2023-05-05 A Meditation on Become Real

“Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.” (Heb 9:23–24 ESV)

In a shadowy world, Jesus wore the robes of righteousness. He found Himself and for our sake reckoned with the unknown, with the secretive, with the potent way life rewards and enables, secretly supports and legitimizes, the wild cusp-of-the-world, edge of all things, discovered scenario. He was at home and comfortable dealing with the shadow fighters and the career agents of a new world. He was all this just so that He could hold the tangible, bright light of day, things in plain surety. He was sure. He had a Father in heaven who He was certain would save Him at the last. And at the last, he pled, for a moment of doubt as to the eternal and post-death reality of this Lord and God on High. He asked why He had been abandoned. He spoke to whomsoever would hear, in faith that His words would carry to the Father. He was like a child led to a stark punishment fit for the mature and worldly-wise or cynical. For the thieves and the addicted. For the abusers and the irreverent, scoffers and those on a strange or wild tear.

In such shadowy world we, too, find we can abide, despite the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Despite the out-in-the-cold fear we are being spooked and asked to shoulder all things alone. Despite the sense that this is a place for those mature beyond their years, not for us in our creaturely dependence and desire to be in a simple—yes, simple—community setting. For the spooks do their shadowy deeds with a heart, for real, not coldly, but with secretive intent and grand hopes. Such were those who enabled Jesus of Nazareth. Such is the horizon, new and bold, of the world today we live in. Such is the imputed faith in each other, that each of us has our secret society, our inducted aims and morals and code, our readiness for parables to play out in denouement beyond those parables we know. Beyond our best attempts to pray for a world and nation gone made. Beyond our best attempts to imagine—or pray through—the roles of leaders and plenipotentiaries, healthsome life allegedly found here or there, in what is funded and deemed valuable, but too the pain of those abandoned to their fate, the reality that some—indeed many—will die, and that early. For no cause but the cancer of another’s compromises with sin. For no cause but the war games never authorized but played in cold and calculated manner. For no reason but because it took, it asked for, a certain heroism to stare blithely, painedly, but certainly and with composure, with conscientiousness towards the strange ways of this our peer, the weakness, the sufferings, the untold sadness. Indeed, each of us is blustery and wrestler of a sort: life careens along, with characters and figures doing their wretched best to each other; but we Believe. We vouchsafe to be the ones through whom an Alien Spirit acts. Through whom God with us becomes real.