Faith
I have a million things to say
about real love
real life
true religion
and everything important.
I’m good with words
but when I look around
they fall short
they are taken from me.
Maybe we cannot explain the good we see
but only thank God for it,
as also with the bad,
we can only confess it.
I have one idea
though.
The Cross.
The Crucified God.
The One who entered
into this broken
cold
despairing
evil world,
and who said
against it
“I love you
I understand you
I know you
I’m with you (Immanuel)
I’ve saved you.”
The cross is:
God’s non-violent response
to a violent world,
his destruction
of who we are
as unloving people
represented by himself
on the cross
dying for our sins
paying the cost for all our emptiness.
The cross is:
the final and full revelation
of who God is
as the Committed One
the Loving One
even the Weak One
able to be moved by us.
The cross is:
the final and full criticism
of who we are
as
the unloving
the cold
the hardened
people,
still somehow
objects of his love and care
when we should
only be
objects of his anger.
The Resurrection
is the resurrection of the One
who died completely
the One
broken completely
under the weight
of carrying
this dead world
upon his shoulders
and
into the grave.
The resurrection
then
is also our raising
to new life
to a new beginning
and is the inaugeration
of a new creation.
One of love
and one where
the final power
of death
and of evil
has been taken away.
Evil continues
because we
continue.
If God were
to take a violent stand
against evil
and against cruelty
he would have to start
with me.
The paradox is
that this evil
has
our old selves
have
been relegated
to the past
done away with
making way for the new
which is breaking in
by the power of
the Gospel
of the crucified One
of the God who came near
and stays near
by His Spirit.
Christian hope
then
for this
still
ugly and cruel world
is that the good work
he began
will continue on
unto completion
taking full reign
over the darkness
continuing to challenge
evil’s
right to exist
and gripping people
in their dark situations
and calling them
into light
into love
into new life
that takes place
in the midst
of the old.
Christian life
then
is not judgement
upon a world
that was already judged,
judged righteous
and new
in Jesus,
the One representing it.
Christian life
then
is not anger
or hostility
towards those
who would call themselves
enemies of God
because God met us
in love
when we all
were against Him.
Christian life
then
is not disconnected
from this world
and our hope
is not for a heaven
apart from this world
but for
the “kingdom of heaven”
that Jesus spoke about
to take a hold of this world
and transform it.
This kingdom is marked
by love
by commitment
by forgiveness
and grace
because it belongs
to the Crucified One
the Loving One.
Christianity
then
is only Christian
in as far as it
shows to the world
the same kind of love
that God himself showed.
Any conceptions
Christians might have
of themselves
or of God
outside of Jesus
is a false conception
the sort of false conception
that Jesus destroyed
did away with
in the cross
when He redefined
both God and man.
