Dangerous Grace!

With the sobering indictment of Ash Wednesday – “Dust you are … to dust you will return.” – we Christians, millions of us, begin the Journey of Lent. This walk with Jesus, from Galilee to the Cross, is what one writer calls, “Reliving the Passion.”

This is a pilgrimage I have only observed recently.

In my early life as one of Christ’s Followers I saw Lent as an exclusively Catholic tradition. I insisted that the pre-occupation with the Crucifix fell short of Resurrection Faith. I saw it as involving a kind of self-mortification; reducing ourselves to the sort of remorse over our sin that lead many of the faithful to lie for nights in the cold or beat themselves for their sins that caused Christ’s suffering. It seemed to me to cloud the glory of Jesus’ Resurrection and the wonder of that “Amazing Grace” which is the Summit of anyone’s walk with the true Christ.

Easter 2003 was the year of my conversion to the conviction that I needed to “relive the passion.” A dear Friend gave me a book. The title? “Reliving the Passion.” Its Author, Walter Wangerin Jr. insists, early in the book, that Christ’s Grace is dangerous. It’s dangerous because it can only do its work in us when it exposes the real me; the real you.

Walking with Jesus on the way to His death we pass among the masses of humanity. We see them shoving and pushing; seeking attention. Would I give way to the person next to me if I were there? We watch the fickle Pilgrims on the way to High Holy Days clamoring for Christ’s Coronation. Barely a week later they riot for His Crucifixion. Would I have rejected this now powerless King? Have I? Have I denied I know Him? Have I hidden from Him to avoid ridicule?

Watching the barbaric brutality of the beating; the torture of the massive cross on his emaciated back; the savage impaling to that awful death stake! What have we done? Am I there? His words cut like a scimitar to our very core. “Father forgive them! They don’t know what they are doing!”

It’s then that we see. “ ‘Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear!”

This journey … these 40+ days of Lent are days of discovery … Dangerous Discovery … expose … “guilt;” “shame;” “ridicule;” “rabid renunciation;” the final sword thrust of a fallen race’s self-destruction!

“All we,” are complicit! On “Him” are “laid the wrongdoing of us all.” For no one is this “Grace” more dangerous than Him. On His own person alone is “the sin of the whole world” of “all” of us laid and exposed. In the barren cross and the empty tomb His Grace is finally revealed; our “fears relieved.”

Dangerous though it is this is a Journey we take with Jesus again and again and always arrive loving Him more deeply!