2022-09-29 A Meditation on Crisis Response

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Co 15:20 ESV)

First century Jews had their crisis, the death of one of their own, and the sheer face of the cliff called Impossible: can this Man be Resurrected? Can this Man make our faith no longer in vain, but a Record for the ages as to who it was involved in this Serious Matter: the temple authorities; the complicit Roman authorities; all mankind, on some level, is divided between those few who were bare bones enough and close to their own crucifixion, perhaps, as not to be complicit; and then the many who did crucify Him.

So the soldier mulls about. The soldier investigates in quieter, ostensibly quieter, times, the Mystery and the Serious Matter, not wanting to get lines crossed and communications jumbled: this one, and not that one, is the culprit. This one, and not that one, tried a slick move. This one, and not that one, can we just say, had a most treacherous view on the value of human life. This one, and not that one, we array against in spiritual counterpose, acknowledging a smart, a hurt, a wound rather than trying to be stronger. That is, we say “Woah. I mean, I must acknowledge my own hurt, not just be the stronger man or woman”. So we were touched, as in a swordfight. We were not invincible, in this case. We had both tangible things on the line, lives lost as Jesus lost His, and intangibles, our own self-righteousness, our own hates, our own efforts at coping minus rhyme or reason as to what we witness.

On that Cross, Jesus beckoned us to be solvent and salient and malleable, to be willing to self-reflect even in light of the abstruseness of an enemy’s parry or instigation. The enemy is astonishingly revealed to be evil when as a corpus some of us draw near. That enemy is within our own fickle hearts; our own decisions are attuned and do matter. From the least enlistee to the commanding officer of our faith, the one with holy words, the one who with a word does heal, the one to whom people come as iron to a magnet, each of us is agent and officer of investigation on a forward, fighting, no time to reflect and philosophize, front. Yet too it is remarkable that we find we have more time, not less, so in those trenches we can indeed take a moment to reckon with a philosophy that comes neatly and plainly and obviously, in light of what hardships we live through, bullets flying overhead.