The Way Up is the Way Down

In November, 1988, Philip Yancey wrote a column in Christianity. It was inspired by a dramatic change in the life of Henri Nouwen a Pastor and renowned Theologian.

Yancey begins the column with a testimonial from Nouwen. “Adam is a 25-year-old man who cannot speak, cannot dress or undress himself, cannot walk alone, cannot eat without much help. He does not cry or laugh. Only occasionally does he make eye contact. His back is distorted. His arm and leg movements are twisted. He suffers from severe epilepsy and, despite heavy medication, sees few days without grand-mal seizures. Sometimes, as he grows suddenly rigid, he utters a howling groan. On a few occasions I’ve seen one big tear roll down his cheek.

“It takes me about an hour and a half to wake Adam up, give him his medication, carry him into his bath, wash him, shave him, clean his teeth, dress him, walk him to the kitchen, give him his breakfast, put him in his wheelchair, and bring him to the place where he spends most of the day with therapeutic exercises.”

Three years ago, author Henri Nouwen moved from his post at Harvard University to a community called Daybreak, near Toronto. There he took on the daily mundane chores related above … Yet in a recent article in World Vision magazine, Nouwen insisted that he, not Adam, is the chief beneficiary in this strange, misfitted relationship.

From the hours spent with Adam, Nouwen says, he has gained an inner peace so fulfilling that it makes most of his other more high-minded tasks seem boring and superficial by contrast. As he sat beside that silent, slow-breathing child-man, he realized how violent and marked with rivalry and competition, how pervaded with obsession, was his prior drive toward success in academia and in the Christian ministry.

From Adam he learned that “what makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love. Whoever speaks about Adam as a ‘vegetable’ or ‘animal-like’ … misses the sacred mystery that Adam is fully capable of receiving, and giving love.” From Adam, Henri Nouwen learned – gradually, painfully, shamefully – that the way up is down.

My career as a journalist has afforded me opportunities to interview diverse people. Looking back, I can roughly divide them into two types: stars and servants. The stars … are the ones who dominate our magazines and … television programs … Christian magazines and Christian television programs too. … Yet I must tell you that, in my limited experience, these, our “idols,” are as miserable a group of people as I have ever met. Most have troubled or broken marriages. Nearly all are hopelessly dependent on psychotherapy. And in a heavy irony, these larger-than-life heroes seem tormented by incurable self-doubt.

I have spent time with servants. People like Dr. Paul Brand, who worked for 20 years among outcasts – leprosy patients, the poorest of the poor in rural India. Or health workers who left high-paying jobs to serve with Mendenhall Ministries in a backwater town in Mississippi. Or relief worker in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, or other such repositories of world-class human suffering. Or the PhD’s scattered throughout jungles of South America translating the Bible into obscure languages. …

As I now reflect on the two groups, stars and servants, the servants clearly emerge as the favored ones, the graced ones. … somehow, in the process of losing their lives, they have found them. They have received the “peace that is not of this world” such as Nouwen described in his article, a peace he discovered not within the stately quadrangles of Harvard, but by the bedside of incontinent Adam.

“Keep your eyes,” Nouwen said, “on the one who refuses to turn stones into bread, jump from great heights, or rule with great temporal power. Keep your eyes on the one who says, ‘Blessed are the poor, the gentle, those who mourn and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; blessed are the merciful, the peacemakers and those who are persecuted in the cause of uprightness’ … Keep your eyes on the one who is poor with the poor, weak with the weak and rejected with the rejected. That one is the source of all peace.”

The Gospels repeat one saying of Jesus more than any other. 'Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.'

Truly the way up is the way down."

Philip Yancey, Christianity Today, Nov. 18, 1988

How Can You Be Sure that Jesus is Who He Claims to Be?

We are near midway through Lent. I’ve found myself wondering what was going on in Jesus’ life leading up to that monumental moment and the unparalleled suffering He endured. Interestingly Matthew gives us a kind of “turning point,” or event from which everything that followed lead to His “time.”

That “point” is defined in Chapter 16 verse 21 of this Tax Man turned Christ-Follower’s Biography of Christ. “From that time on,” he writes, “Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” It’s occurred to me that I could, quite appropriately, conclude that what He did, and talked about, from then on, ‘til His Death and Resurrection, was of highest importance. Kind of “Famous Last Words and works.”

Interestingly, in that very Chapter; Chapter 16 He makes a statement which is repeated earlier in Matthew and also in Luke. “A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” (Matthew 16:4) The religious elite had asked Him for a sign presumably to prove He was who He claimed to be. This was His response to them. Luke tells us that, “As the crowds increased, Jesus said, “This is a wicked generation. It asks for a sign … .” Once before Matthew had recorded an instance where Jesus gave the same reply to religious “Teachers.” (See Matthew 12: 39 & 40)

What is there about a sign that disturbs Jesus so deeply?

Anyone who asks for a “sign” that someone is authentic is asking for proof of it. The question that follows is obvious. To whose satisfaction? Jesus indictment makes it clear that the one asking for a sign has a set of criteria which must be met. These men; this crowd; had expectations of Messiah and they were asking Jesus to meet those. Jesus refused because to comply would mean compromise. The things He did were and would always be the Father’s choice and not His. Anything else would be self-serving and dishonoring to the “Lord God.” They would be “wicked.” He would be “prostituting” Himself to another god just as those who pestered Him for a sign had sold out to a nationalistic creation of their own minds.

However, Jesus did say, in the Matthew 12 conversation that there would be a “sign.” This is how He put it. No sign “will be given … except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

The Resurrection was to be “the sign.”

Among Jesus “Famous Last Words” are these. And the importance of them is that, in fact, His Resurrection was then and always will be the “sign” that establishes His identity as the “Christ” – Consummate Man – and “Lord” – Son of God.

We now live in a time when “signs” are just as eagerly sought as they were then. And, as then, so now the sensual and gratifying; spectacular and powerful; beautiful and successful are touted and craved.

Are we being seduced into the worship of another God? Are we prostituting ourselves to a deity carved out of the stuff a secular society values? Are we forgetting the centrality of a cross to the Resurrection story?

Paul, Christ’s handpicked Representative to the Roman world, is a real life example of someone who’s rock solid certainty that Jesus is “Lord and Christ” is based on a “faith” that the path of suffering and death is the way to Resurrection. This is what he wrote in his second letter to the Christ-followers in Corinth. “We think you ought to know, dear brothers and sisters, about the trouble we went through in the province of Asia. We were crushed and overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God, who raises the dead.”

Christ is Risen!

We too will live!