a grinding halt. A pardon is delivered. The Governor has commuted your sentence.
And so he has. Read it again. “All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross.”
You did it. You told God to butt out. You assumed what you considered to be your rightful place as the ruler of your own life. But you overstepped. You made wrong choices. Your own life was skewed. A lot of other people suffered as well. The world God trusted to you and your race suffered. It is now the kind of world that kills good people.
But God has commuted your sentence. You are free to go. You have been pardoned.
Another reason Jesus died.
5. Somebody Had to Get Us Out of Debt
Every time we pray the prayer we’ve come to know as “The Lord’s Prayer,” we acknowledge another Biblical assertion about the reason for Christ’s suffering and death. We are indebted to God.
To underscore the extent to which this is true Jesus told a story. “The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market.
“The poor wretch threw himself at the king’s feet and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt.”
“In the day you eat fruit from the forbidden tree,” God said in Eden, “you will surely die.” That dieing is about more than declining life span. It is immortality in isolation from God who gives life. Eternal solitary confinement is what we owe. Jesus covered our debt. He endured a Divine moment separated from God. His infinite solitude was enough to cover our debt. Paid in full, is written large, in the blood of Jesus, across the loan documents.
6. We’re Dieing, Someone Has to Save Our Lives
Yes, as we acknowledged previously, our immortality has been compromised.
But Jesus has died to correct that as well.
Perhaps the most familiar passage in all the Bible is John 3:16. Even people who have no clue about what’s in the Bible or who Jesus is have seen that reference. They may think it’s a trick play in football cause they keep seeing it at football games. But at least it’s familiar. It is about Christ’s conquest of death. “God loved the world – i.e. – you and me – so very much that he gave up his only Son (let him die) so that anyone who believes in him will not perish – i.e. – die forever – but have life that never ends.”
Jesus endured the most ignominious death known to humankind so that we could live forever with him.
7. We Are Enslaved to a Lot of Things and Need Deliverance
Read this.
“So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? …
“That’s what baptism into the life of Jesus means. When we are lowered into the water, it is like the burial of Jesus; when we are raised up out of the water, it is like the resurrection of Jesus. Our Father raises each of us into a light-filled world so that we can see where we’re going in our new grace-sovereign country.
“Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the Cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did.
“That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God.”
This is a modern English version of a section of the New Testament. (Romans 6:1 and several of the following verses.)
The message is clear. Our sin has enslaved us under its tyranny. Jesus has thrown off that tyranny by walking out of his tomb.
We are delivered. “Free indeed,” to quote Jesus.
8. We Don’t Really Know God
“No one has ever seen God,” St John wrote in the first chapter of his selective biography of Jesus. “But,” he continues, “(God’s) only Son, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart; he has told us about him.”
Every event, every word he spoke, every act in the life of Jesus, even his response to pain and death, gives us a glimpse of God. Jesus said, “This is immortal life. To know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” And, he said to his Father God, “I have revealed you to them.”
We can know God now thanks to Jesus’ willingness to come and tell us about him both through what he taught as well as how he lived and died and lived.
9. We Were Born to Rule and Need Someone to Restore Us to Our Rightful Status
God’s instructions to the first couple were, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” We were made to rule. Our choice to take that too far, disregarding God as the source of our authority and the one alone deserving of the last word, resulted in alienation, conflict, and oppression. The extent to which we had lost control was never more evident than on the day of Christ’s crucifixion. But on that day the potential for a major reversal, what C.S. Lewis described as “death starting to work backward,” was introduced. Within less than 50 years St. Paul was able to write, “The fruit of the Spirit is … self-control;” “He has not given us a Spirit of timidity but of love, power, and self-discipline;” “Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.” “Self-control;” “love, power, and self-discipline;” “reign;” the curse is certainly being reversed. We are being restored, gradually but surely, to our original place in God’s world. This restoration is taking place right now in the lives of people who are filled with the Spirit of God. Great privileges follow for those in whom the Spirit of God is completely free to carry out his ongoing work of creation; greater by far than many of us expect. “We are being changed,” St. Paul asserts, “from one degree to another in our resemblance to Jesus.” Still, though our experiences of restoration are substantial now they will not be “what they’re gonna be,” ‘til we enter the real unseen world where “this mortal will become immortal.”
Jesus said, “I came to give my people life to the max.” This life is ultimate living; the way for which we were created. Restoration to the place of rule to which God originally appointed us is only possible as we take that way. Jesus life as the Christ, the consummate man, is the only model for such life. He had to die to make it possible. So he did. And, so, we will, indeed, live as he lived and rule with him “substantially now, ultimately then.”
Why did they have to be so mean to him? Because rescuing us required an effort that drastic. Because his love was so great it willingly chose such effort. Because he considered the joy of seeing his beloved restored to be worth such a price.
One song writer caught in the euphoria of this love of Jesus wrote the following lines. “Were the whole realm of nature mine that were a present far too small. Love so amazing, so Divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
I agree!!!
Jim Denison
This deeply pained identification with Jesus’ suffering is one of the more common responses to this dramatic portrayal of his crucifixion. Cascading down a third of the cover of none other than TIME magazine is emblazoned the question, “Why Did Jesus Have to Die?” Kids wonder. Journalists speculate. Scholars pontificate. Pastors elaborate. One Pastor has published a short work titled, “The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty Reasons Why He Came to Die.” A High School Teacher prepared a 3 page point-by-point summary of Biblical answers to this pressing question in response to the endless pleading of his Students for an explanation of what they perceived to be an atrocity.
So, WHY DID HE HAVE TO DIE?
At the risk of appearing presumptuous I’d like to weigh in. Without pretending to provide an exhaustive summary of what the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures teach about the death of Jesus I suggest the following reasons I consider to be critical to us.
1. This is the way we humans treat someone who is truly better than we are.
2. Someone had to reconcile us with each other and with our God.
3. Someone had to defeat sin and its perpetrators.
4. We need a pardon.
5. Somebody had to get us out of debt.
6. We’re dieing someone has to save our lives.
7. We are enslaved to a lot of things and need deliverance.
8. We don’t really know God.
9. We were made to rule and need someone to restore us to our rightful status.
O.K. … I don’t have fifty reasons. Still these are a lot. Theodore Jennings Jr., of Chicago Theological Seminary probably thinks there are too many. “The New Testament,” he commented in an interview with the writers of the TIME article, “is just all over the map … something really drastic, fundamental and dramatic has happened and they’re pulling together all kinds of ways to understand that.” He seems to be saying that if we really understood what we believed here we’d be much more concise and orderly in our answers to the big questions Jesus life and death pose.
Well, maybe we don’t understand it. We are, after all, trying to explain something that has been conceived and carried out in the mind of an infinite God before ever any of it came to our sphere of existence. The nine reasons I’ve chosen are matters I recognize in Scripture and recognize as not only reasons for his suffering but aspects of it that underscore our complicity. You see, he really was “Wounded for our transgressions … .”
1. This is the Way We Humans Treat Someone Who is Truly Better Than We Are.
Have you ever thought about how we came up with the term Nerd and why the sort of person you picture as you read the word ever got branded with such a term of derision? This is a common instance of a self-indicting practice. We have ways of bringing down, or at least down to a little below the level we’ve defined to be our own, people who are, or are perceived as, better than ourselves. And my colleague’s Wife saw that playing out in the life of a man whom she perceived to be guiltless. “He never did one thing wrong,
Not once said anything amiss. They called him every name in the book and he said nothing back. He suffered in silence …” That’s how his friend Peter describes him. Frankly, the more I learn about Jesus the more accurate I find this description to be. What it is about us that leaves us so touchy in the presence of goodness will have to wait for another discussion. The fact remains. We don’t treat good people well around here.
2. Someone Had to Reconcile Us With Each Other and With Our God
Read the first three chapters of Genesis.
Consider this. Our choice to disobey God resulted in alienation from literally everyone and every thing in our world including ourselves. The first couple’s immediate awareness of their nakedness is stark evidence of immediate self-consciousness and shame. Their hiding, ostensibly from each other but most certainly from God, confirms alienation from each other and from God. The killing of animals for clothing, the feud that began with serpents that day, the cursed ground, the oppression of woman by man. Rifts that have divided us to this very day were torn in the fiber of our existence the day we presumed to be our own God.
The New Testament writers use the term “reconciliation” to speak of the bridge that has been rebuilt between God and man, and between us and our fellows, through Jesus. Is there any greater incident of the realization of this possibility than Christ’s compassionate prayer for his tormentors, “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”?
The love of God demonstrated in Jesus is God’s first step in the journey to reconcile all the rifts that exist because of our sin.
3. Someone Had to Defeat Sin and Its Perpetrators
Our greatest liability is our sin. The presumptive notion that we could take a course different from the one God designed for us spelled our doom. The burden of God, which we assumed when we chose to define our own destiny, is too heavy for us and we are overwhelmed by its weight. The decision to ignore God and defer to ourselves is called sin in the Bible. Our inability to live up to our own press, our constantly failing to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves, our “missing the mark,” our shortcomings are the outgrowth of that sin. We are incapable of fulfilling the mission we’ve given ourselves.
Most of the blame for this rests with us.
There is however an accomplice. The tempter is in it with us.
St. Paul wrote this about our sin and our accomplice. “When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive—right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross. He stripped all the spiritual tyrants (our accomplice and his ilk) in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.” The cross was a battlefield. Jesus won. He now has the resources to declare you and me forgiven and to set about the lifelong work of recreating us; making us like the God in whose image we were originally made.
4. We Need a Pardon
Think about it! You’re guilty. The execution is about to be carried out. The apparatus has been prepared. The “guard and the sad old Padre” have come to escort you to the chamber of death. You’re “Dead Man Walkin’.”
Suddenly it all comes to a grinding halt. A pardon is delivered. The Governor has commuted your sentence.
And so he has. Read it again. “All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross.”
You did it. You told God to butt out. You assumed what you considered to be your rightful place as the ruler of your own life. But you overstepped. You made wrong choices. Your own life was skewed. A lot of other people suffered as well. The world God trusted to you and your race suffered. It is now the kind of world that kills good people.
But God has commuted your sentence. You are free to go. You have been pardoned.
Another reason Jesus died.
5. Somebody Had to Get Us Out of Debt
Every time we pray the prayer we’ve come to know as “The Lord’s Prayer,” we acknowledge another Biblical assertion about the reason for Christ’s suffering and death. We are indebted to God.
To underscore the extent to which this is true Jesus told a story. “The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market.
“The poor wretch threw himself at the king’s feet and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt.”
“In the day you eat fruit from the forbidden tree,” God said in Eden, “you will surely die.” That dieing is about more than declining life span. It is immortality in isolation from God who gives life. Eternal solitary confinement is what we owe. Jesus covered our debt. He endured a Divine moment separated from God. His infinite solitude was enough to cover our debt. Paid in full, is written large, in the blood of Jesus, across the loan documents.
6. We’re Dieing, Someone Has to Save Our Lives
Yes, as we acknowledged previously, our immortality has been compromised.
But Jesus has died to correct that as well.
Perhaps the most familiar passage in all the Bible is John 3:16. Even people who have no clue about what’s in the Bible or who Jesus is have seen that reference. They may think it’s a trick play in football cause they keep seeing it at football games. But at least it’s familiar. It is about Christ’s conquest of death. “God loved the world – i.e. – you and me – so very much that he gave up his only Son (let him die) so that anyone who believes in him will not perish – i.e. – die forever – but have life that never ends.”
Jesus endured the most ignominious death known to humankind so that we could live forever with him.
7. We Are Enslaved to a Lot of Things and Need Deliverance
Read this.
“So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? …
“That’s what baptism into the life of Jesus means. When we are lowered into the water, it is like the burial of Jesus; when we are raised up out of the water, it is like the resurrection of Jesus. Our Father raises each of us into a light-filled world so that we can see where we’re going in our new grace-sovereign country.
“Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the Cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did.
“That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God.”
This is a modern English version of a section of the New Testament. (Romans 6:1 and several of the following verses.)
The message is clear. Our sin has enslaved us under its tyranny. Jesus has thrown off that tyranny by walking out of his tomb.
We are delivered. “Free indeed,” to quote Jesus.
8. We Don’t Really Know God
“No one has ever seen God,” St John wrote in the first chapter of his selective biography of Jesus. “But,” he continues, “(God’s) only Son, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart; he has told us about him.”
Every event, every word he spoke, every act in the life of Jesus, even his response to pain and death, gives us a glimpse of God. Jesus said, “This is immortal life. To know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” And, he said to his Father God, “I have revealed you to them.”
We can know God now thanks to Jesus’ willingness to come and tell us about him both through what he taught as well as how he lived and died and lived.
9. We Were Born to Rule and Need Someone to Restore Us to Our Rightful Status
God’s instructions to the first couple were, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” We were made to rule. Our choice to take that too far, disregarding God as the source of our authority and the one alone deserving of the last word, resulted in alienation, conflict, and oppression. The extent to which we had lost control was never more evident than on the day of Christ’s crucifixion. But on that day the potential for a major reversal, what C.S. Lewis described as “death starting to work backward,” was introduced. Within less than 50 years St. Paul was able to write, “The fruit of the Spirit is … self-control;” “He has not given us a Spirit of timidity but of love, power, and self-discipline;” “Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.” “Self-control;” “love, power, and self-discipline;” “reign;” the curse is certainly being reversed. We are being restored, gradually but surely, to our original place in God’s world. This restoration is taking place right now in the lives of people who are filled with the Spirit of God. Great privileges follow for those in whom the Spirit of God is completely free to carry out his ongoing work of creation; greater by far than many of us expect. “We are being changed,” St. Paul asserts, “from one degree to another in our resemblance to Jesus.” Still, though our experiences of restoration are substantial now they will not be “what they’re gonna be,” ‘til we enter the real unseen world where “this mortal will become immortal.”
Jesus said, “I came to give my people life to the max.” This life is ultimate living; the way for which we were created. Restoration to the place of rule to which God originally appointed us is only possible as we take that way. Jesus life as the Christ, the consummate man, is the only model for such life. He had to die to make it possible. So he did. And, so, we will, indeed, live as he lived and rule with him “substantially now, ultimately then.”
Why did they have to be so mean to him? Because rescuing us required an effort that drastic. Because his love was so great it willingly chose such effort. Because he considered the joy of seeing his beloved restored to be worth such a price.
One song writer caught in the euphoria of this love of Jesus wrote the following lines. “Were the whole realm of nature mine that were a present far too small. Love so amazing, so Divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
I agree!!!
Jim Denison
IdeaLog Illumidate 05.26.04 - Tolerance Revisited
Something to think about as we struggle with the idea of "tolerance" as an absolute and clamor for some form of speech management in an increasingly pluralized society. ...
Today, for example, we encounter this paradox in the concept of 'militant democracy': no freedom for the enemies of freedom. However, from this example we can also learn that the straight deconstruction of the concept of tolerance falls into a trap, since the constitutional state contradicts precisely the premise from which the paternalistic sense of the traditional concept of 'tolerance' derives. Within a democratic community whose citizens reciprocally grant one another equal rights, no room is left for an authority allowed to one-sidedly determine the boundaries of what is to be tolerated. On the basis of the citizens' equal rights and reciprocal respect for each other, nobody possesses the privilege of setting the boundaries of tolerance from the viewpoint of their own preferences and value-orientations.
- Jurgen Habermas
More on morality and ethics in postmodern culture.
Today, for example, we encounter this paradox in the concept of 'militant democracy': no freedom for the enemies of freedom. However, from this example we can also learn that the straight deconstruction of the concept of tolerance falls into a trap, since the constitutional state contradicts precisely the premise from which the paternalistic sense of the traditional concept of 'tolerance' derives. Within a democratic community whose citizens reciprocally grant one another equal rights, no room is left for an authority allowed to one-sidedly determine the boundaries of what is to be tolerated. On the basis of the citizens' equal rights and reciprocal respect for each other, nobody possesses the privilege of setting the boundaries of tolerance from the viewpoint of their own preferences and value-orientations.
- Jurgen Habermas
More on morality and ethics in postmodern culture.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
IdeaLog Illumidate 05.25.04
I was talking with a guy the other day who was beating himself up over his sense of complete failure. As I listened to him I realized that his problem was not with his failures but with the extraordinarily high expectations he had for himself. He genuinely believed that he ought to be perfect. Listening to him I realized that it is possible to have such a lofty estimate of ourselves that we are rarely, if ever, pleased with ourselves.
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