The Lenten Journey Day 31

Today’s essay is actually an excerpt from the book “Jayber Crow” by author, farmer and poet Wendell Berry. In the passage Crow, the title character, speaks of his association with the crowd at the foot of the cross. Crow is tempted to be just like the throng and call for Christ to come down off the cross and reveal his true power. But Crow laments what he knows to be true, “I knew the answer. I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it. He didn’t , he hasn’t, because from the moment he did, he would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be His slaves.”

Giving into their and admittedly our worldly demands would have made Christ our overlord instead of our beloved Lord and Savior. We claim to want God to step in and just stop all the bad stuff, but we really want is what that crowd wanted. We want Jesus to be the hero of our opinions of OUR bad situation. Christ appears weak because that is His strength. It is in the ordinary that we should look and will truly find Jesus.

The Lenten Journey Day 30

Edith Stein delivers a short essay centered around Christ’s words in Gethsemane, “Thy will be done.” She asserts this is the regulatory measure of following Christ. Her writing is magnified by a short description of her own Spiritual journey. She was born into Judaism, turned to atheism in her teens, later converted to Catholicism as a Discalced Caremilite nun, and died at the age of 51 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The essay reads as a charge to her fellow nuns and friars. The surrendered will of Christ, Stein writes, is evident in His obedience, poverty, and purity. From the cross Christ calls for the allegiance of His followers and the answer Stein urges is, “Lord, where else should we go. You have the words of eternal life.”

God’s will is for some a grandiose mystery that must be discovered and followed with pinpoint accuracy, and rigid attention to detail. For others it is a pious thought that few, if any, every attain and so it sounds good but is not practical. For Christ, God’s will, was a daily call to surrender, intimacy, and listening. It is a pursuit to follow the two great commandments, love of God and of others. It is not God’s will that we all die on a Roman cross, or serve others in a nunnery. It is His will that today we might lean in to a supreme love for Him and a humbled, servant minded, love of others.

The Lenten Journey Day 29

G.K. Chesterson writes today of the isolation that Christ took on in the garden and while on the cross. He writes with an almost eerie reverence of the forsaken Christ who passes not only through death but his own earthly doubts.

Chesterson makes an interesting connection, in joining an atheistic perspective with the experience of Christ. He says that Christ is the only divinity that “uttered their isolation.” Referencing those who have not found or refuse to believe in the existence of God. As much as we talk about Christ’s death reaching to the very depths of human loss we rarely talk about how the earthly life of Christ reaches all human experiences. For just a moment Jesus wondered where God was. For all those who have or do wonder the same thing, Christ reaches out, empathizes, and offers the hope of God’s existence and activity.

The Lenten Journey Day 28

It’s amazing what a little information can do. As I read Dag Hammarskjold’s short essay today I have a sense of familiarity and of freshness. The story is of Jesus and His preparation for and realization of his crucifixion. But it is written about “the adamant young man” preparing for His seemingly cruel destiny of sacrifice. The “young man” remains focused in spite of the ignorance and unwillingness of his closest friends. The essay ends with a challenge for followers of Jesus to embrace sacrifice with the same faith that is exemplified and strengthened by the work of Christ.

The informing part for me was a quick google search of Hammarskjold. It revealed that he was the youngest person to ever serve at the UN Secretary Journal. An economist who was committed to public service. Not necessarily profound but it made me think how our life experiences are both informed by and informational in our reading of Scripture. The essay and the google search hint at the possibility that Dag found in Christ a purpose to serve and a drive to keep going even when outer skepticism and inner doubt may creep in. May we be driven like Christ for Christ.

The Lenten Journey Day 27

Author and professor of Philosophy Peter Kreeft writes a flowing essay on the wonder of the cross and the consistency of Christ’s suffering. Wonder in the depths of His love that Christ would die for us, that He would give Himself for us, dead in our sin but alive because of Him. Consistency in that Christ continues to suffer in empathy with the suffering today, we find Christ in our own and with others who are hurting. Kreeft ends with a call for followers of Christ to follow Him in suffering and ministering to those who are hurting.

My thoughts come from Kreeft’s first line after an extensive quote from John Stott. He says, “the Cross is judo.” He means by this that the death of Christ is using the cruel evil of this world to conquer the cruel evil of this world. Judo, as a martial art, focuses on using the opponents own strength against them. That is it, that’s what I know about judo. Yet, I know even less about the cross. I have studied, taught, and read often on the cross of Jesus, but do I really understand it? I praise God for its reality and hope to spend my life seeking the cross. Kreeft summarizes the paradox and joyful reality, “ It (the cross) is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world. Yet it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at. And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs.”