Tag Archives: easter

Good Friday World

Posted on by

2

We are living in a Good Friday world. This is not a comfortable fact. This is not something we want to admit. This is the vast chasm of screaming brokenness that we spend our lives teetering desperately away from. Dreams. Health. Career. Success. Family. Living your best life. We brandish these things like weapons, like armour against the fact that we are mortal and, as one of my friends puts it, ‘the world is on fire’. 

Sure, we realise that bad things do happen, but they happen, mostly, to ‘other people’ – those poor souls out there who are living in Gaza, or the Ukraine, or central Africa. We, in the developed world, are able to generally live our lives insulated from the cries of the desperate and the dying. We craft a delusional bubble of immortality and immunity and we work hard to protect it for as long as we can. 

There are a few things that scare us – car crashes, terrorist attacks, and cancer – the only conceivable tragedies that could touch us in our insulated lives, but we console ourselves that this won’t happen to us. It’s very unlikely. And we plan to start actually going to the gym.

And yet, despite our illusion, we are being eaten away slowly from the inside. Our buried brokenness rises up slowly, encroaching on us like the very cancer we seek to avoid. But we don’t want to realise how far we are from reality, how far we are from seeing our vulnerability, our desperation, our need for a saviour. 

This is the case, even, for those who call themselves ‘Christians’ – at least it was for me. I was happy to be a Christian insofar as it meant getting a ticket to heaven and maybe even following most of the rules, but was I interested in taking up my cross to follow Jesus to death and resurrection? If I’m honest, not at all. 

It’s actually kind of crazy hard-core; the ravaging brokenness of the reality of this world, the utter desperation in which we find ourselves, the intense passion of our Saviour – and what he asks of us in return. It feels too big. Too much. Too scary. Like I thought life was a Rom Com and I’ve woken up in ‘Lord of the Rings’. How can I possibly take part in this adventure? 

In church this morning, I slipped off my reeboks and knelt on the hard carpet between the rows of seats. It was all I could do – to offer my body, to open my hands. The weightiness of the presence was in the room and I was desperate to be close, to breath him in. As I knelt there, I was transported to the foot of the cross. One of the women who knew and loved Jesus, weeping, as her Lord was splayed helpless across wooden beams and broken in front of her. Pain. Anger. Confusion. Despair. Jesus – you were supposed to save me! You were supposed to stop the cancer from ever occurring in my body. You were supposed to heal the bowel tumour before my last colonoscopy! There is so much you were supposed to do! And there you are – silenced and broken, apparently impotent and shackled, yourself overwhelmed by the pain of this world. I do not understand. And yet, you are still my Lord. 

Somehow, I manage to lift my eyes from the ground to the cross above me. For an infinitesimal and unexpected moment, his face turns and his eyes lock with mine. 

And He sees me. 

Real Death and Real Resurrection

Posted on by

0

Well the last few weeks have been some of the hardest of my life. I got told a couple of weeks ago that my bowel tumour is growing. There are a lot of reasons that is bad that I don’t feel like going into here, but it’s bad. They want to do a big operation on me in a couple of weeks but they can’t promise anything from it, apart from the fact that it would give me a permanent colostomy – which would be the first big hit my body would have taken in this whole journey.

And I have been kind of lost. Lost in a swirl of panic and pain. There are lots of questions and not really any answers. There are lots of reasons to doubt and fear. There are lots of reasons to remonstrate and self-blame. Almost every fibre of my being is grasping for a vestige of control. My body has been in an almost constant state of fight or flight, which is only helped with running or sauna or binge-watching ‘Young Sheldon’ on Netflix (seriously – it’s the cutest show!).

Or I can come into His presence. If I can bear to confront the depths of my anger and pain and bring it, along with my heart, into the secret place. I can come to a place of really deep self-emptying, maybe for a couple of minutes. I can come to a place, for a short time, where I let go. Where I have cried out the last drops of my own resistance and laid open my heart’s deepest anguish. Then, sometimes, I find I can hide in that space in the shadow of his wing.

The death he calls us to is real. I don’t think I had got that. I don’t think I wanted to get that. I still don’t.

I think all of us, really, read John 3:16 and interpret it as “for God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to die so we would never have to taste death”. Nope. Turns out he wants us to die to ourselves. And he says it too: “all who are obsessed with with being secure in life will lose it all – including their lives. But those who let go of their lives and surrender them to me will discover true life”. I think perhaps we should make that the new John 3:16 – print it on bookmarks or Christian mugs or something.

And so we go around in this sort of Christian half-life, quite content to stay here – in this life that we have now – and hope that God blesses it. We sing “you can have all this world, give me Jesus” and then we go home and expect God to work around our plans for our lives. At least that’s what I have always done.

I was standing at the front of the room in worship at church today, surrounded by people declaring that “I don’t need anything else, you are my one thing” to Jesus, and I was telling him that I sure as hell didn’t feel that way. I want to live in this world. I want to live ‘my life’. The desire is strong. The sense of it being my right is strong. But I can see that all my sense of fight and entitlement is also empty and useless to actually save me. I see, terrifyingly, my ultimate helplessness in the face of death and disease and disaster. I realise that I cannot control this world, cannot even control my own body. The brokenness of this world seems to be attacking me from the inside – my very cells turning rogue.

And I am starting to learn how to let go. Not to ‘give up’ but to ‘give upwards’. Somehow, I really do believe he wants life for me – and life abundantly. Somehow, I really do believe he has a plan. And I have no idea what this is going to look like.

I’ve been resisting surrender. I’m still resisting it. I don’t want it. And that’s part of the point. Jesus didn’t want to let go at Gethsemane. We wrestle alongside him. We take up our cross, alongside him. We die alongside him, and alongside him we are resurrected. This is the mystery of faith – perhaps a faith I never wanted. A story I would never have volunteered to be a part of. But He’s told us all along; our only hope for both this world and the next is in living resurrection. And you cannot have real resurrection without real death.

None of this makes sense. But to whom else would I turn?

Give me Jesus.