2023-01-11 A Meditation on Sensitive to His Cross
“but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” (Is 40:31 ESV)
Working in tandem with spiritualists, we listen to our own selves talk, and do hear weariness, cynicism, ingratitude, but also remarkable reverence for the Jesus out there. Jesus is in the air waves and on the big screen and in our friends’ networks. Jesus is there where we became emotionally drained, because His burden is lighter. His love is cheap to procure yet lavish in expenditure. The draining, emotionally-speaking, kinds of mechanical love, kinds of self-maintained religiosity, kinds of determined avoidance patterns rather than equally determined race to the Crown, to the Cross, to the Christ, is now a drainage that is called to end.
Make no mistake: Jesus has done all we dream of and more. Jesus has shouldered more than what is shouldered by a generous outstretched hand: He has taken an impossible burden on Himself, and died on a Cross for that burden. So our ground zero: all artifice and self-maintained religiosity has come to naught; we begin to forage and seek in what climes we find ourselves; we alight upon a Total Gospel, a Savior who takes all on Himself. Who hears our patently interesting observations from that ground zero, who reaches across the self-made divide to motivate and lift us, who is our guarantor and the one now imbuing us with interesting stuff. We are interesting to talk with, because we’ve felt the storm of Salvation History. We have drawn near to a storm of goodness that we could not see while still walking on our own terms. Yet in all our walk, He discerns Love, and He discerns a call to patient outstretched hand of the Gospel.
Anything less than Ground Zero was a preposterous mess. And our ground zero served us mightily, introducing us to the Other, to the End of mankind’s reach and the beginning of Created Love. Love on His terms and in His abode and with all the apparatus entrusting to Him: His successful escape from many-a temptation; gifts of healing; gifts of prophecy; a baptism into the prophetic streams and into the Body designed and built by that forerunner the Baptist.
So we plead guilty to the charge that our words at times have crucified the easy target, the Christ. The restless nature of Man has found it easy and fitting to crucify such a submitted One, such a One in tune with Man’s self-denying real center. Yet to those acquainted with grief, His grief is no longer a laughing matter. To those acquainted with pain, His nails are actually nothing to be ashamed of. To those acquainted with remorse, His punishment is now real and saves. To those innocent of evil, His sinlessness speaks a word of peace.
We strive therefore, no longer in a classical sense of the word, but strive to listen and be receptive, to be reactive rather than innovative. We prefer His headship to our own selfish innovations. We create, but no longer in the classical sense of the word. We create by permitting His movements, formation, letting the good Spirit in a Man speak, rather than letting the demons talk. This is a submitted and reverent posture. It is no fear of being too weak to carry on our life’s burden and the good fight, but rather an unwitting discovery that when we are weak, then we are strong (2 Co 12:10b).
When we recognize that all of us, burdened from without, are still a hot bundle of willfulness and sin, until we acknowledge a Salvation History written just for us. Until we acknowledge the patterns of willfulness we cannot ourselves rewrite nor manage. We are custodians now, looking patiently and a bit forlornly on ourselves from an objective distance. We are now agents of that self-denying, cognisant and responsible, self consideration. All is now considered in the Light of the One whom we Crucify.
By thus considering, we for a day or a season or a lifetime do cease to do harm to His person. We have backtracked on our unrepentant assertions and repeated claims. No perch is too capricious for Him to absolve and dissolve into a perch of apology and love. So our testimony is of Him, not of anything less than the Gospel itself: His Cross, His manners that are in affinity with the cultures He came to save, His patient outstretched hand. If we define those things well, we shall hear our own merciful estate and places of both work and rest.