I have few memories from my childhood. When people ask me about what I did in middle or high school, I usually respond that I can barely remember what I ate for breakfast that day, let alone events that happened a dozen years ago. Almost all of the memories I do have are quick flashes, images or conversations that stick out in my mind. One of those flashes is from a Good Friday service at my church when I was ten or eleven. After the service, when traditionally the congregants leave in silence out of respect for Jesus' sacrifice, I was waiting outside the church and heard one of the members loudly whispering to her nine year old daughter, with what looked to me like anger: “He's dead! Jesus is dead! They killed him! It was the worst mistake he ever made!” A little extreme to say to your child after a service that many people already find depressing. God only knows why she decided to say what she did. Maybe she was having a horrible day, and the service brought out negative emotions that she had been bottling up. I hadn't learned the (generally) adult habit of judging people yet, so I continued to like her as a person and to be friends with her kids.
But let's move beyond the questionable parenting to the actually statements she made. Even if few people would express her belief the way she did, I think many (some Christians in addition to non-Christians) view Jesus' death as either something akin to a mistake that he made, or as not actually important. The resurrection is pushed even more to the wayside, either as a figment of the grieving disciples' imaginations or as a happy ending tacked on to the end of the story. In many ways, I can understand the desire to emphasize Jesus' ethical teachings on love, forgiveness, etc. as a response to the centuries when the extreme opposite belief tended to prevail: that individual salvation from our sin through Jesus' death is all that matters, to the near-exclusion of anything else he did or taught during his earthly ministry.
I think there's a false separation here between what are seen as the different aspects of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. A genuine understanding of what happened during his ministry, on the cross, and at the empty tomb can only be achieved by recognizing and constantly reminding ourselves of the glue that binds them together: divine love. It's the love of the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, who always meant for us to be the faithful stewards of His creation, reflecting His goodness into the world for His glory. Instead, we decided that wasn't in our best interest, that our plan was better than God's plan, that we could do well enough on our own. We chose to put ourselves at the center of our universe, to seek life in a multitude of things that God had created, courting death and decay rather than depending on Him. We were enslaved to sin and death and couldn't free ourselves. What was needed wasn't human wisdom or self-help philosophies, but a drastic rescue operation by God himself.
In spite of what my fellow church member claimed, then, Jesus' gift of self-sacrifice for our sins wasn't a mistake. It was love. And he died, but is now alive, the ultimate assurance that our future isn't death in our sin, but life in him.
(In the next entry, I hope to discuss God's first rescue operation, the Exodus, and to stress the importance of seeing Jesus' sacrifice and resurrection within God's plans to redeem us and the rest of His creation.)
No comments:
Post a Comment