Today is Ash Wednesday the door though which we enter Lent, enter the journey to Easter. It is a time to look at our finitude, our frailty, our pain and even our death. I did not grow up in a tradition that observed Lent. While there may be many reasons for its absence from the church calendar, ultimately its absence had theological consequences, or perhaps its absence was a consequence flowing from a larger theological weakness, I don't know. In my tradition, it was all good, and then it was Easter -- kind of super good, and the next week back to good again (until Christmas when it was super good again for a day). It was a theology that said our journey was a two segment journey to the cross and then from the cross. (actually it became a one segment journey, but that is for topic for another post)
A journey to the cross and a journey from the cross. While that is right, I think it is not right enough.
I think that our journey, instead of a two segment journey, is rather a three segment -- not necessarily linear -- journey, to the cross, through the cross and from the cross. While the miracle of grace tells us that God does all of the work in each of those segments, each is nonetheless necessary. And yet, the middle segment, the "through the cross" segment is often ignored. And for good reason; nobody wants to go to through the cross. The cross is suffering, the cross is pain, the cross is hard. "Jesus did the cross thing, not me."
Yes, Jesus "did the cross thing." But, can we truly identify with him without taking some time to identify with his suffering? I'm not suggesting some weird earning through suffering thing, I'm suggesting an identification thing. How do we fully identify with Christ if we never identify with his suffering. But, we don't want to go there. We live in a culture of suffering avoidance -- we spend $40 billion annually on pain medicine! We are a people obsessed with finding a cure for every possible pain, and that obsession infiltrates our Church and tells us we should do the same. And in the process, we lose something important.
Lent provides us with a cure for our obsession to find a cure for every pain. "Oh my Lord, to suffer as you do, it would be a lie to run away."
2 comments:
If our goal is "abundant life", and by that we mean the traditional "good life" of the American suburbs, then why would we want to even consider suffering? Where is the "good life/abundant life" in suffering? (As you can see, I intend to continue to hound you on this "abundant life" theme).
I read though Ecclesiastes this week, which turned out to be good preparation for Lent. The Preacher urges us to consider the dark days to come, and spend time with the mourners instead of the party-goers. But I think the role of suffering/mourning is more to identify with reality, than to identify with Jesus. Or perhaps to make us stronger, as in http://www.immortalhumans.com/science-has-confirmed-%e2%80%9cwhat-does-not-kill-us-makes-us-mentally-stronger%e2%80%9d/ ??
Jesus said, "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." (Jn 10:10). He was not familiar with the culture of the American suburbs, and I suspect he meant something more transcendent than abundance only in a first century Palestinian context. So, what do you think Jesus might have meant by abundant life?
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