Over the Lenten season our family has been reading from Walter Wangerin Jr.'s, "Reliving the Passion". The reflections are honest, imaginative renderings taken from the passion narrative in Mark. They invite you to be a character in the story leaving little room to choose the easy role of the indifferent bystander. One of my favorite reflections is taken from the following passage:
Mark 15:44-45,
And Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead.
And when he learned from the centurion that he was already dead, he granted the body to Joseph.
Wangerin's writing beautifully explores the salvation formation that is occurring in Joseph, a man of the same religious council that earlier convicted and crucified Jesus. It explores the understanding of a kingdom which reverses the definition of power and rank as Joseph willingly surrenders his own acquired success for body of Jesus. He would rather have Jesus than anything else. He would rather have the crucified Jesus than keep his rank and power.
After reading it with the family, I look up and there's my 8 year old leaned back gripping the arm rests of his chair, eyes all wide and saying, "Wow Mom, that's intense!"
He's right! Its very intense. It's life threatening and life all at the same time. FAITH.
Last night, on Good Friday we watched "Amazing Grace" the story of William Wilberforce and the journey to the abolition of slavery.
When Wilberforce confessed faith in God in early adulthood he was already considered a promising politician. He believed the reconciliation of faith and politics were impossible. People in his life spoke into this disparity, passionately pushing him to embrace both! The biography of Wilberforce by Eric Metexas speaks into this mental wrestling match. "He saw, so to speak, the full horror of himself. God, in his mercy, had allowed Wilberforce to see himself as he truly was, and it was crushing. But Wilberforce knew God didn't mean it to end there." (67). "Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple and lead not to meditation only, but to action." (68).
Wilberforce did decide to embrace both politics and faith in God. It was a long, hard journey where he experienced failure, disappointment and sickness. He reflects on learning to call out to a Saviour rather than try to be his own saviour. He learned much through his life of following God, "so true is it that a gracious hand leads us in ways that we know not, and blesses us not only without, but even against, our plans and inclinations" (45).
Metexas explains the following incident in the biography. It speaks of Wilberforce living wide eyed and attentive to God through everyday moments:
On witnessing a child vaccination, the infant gave up its little arm to the operator without suspicion or fear. But when it felt the puncture, which must have been sharp, no words can express the astonishment that followed. I could not have thought the mouth could have been distended so widely as it continued, till the nurses soothing restored her usual calmness. What an illustration is this of the impatient feelings we are often apt to experience, and sometimes even to express, when suffering from the dispensations of a Being, whose kindness we know to be unfailing, whose truth also is sure, and who has declared to us, that all things shall work together for good to those that love Him, and that the object of His inflictions is to make us partakers of His holiness. (270). HOPE.
At the beginning of this week we attended a funeral. It was so evident at the funeral that the man's family loved him dearly. The tributes were beautiful and laced with sentiment, and the weeping emotional. You couldn't help but feel and experience depth of sorrow. With this happening on the brink of Holy Week, my imagination went to the band of followers who became Jesus' family. The sorrow they must have felt on a day like today, on the Holy Saturday. I'm not just thinking about their confusion and fear of misplaced expectations in the wake of the death of Jesus but also of the deep sorrow of losing someone who loved them and they dearly loved in return. LOVE.
On this Holy Saturday, the day before the resurrection, the not yet, I can't help but wonder at the importance of despair, sorrow, and long suffering. Of living with eyes wide open, hoping and trusting that in our blindness, in our impatience, in our loss, that we trust enough to believe the yearning in our hearts that our loving God is completing the story He started writing many, many years ago.
But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13 MSG)
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