I write this on the heels of Holy Week - Palm Sunday came and went, the sweet solemnity of Good Friday has passed, and the victorious, history-shaking, first breath of the risen Christ has been remembered on Easter Sunday. Although at this time of year a spattering of questions tend to rattle in my head like a round of errant BB’s:
1) Could there have been another explanation to what the early Christian’s claimed to have seen (ie. Are we really sure Jesus actually arose from the dead?)
2) What would it mean for us if He didn’t physically resurrect? (The very thing that some liberal Christian denominations believe)
3) What does it mean for me if God truly did raise Him from the dead?
As a teenager, I was a sort of pseudo, a la carte, pick-what-sounds-good-today, Christian. I loved love (although I had no idea what that meant). I was ready to claim Jesus as an historical fact, and His gift of grace as a beautiful expression of what we all need. I understood the Gospel and saw my need for it. I liked it, but I was unwilling to submit myself to much of it. As I looked at the unavoidable moral claims, I continually tried to wiggle out of what I saw as antiquated and repressive. This perspective led to my teenage mantra: Live and let love. Do what you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else.
If love = no harm, then no harm = love. And if love = no harm, then harm = no love. It has to add up! Right?
Acts 19:13-16 … I can picture it now - seven over-confident, religiously diplomatic men enter a home wearing their long black robes. Gassing one another up, poking the guy next guy with eager elbows, and nervously laughing, the group pushes the most foolhardy of the gang in the door first. After approaching the demon-possessed man (who is scoffing at the overdressed, elitist, silver-spoon Jews) begins to approach the group. Like a kung-fu movie from the ’70s, we see the comically long, rapid movement of the mouths of the men while the captions simply read “Get out of him! Jesus said so.” Dust is kicked up, robes torn, and eyes poked (three stooges style, of course). The crazed, demon-possessed man is quoted on the bottom of the screen: “You are not Jesus. You are not Paul. Who are you?”
Let me confess something: I overthink a lot of things. On one occasion a friend offered a very confusing observation about me, that the number of questions pinballing around my skull would dwarf that of almost every person he knows. Notice the keyword, questions, not answers. In the last couple of years, I have had a framework introduced to me, so that I better know how to ask these questions. Much like jazz, it is helpful to have a loose structure and the capacity to improvise in the midst of deep conversations.
When I committed my life to Jesus as a 19-year-old, I had to take a big step. This step, called faith, was a difficult one. The most difficult intellectual step that I had to take was to reconcile the fact that I saw swaths of self-proclaimed Christians who could not articulate why they believed what they believed. How have we gotten to this point? What has led the world outside our Christian walls to wonder if they can hold onto their intellectual honesty while choosing to follow Jesus?
If you have confessed faith in Jesus, repented of your sin, been baptized, and received the Holy Spirit, you have been called to make disciples. Jesus has not given you a task that can only be achieved by a kind of Christian elite. The Great Commission to make disciples of all nations is not a call for a select few. There is no way of getting around it, discipleship is a listening affair and you have been given the capacity to love others by listening.
I was raised in an era in which kids were expected to learn about God in a room with a trained “Christian professional.” Why does this chasm exist between regular folk, their children, and the church? Why has the spiritual formation of children become a separate, professionalized endeavor?
Let me ask you a provocative question: How well-suited are you to take a punch from a friend?
Of course, I am not wondering if you are choosing abusive relationships and chalking it up to humility. Certainly, I am not imploring you to start and attend a kind of fight club that meets in the dingy darkness of a back alley. Instead, I am wondering whom you place yourself around and how you choose to interact with those nearest to you. What types of relationships do you have?
“If you can make a good friend, you should be able to disciple. On the other hand, inability to form close friendships is an absolute barrier to effectiveness in making disciples.” (Dennis McCallum) What kind of friend are you? Be encouraged that Jesus uses average people, with normal dispositions, and mediocre talent to build His eternal and everlasting Kingdom.
What is the first thing that you picture when you think of Easter? If you are like me, you were introduced to the fanfare before you came to understand the significance. Perhaps your earliest memory is dyeing eggs and eating marshmallow peeps. Maybe you remember sitting in a Sunday church service and the phrase “He has risen indeed!” quickly became commonplace and mundane.
…Why do you think it is so easy to lose sight of Easter’s significance?
Good Friday has always felt like a strange way to describe the bleakest day in human history to me. I remember the first time that the weight of this event parked itself on my heart: sitting on an old, white couch in our dank basement, an elementary-aged version of me had just been shown the movie The Passion of the Christ. Although I did not comprehend how Jesus’ death was intended as an atoning substitute for my own or what I was supposed to do with this information, I cannot help but again feel the tears that welled up in that little boy's eyes. On a slow April evening in the early 2000s, the reality of this catastrophic calamity stirred up profound compassion in my heart.
I did not come to Jesus for Jesus. I will make a bold assertion and say that you did not come to Jesus for Jesus either. It is possible to have an interaction with Jesus and totally miss the mark. On a single day, thousands of people experienced this reality. It is feasible that many of us have encountered many of the good things that Jesus offers, while completely missing Him.
There is no such thing as Christian discipleship without the ever-deepening journey into self-sacrificing love. I am convinced that many of us (myself often included) are missing the delightful path of Christian discipleship because we do not see our everyday life and interactions as carrying appropriate eternal weight.
“There is no hell for any of us to fear outside of ourselves.” - Quillen Hamilton Shinn, Universalist Minister.
How does this “gospel” sit with you? If we move past our own preconceived notions and personal appetite for freedom from accountability, the hollowness of the message is evident. Much like having candy for every meal will inevitably ruin the taste of candy, mercy without wrath will never equate to love. In fact, it ruins the idea of love.
The story of the Tower of Babel feels silly to us, in a lot of ways, because it appears so distant and not relatable. My continued realization is that we share much more in common with the cult of Babel than we think. Within this real-life story, there is a nugget of truth that plagues the human heart, whether we live in the ancient Middle East or the post-postmodern West: mankind continues to place ourselves on the perpetual hamster wheel of self-deification. In other words, we continue to define ourselves as gods and goddesses.
If there was a short list of topics to stray away from in Christianity with the hope of keeping people from feeling uncomfortable, hell and judgment would both sit near the top. Heaven is heaven because it is forever rotating around the Son. Hell is hell because it is absent of the One from whom all goodness, love and light glow out of.
Could it be that the very bandaids that we are using to cover our symptoms are the very perpetrators that are most afflicting us? Day by day, we continue to lull ourselves into a state separated from God’s reality.
Everybody asks it. The Trinidadian-German Eurodance artist, Haddaway, posed the question with an echoed chorus and a techno beat: “What is Love?”
Perhaps we have lost a real, solid, immovable concept of what love truly entails.
Daily we submit to this lie that being efficient is the calling card of godliness. Says who? And who cares?
“What is truth?” - Pontius Pilate (John 18:38)
In the thick weeds of a confused culture that believes there is truth for you and truth for me and it does not matter if they are diametrically opposed, John pokes his head in to explain what Jesus said and meant: “there is no path, but Mine.”
![Jesus, Paul, and you [who?]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58c9bf2215d5dbb3919c7112/1688592053341-Z2IB10MLZROE8DC6E90M/caleb-jones-J3JMyXWQHXU-unsplash.jpg)
