A few weeks ago a 23 year old boy was killed. Last week, I participated rather lamely in a discussion on the deaths of six million people and how that informs the psyche of the Jewish religion. And it sits in my gut, what is the answer to suffering in my faith?
An atheist anthropology professor in college said that any good religion has an answer to the question of suffering. For some reason, these threads and actions, and a bunch more stuff, in my life have coalesced into a very strange vortex.
What does Christ have to do with suffering? What does a theology of the Cross have to do with suffering? Why has there not been a systematic theological consideration of the question of pain in the lives of people as addressed from Scripture? There are certainly enough references to pain and suffering across the bible. The hours leading up to the death of Jesus are filled with anguish, with shame, with disgust, with torture, culminating in a horrible death.
Does it sound like a fixation?
Only a little. I know that the glory of the Lord is made manifest in the resurrection of Jesus. But the greater the pain, the greater the glory that follows.
I guess I am tired of theology being so much in the intellectual, the academic realm. It needs to be there, don’t get me wrong. The best and the brightest need to be using the gifts God has given to them to push the edge of what we know about God, about our salvation, about our interpretation of Scripture, about how the Holy Spirit knits together the message of Christ to meet the challenges of a changing world.
But right now, I am in one place, pulling on one thread. Coming to a salvation knowledge of Jesus as Lord and Savior does what to the suffering we endure? The Scripture seems clear that if we are in the faith, we are to endure suffering. Which leads to a sidebar question, if we are not suffering in the faith, are we really pursuing it?
I know Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I need to know more completely how that is a benefit for me as pastor and as man when there are times of crisis and pain.
This is not going to be polished prose. This is going to be rough and tumble, explore the bible, pull at the edges of my own heart, hope it gets noticed and pulls in real discussion.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Defining Moment of Christianity
The defining moment of Christianity is the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. I choose this moment instead of the resurrection for a couple of reasons. First, to everyone who has ever claimed that God is dead, in that moment, they were proved right. Jesus, fully God, fully human, succumbed to the final moment of all our earthly existences, death.
Without the resurrection, Christianity is a sham. At best, it is a collection of moral platitudes and clichés built around the Golden Rule. The promise of Scripture was that Jesus would rise again. So, without a resurrection, we have definitive proof of the error of Holy Scripture.
But for the resurrection to occur, Jesus showed the ultimate love for us. He loved us so much that he died for us, and died horribly. Jesus, as human, would find death inevitable as someone who lived fully as human on this earth. But Jesus as God, as Deity, as the Creator, someone fully separated from the Creation, he died too.
Now death could not hold him, and Jesus knew that death could not hold him, but that promise did not prevent his anguished cry, “My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?” It did not prevent him from sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying that the cup of wrath be passed from him. But he was obedient, he was loving, even to the moment of his passing.
Theologies of the Cross explain the death of Jesus judicially, as atonement, morally, as the ultimate example of faith, cosmically, as the victor over the forces of Satan, but I feel a hole in those understandings.
Biblical interpretation is marvelous at logical and intuitive assemblages of God’s Word to show us the marvelous nature of our faith. And for that I am so very proud to be a Christian.
But I also know that I have been called upon to pastor people who have experienced pain and death and loss in ways I can only imagine. The Spirit gives me utterance, but I have this terrible feeling that I do not have the ‘chops’ to really speak to their situation. But the language of suffering and pain permeates Scripture, as does the language of its healing. I don’t have the ‘chops’, but my Lord Jesus does. I want to explore that, to develop the theology of the Cross to include a real exposition of the suffering of Jesus, how that suffering can truly allow us, as the followers of Jesus, to speak more completely to people who could use the healing we have experienced.
Without the resurrection, Christianity is a sham. At best, it is a collection of moral platitudes and clichés built around the Golden Rule. The promise of Scripture was that Jesus would rise again. So, without a resurrection, we have definitive proof of the error of Holy Scripture.
But for the resurrection to occur, Jesus showed the ultimate love for us. He loved us so much that he died for us, and died horribly. Jesus, as human, would find death inevitable as someone who lived fully as human on this earth. But Jesus as God, as Deity, as the Creator, someone fully separated from the Creation, he died too.
Now death could not hold him, and Jesus knew that death could not hold him, but that promise did not prevent his anguished cry, “My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?” It did not prevent him from sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying that the cup of wrath be passed from him. But he was obedient, he was loving, even to the moment of his passing.
Theologies of the Cross explain the death of Jesus judicially, as atonement, morally, as the ultimate example of faith, cosmically, as the victor over the forces of Satan, but I feel a hole in those understandings.
Biblical interpretation is marvelous at logical and intuitive assemblages of God’s Word to show us the marvelous nature of our faith. And for that I am so very proud to be a Christian.
But I also know that I have been called upon to pastor people who have experienced pain and death and loss in ways I can only imagine. The Spirit gives me utterance, but I have this terrible feeling that I do not have the ‘chops’ to really speak to their situation. But the language of suffering and pain permeates Scripture, as does the language of its healing. I don’t have the ‘chops’, but my Lord Jesus does. I want to explore that, to develop the theology of the Cross to include a real exposition of the suffering of Jesus, how that suffering can truly allow us, as the followers of Jesus, to speak more completely to people who could use the healing we have experienced.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)