2024-12-13 A Meditation on Resurrection

“3 We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. 4 Therefore we ourselves boast about you in the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions that you are enduring.” (2 Thess 1:3-4 ESV)

To say we are unfazed is a bit of a wishful thought: but fazed or not, we are plucky. For, having put everything on the line, we dunked, and we emerged Different yet not compromised. Strange haunts, familiar but long lost environs: we are coping with the worldview of an interlocutor, someone near to us either by circumstance or by longstanding affinity. And it can all go hollow. It can all start to seem somehow the lesser broadminded vision of a peer rather than what our Teacher and we had gotten up to.

For our Teacher is the Holy Spirit, and strange courage arrives on the doorstep asking after some Christian Service: we suddenly become those who are curious about our own souls and our status as servants of the opposite-thinking Gospel: down with wealth and worldly prestige, up with untold paradoxical blessing-in-weakness. We are made fools for Christ, because secretly there is a whole audience of the Saints in the land, who cannot wait to give the crew a homecoming celebration. Yet for us Today, it is a solo crossing. It is a warmth on behalf of one or two few who have not abandoned or hated on us.

The plain honesty, then, makes for radical Otherminded changes to occur not because of our own professional self-Assessment, but because some downtrodden, miserly, lame and weakened Aspect of life has been the fertile seedbed of a Resurrection life together. We Rise, and are suddenly free of the crutches. We suddenly recover that broad scope, horizons perhaps larger than this our poorer brother’s or sister’s, for whom we pray, or cease to let it all be up to Fate. It makes a difference, and we can first see some Christian Deed when first we can face up to how many Christian Deeds have gone unanswered, not pursued, not ratcheted up to the Record and Final Judgment piecemeal litany: in this, see how I soared! In this, see how I Gave! In this, see how I Arrived, not unkempt, together, “of course”-minded as to good deeds!

But no, the Gospel has no bottoming-out or limits to its own Ability to ratchet up the good deeds: these go rampant in the hands of a broader sainthood, and God is rich in service. What the Gospel is about for us personally, however, is a waking Realization that we are beloved amidst pecuniary loss and poverty. We are beloved even with no one sitting across from us gladsomely to remind us of this. We are no longer Fazed, because that harrowing valley stride led to Submission and Defeat, all in the name of Resurrection. It took us to places we shall not ever wish to go to. It provoked us in our innermost spirit. It jaunted us and jested at our sense of Togetherness. Somehow our late night wilderness or valley Wandering, it took us to new levels of Acceptance, and sympathy indeed for the other set, for the brother and sister in the faith, for those squeezed and for those with divine Strongholds of character we ourselves scarcely own.

We ourselves can wonder, am I moral? Am I, in the sum of things, Good? Am I likeable and servant-minded, and in the end after all is there any sliding scale or difference in these regards? Or are all miserly sinners, and all potentially Loved on from outside of ourselves?

We are only told the latter because any and all Goodness in ourselves, to become aware of it, is to feed it to a mongrel hoard of vipers and ambitious conniving calculating inner demons. We tussle and boast in our own Good Works. We question and applaud our own Attainments. We are fools for our own aggrandizement, until our life is Met, Coached, Lifted up high, around love for the beggar and love for the sensitive soldier in each of us. So it is a gift undeserved, but also Mankind gets the job done: society plugs away, offices and departments and political camps fight over meaningful things, over Ideas and Changes, over Gifts and Freedoms. As though man was only halfway sinful.

We went through the Pain, through being Touched, and not in a good way: we went through this because we are All In, and the flipside—Jesus Himself descended to Hell—is only to teach us, like a team that carries the beleaguered fellow ropes-course striver, we have to lose self-control to gain it. We have to have faced defeat, in order to have mastered God’s City and Cohort. In our weariness we find our Strength. In our strange locales arrived upon, we find our sympathetic woman by the well or man of Samaria, one not precocious only to love those Put Together: the prophet, her or himself likewise persecuted and non-judgmental. We lost all we had hoped upon, our grand position, our wide horizon, because of a something reluctantly observed, some equal and opposite reaction to good things, that was happened upon, because in any and all things, though we’d like to be reserved, we give our all, because we are Christian vis-a-vis contributing to whatever the social climate, that our God and not we ourselves be lifted High. So at day’s end if we are prickly about anything, we only trust it will be about matters of His state. Of His city. Of His wealth of good works, especially those good works accidentally arrived upon, or rather, that mete out to their doer exactly the opposite of what is expected: no boast, but a sense of “be merciful to me a sinner”.