2024-06-04 A Meditation on Feels Right

“15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” (Col 1:15-20 ESV)

In bolder temperatures, the Christian plaintive, the soldier at it, hurry-up and about the Master’s business, she or he discovers the Remedy to a faith-based sand castle that has been destroyed. A faith-based edifice crushed by something that just… just feels right.

Indeed, the temptation is the response no longer meek but rather tempted by the preaching of only the Law—omitting the Gospel—and the flattery it entails: someone out there is positing a different gospel, one of works and of almost-there purity: as if; as if we are “almost there” in the purity scale. “Almost there” in the pick-me-up. “Almost there”, is so tempting to believe; the message then should not be, “bear one another’s burdens” alone, but do more: see your own burdens as just as compromising. You are no less a sinner than the outcast, than the miscreant, than the one still in childhood garb according to the voices and pundits that be.

The remedy the soldier discovers, to a sand castle just destroyed, to something that just feels right (call it the honesty of a dream, the collegiality of a group spirit, the “when did we end up here?” of a shared expedition), is once again to put out in the cold anyone the preaching of good works.

Is this really something to be so agitated about? The chief experience gifted to us is the experience of relying fully on Another, on Jesus, to remedy our plainly-lived-into sins. The scary zone of former habits that today still speak to us of a nearly-holy sharing or unity with another body and spirit; is it only we prodigals who are still sinners? Who even live wakefully into such go-with-it familiarity?

And then the challenge, who and what “race” or “breed” of man, of woman, is doing the D-Day Christ-like sacrifice in our generation? That they may boast, like the Jewish people of two millennia, that Christ and His sacrifice came from their folk. That they may boast, in the presence of the rather bumbling or less attuned, less focal, less Obsessed Romans, that they died for the sins of the world? In all these mysteries is a return to that basic preaching: Jesus sacrificed His life so that we could live out ours, no longer faulted because we have condemned in the flesh not just sin but also punishment: punishment has been proven to be ill-meted out; it adheres to the innocent as much as to the guilty. Jesus is punished, and we are laughing away at how little respect or regard we now have for that Scale of Worldly Justice.