Sometimes, too often, I think, on Sunday mornings I do not
feel worship-filled. I feel sorry about this and a little ashamed about feeling scolded as I am urged to confess my sin and rebellion. Perhaps
it is the word-choice that has become too familiar? “You rebel against God. You
know how sinful you are and you know that you run from God at every
opportunity.” Of course, I need confession
in my life, I don’t deny that. But I seem to need more of, of, I don’t know
what to call it … a more robust practice of the joy of worship and reconciliation?
What seems like an over-emphasis leads my soul not to confession or deep
awesome gratefulness for the love of Christ, but a head-hanging, dispirited
state of being.
Perhaps this is my problem alone. I don’t know. You are
welcome to correct me.
My good friend, Wes Hill, now an assistant professor of New
Testament at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania recently
noted:
“This is the book (Unapologetic:Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising EmotionalSense) that probably stands out most when I think back over the reading I
did in 2012. There are plenty of things that I didn’t like about this book (its
theology is considerably more liberal than mine), but when I finished the
“Yeshua” chapter, I felt like someone who’s just heard the story of the
Gospels, having never heard it before. I was reconverted.”
“Yeshua and the Crowd” [Excerpt]
Daylight
finds him in a procession again, but this time no one could mistake him for a
king. He’s stumbling along under the weight of his own instrument of execution,
a great big wooden thing he can hardly lift, with an escort of the empire’s
soldiers, and the bystanders who’ve come blinking out of the lodgings where
they spent the festival night and don’t see their hopes, or even the
possibility of their hopes, parading by. They see their disappointment, they
see their frustration. They see everything in themselves that is too weak or
too afraid to confront the strapping paratroopers; and much though they hate
the soldiers, they hate him more, for his pathetic slide into victimhood. Word
of his loose living, his impiety, his pleasure in bad company goes round in
whispers. And just look at him. There’s something disgusting about him, don’t
you think? Something that makes you squirm inside. Something … furtive. He’s so
pale and sickly-looking, with that dried blood round his mouth. He looks like a
paedophile being led away by the police. He looks like something from under a
rock; as if he doesn’t deserve the daylight. He’s a blot on the new day.
Someone kicks his arse as he goes by, and whoops, down he goes, flat on his nose
with the cross pinning him like a struggling insect, and let’s face it, it’s
funny. Yeshua is a joke. He’s less a messiah, more a patch of something nasty
on the pavement. And as he struggles on he recognizes every roaring, jeering
face. He knows our names. He knows our histories.
And
since, as well as being a weak and frightened man, he’s also the love that
makes the world, to whom all times and places are equally present, he isn’t
just feeling the anger and spite and unbearable self-disgust of this one crowd
on this one Friday morning in Palestine; he’s turning his bruised face toward
the whole human crowd, past and present and to come, and accepting everything
we have to throw at him, everything we fear we deserve ourselves. The doors of
his heart are wedged open wide, and in rushes the whole pestilential flood, the
vile and roiling tide of cruelties and failures and secrets. Let me take that
from you, he is saying. Give that to me instead. Let me carry it. Let me be to
blame instead. I am big enough. I am wide enough. I am not what you were told.
I am not your king or your judge. I am the father who longs for every last one
of his children. I am the friend who will never leave you. I am the light
behind the darkness. I am the shining your shame cannot extinguish. I am the
ghost of love in the torture chamber. I am change and hope. I am the refining
fire. I am the door where you thought there was only wall. I am what comes
after deserving. I am the earth that drinks up the bloodstain. I am gift without
cost. I am. I am. I am. Before the foundations of the world, I am.
This leads me to confession. Strangely, it also lifts my
heart. It reminds me of when I was a little girl and first fell in love with
Jesus and foolishly thought that had I been there, I would have saved him from
crucifixion. I now know otherwise. But, against what I’ve often heard, it just
isn’t true that we run from God at every opportunity. There are many, many
times and many, many people who run toward him dragging all their troubles, begging
for exactly what he offers: grace, forgiveness, joy, freedom.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment