“He is risen, my friend.” These are the first words of an email Mikey sent me on April 4, 2010–Easter Sunday–an email in which Mikey also said, “I have been blessed so much that I couldn’t deny his love ever again. He truly is my savior. I just realized that through Christ anything is possible.”

Indeed, He is risen. But on days like today it is hard to say such words. And though these are the words we most need to say, most need to believe, on days like today it’s not the resurrection that we feel; it is the death that precedes it, not the words of Easter but the words of the Friday before. We open our mouths to say it, to say, ‘He is risen’, but all that comes out is, ‘He is dead’.

‘He is dead’. That’s what Jesus said about Lazarus in John 11. There are only three places in the Bible that we are told Jesus cried. One of them is in John 11. It was the day when Jesus entered into a situation much like today, the day a good friend of his died. And though he knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, he still cried. He cried because he knows how days like today feel, despite all our hopes for tomorrow, all our hopes of resurrection. We have hope but it doesn’t take away our pain. We have faith but it doesn’t take away our tears. So Jesus cries with us. Jesus dies with us.

On days like today we are reminded that death is pursuing us. As we weep for Mikey we can’t help but to weep also for ourselves. We feel somehow both distant from death and close to it all at once. We feel our lives more intensely than normal but only because we recognize, in a moment of clarity, a moment of sobriety, that our day is coming. The death of one ever and again announces the death of us all. And the closer we are to someone snatched away by the iron grip of death, the more of a reality it is for us, the more it seems to call out our name. Mikey was everyone’s best friend. Death feels very real today. It seems to be whispering in all of our ears.

On days like today we are reminded that death is pursuing us, but we must also be reminded that life is pursuing us. Jesus had to walk from Bethany to Jerusalem when he found out that Lazarus had died, to the very city that would have him crucified. But as death pursues us, Jesus is close behind, ready to cry with us, ready to die with us. So we need not talk about today as the day that something good happened, as the day that heaven got another angel, as the day that Mikey began watching over us, or whatever else we may try to say to soften the blow, to romanticize this terrible day, to try to distract ourselves from what Mikey’s death is trying to tell us about our own. The truth is, death is just as bad as we fear. Today is as dark and horrible as it feels. It’s not helpful to pretend otherwise, because none of us feel otherwise. Neither does Jesus. Jesus didn’t remove our tears. He shed them. He didn’t remove our death. He endured it. And it was just as terrible for him as it is for all of us. But Life pursues us at all costs. Jesus pursues us at all costs, even when it costs him his life.

It’s time for all of us to feel with Mikey today. Allow it to sink in your soul. Allow yourself to cry for him, for his family….to cry for yourself, for that matter. Whatever you do, don’t stay in Bethany, keeping a safe distance from the grim reality of today, a reality about our dear friend and a reality about ourselves. Walk toward the tomb and confront it for all that it is. And then, and only then, once you’ve fully entered in, can you say with any real conviction, in the face of that truly God-damned tomb, those same death-shattering words that Mikey said to me: “He is Risen!”

He is risen, indeed.

My prayer on this dark day is that we would truly begin to take seriously our identity as the human family, confess our condemnation before God as such, and repent of the artificial boundaries that we self-righteously create to separate ourselves in order to point away to a more wretched type of sinner than we. We must admit that our hands can never be completely washed of any man’s blood, lest we find ourselves sharing the basin with Pilate rather than Jesus. I’ve never heard a sermon preached on the story of Pilate in the Passion narratives. I think I know why. If we wrestle honestly with the central role that Pilate plays in the Passion of Jesus Christ, we will be confronted with the dismal truth that our attempts to wash our hands of any man’s blood, much less the blood of these children, amounts to a baptism in it.

Pilate had the power to stop what was happening, but he did not have the obligation. The state cannot oblige compassion, cannot command love. As the crowd grew restless, it created more discomfort for Pilate to stand up for his conviction about Jesus. Eventually, he compromised. He would wash his hands, transfer the guilt, and hand the Innocent One over to his accusers. Pilate is the one who “sits on the judgment seat” (Mt. 27:18). He thinks that he has the power to escape judgment by the word of his own declaration of innocence. He washes his hands feverishly, trying to convince himself that he is getting all the blood off. The Innocent One is executed. He pulls his hands from the basin–dark red.

Jesus fills the basin to wash his disciples’ feet. He tells them to do the same. We turn on the news…”O God!” We run to the basin. We wash…we scrub… “For God’s sake, these were just children!” “We hate it for the families.” “Did you hear?” “Lift up the people in…” “What an evil…”

Now we are ready to declare our innocence. Hands clean. Conscience appeased. Now we are free. There’s nothing to get excited about, no reason to react, no sense in thinking we need to make any changes now. No need to consider any form of repentance that might be necessary for us. This was just one evil man with a couple of guns.

And then someone asks Jesus about the greatest commandment, and he says to love God and neighbor, a category which, for Jesus, included enemy…and the water thickens…warms…darkens.

Jesus’ haunting distillation of the commandments of God into something fundamentally proactive (you shall love), rather than prohibitive (you shall not…), means that our obedience is located ‘out there’ in the world of violence we are willing to condemn but unwilling to love, a world that has a desperate need for the love of Christ demonstrated by his body, precisely as his body. This is only possible for the confessing body of Christ; for we are a people who destroy artificial human boundaries that seek to divide the human family in pride–whether political, national, racial, whatever–and unite the human family in humility. “Take up your cross” is not a nice principle of trying not to be selfish. It is the confession that human guilt is shared guilt. That is what the cross was for Jesus and that is what it is for us. If God shares Pilate’s guilt (“Father forgive them!”), we can share any man’s.

Jesus is not called the second Adam arbitrarily. He is called the second Adam because we are all “in Adam,” his family sharing his guilt, and ever recapitulating it. If our guilt is not shared in Adam, neither is our salvation shared in Christ. “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). We are the people who see, as Alexandr Solzenitzen look out from his prison window in communist Russia, that the line dividing good and evil is a line that runs straight through the heart of every man. We never fail to draw the line elsewhere, however, in order to locate guilt anywhere but ourselves. Our self-righteous categories whether with reference to myself, family, interest group, nation, or even religion, are categories that mock the Christ whose death is the center and circumference of all human righteousness, and apart from which there is only the abysmal void and the outer darkness.

Christ commands that his followers’ first confession is that they are unrighteous. And if a community will actually unite on the basis of their unrighteousness, then they can become the community that truly celebrates the grace of God in Jesus Chris. This community alone will be a place where nobody has to hide, a place where nobody has to pretend, a place where nobody has to cover themselves with fig leaves and point away to another or the devil, because we can celebrate that “God has proven his love for us, in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

This is the only kind of place where a murderer might find salvation…before he murders.

For all of us who could have expressed love to some wretched sinner in the name of Jesus Christ and didn’t, no matter how clean our hands and how dirty theirs, we have only proven that their guilt is our guilt. A man who massacres elementary school children is one member of one very negligent body. People do not get to that point without the help of high school bullies, absent fathers, heartless mothers, impatient teachers, unwelcoming peers, and law abiding Christians with squeaky clean hands. We have all contributed to the death of those children. It takes a village to raise a monster.

We are all under condemnation tonight. We all need repentance tonight. The Church has dirty hands and it better not wash them. Dirty, honest, humble hands are the only kind that a monster will ever respond to. So if we are serious about declaring war on evil and preventing this kind of thing from happening, we will no longer pretend like it is some other parent’s problem, some other school’s problem, some other activist’s problem, or Washington’s problem. We will think corporately about how we can better reach out to the unloved–as Christ reached out to us–and we will declare with all sincerity that: “Those children were God’s children. That family was my family. Their blood is on Christ’s hands, and I’ll be damned if it’s not on ours.”

Lord, have mercy.

This morning as I sat down to read my Bible, my 91 year old grandfather asked me to read aloud–he has trouble seeing.

What an honor to give a few minutes of my day to proclaim the Word of God to a man who spent 65 years of his life proclaiming it to the world–through sermons, poems, recitations, songs, stories, radio broadcasts, books, one-on-one evangelism, street preaching, visitations, family devotions, and an unwavering life of faithfulness–to a world which he knew has trouble seeing.

#thankfulforBarneyPierce

http://seedbed.com/feed/commodified-truth-is-a-lie/

Based on the conviction that discipleship requires eye contact, I am incredibly thankful for my leadership team this morning. I can’t imagine how big of an impact it would have had on my young, confused, insecure self to be surrounded by a community of mentors modeling authentic Christian faith expressed in dusty, street-level love, rather than the airy, cloud-level cliches shouted down from the distant, humanlike Christians who hang like ornaments in the sky, whose faith turns out to be the very hot air that keeps them from the people of the streets and, ironically, from the God of the streets. I’m thankful that they know a God who made eye contact with them and heeded the call of the horizontal plane, the catch and release call of the kingdom of God. Without them, this ministry would be a hot-air ballon service. GRATEFUL!

I wonder if Peter, James, and John were in the spotlight so much not because Jesus saw in them the most potential, but the least. It’s not like they had many flattering lines or proved to have been particularly insightful. Even Peter’s great confession is relativized when Jesus pointed out that his idea of who Jesus should be came from Satan himself. And if James and John weren’t awkwardly calling down fire from heaven, they were asking for to be seated at the right and left of Jesus in his glory–of course, they envisioned Jesus on a throne in all his glory, but Jesus envisioned himself on a cross. We shouldn’t, then, be surprised by the response: Indeed, “You know not what you ask!” (Mk. 10).

Maybe the term “inner circle,” is misleading given its sense of endearment. When I read the Synoptics, especially (that Triad doesn’t really show up in John), it seems to me that Jesus brings this trio closest to him perhaps because they are the furthest away. And if so, maybe the three years with these three stooges is as much a model of evangelism than it is discipleship–an unfortunate dichotomy in our language today–which may undermine our fast-food models of evangelism. This will only interest the few who are interested in discipleship/evangelism models (in which this trio always gets brought up), but I wonder if it would change anything if we read about this trio and Jesus’ perspective of them through that lens (which seems to me to be truer to the text) and then considered “models” (for lack of a better word).

Ash Wednesday, 2013

Today commemorates the day that Jesus spoke thousands of years into the future, warning the Western world of its temptation to lose wonder at the cost of bread, faith at the cost of kingdoms, to discover reality at the cost of art.

Gustave Courbet, nineteenth century French artist and leader in the Realist movement, once wrote, “Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.” Realism, of this sort, seeks to represent “existing things,” that is, in Courbet’s eyes, visible things in the “natural” world, and to do so void of the subjective expressions of expressionism, the unrealistic perfections of Idealism, and christened unicorns of Romanticism. This unimaginative mood was the product of an aging “Enlightened” world, whose micro- and telescopes had failed to find a god in the heavens or even an ounce of fairy dust on earth. So it was time for art to come to its senses. All that mattered was representations of matter, meadows and potatoes and, if you like, dead deer.

~ Gustave Courbet, “Dead Dear” (1857)

The painter had to become a photographer.

But I find the irony in Corbet’s rigid words and unexpressive deer rather amusing. Any work of art, whether the angels of the Renaissance or the deaths of Realism, that tries to disguise itself as a mere reflection of the representable world is like a magic zebra trying to disguise its magic by writing a novel about a normal zebra. It is one things for a spontaneously organized cluster of atoms to find itself needing bread and water to maintain its present structure, which it calls life, but it’s quite another for this soulless cluster to find that cannot seem to live on bread alone, to find that it consistently needs to appreciate the sights and sounds observed in the random collisions of colors against canvas and breath passing through bent brass.

The artist of Realism is in a damning cycle: he paints the perfect self-portrait—hollow eyes, impassive lips, bloodless cheeks—human as mere matter. With the last stroke he steps back and with great satisfaction grabs a mirror to compare. It is perfect. It is beautiful. His admiration begins welling up like a fountain filling his face with curves and color, like a wooden puppet becoming a boy. But as it happens, the dark windowed eyes in the portrait now seemed a universe away from the shiny globes, infinitely reflecting back and forth with the mirror, as though searching for something, or someone, beyond the reflection. He glances again at his masterpiece and, either to his dismay or delight, suddenly realized it was a masterpiece indeed, but a masterpiece of Idealism. It was the ideal of the Modern man, but it was not a real man. The reality of his face condemned the Realism of his portrait. Faithfully representing reality through a work of art only revealed that reality is a work of art. He couldn’t help but admire the masterpiece in the mirror and even its shadow on the canvas, unrealistic though it was. He was a romantic and couldn’t help it. The distance between a beast’s mind and an artist’s canvas is infinite. The only way it can be bridged is if that beast confesses his secret. The Zebra is only magic because he is a writer. The beast is only human because he is an artist.

Man does not live on bread alone.

“Obama is a Muslim. He will burn in hell. 🙂 (John 14:6)”

This was the impressively creative the bumper sticker I saw the other day (smiley face and all). This verse (Jn. 14:6) is the one most quoted by those who enjoy the thought of their enemies (typically the Muslims and the Democrats) burning in hell, in which Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” If I may, I would like to clear the air on this issue, but not by removing from it the stench of hell, as trend would have it. I actually believe that hell is real. I don’t claim to understand it or God’s motivations for it, but I can’t say that I have a problem with it, having read the Gospels. I myself have a son, and my passion for him has the capacity for fury. If he were murdered, I couldn’t imagine containing that fury. That is why I can understand hell more than I can understand grace. So I’m thankful that God is not like me. But say, by some miracle, I chose to offer my son’s death as pardon to his executors in exchange for their gratitude, and they persisted to mock my treasure as garbage, proclaiming, “To hell with him! To hell with forgiveness! To hell with you!” In that case, I would, with all the wrath within me, unflinchingly press them into a white-hot furnace and restlessly spend all eternity feeding it coals. Again, I am not like God, nor he like me, but I can at least say that I would be rather suspect of some god so needy and sheepish that he would welcome everyone at an infinitely wide gate to his kingdom, even those who spit on him as they entered. So it’s not that I think hell isn’t real, like some. On the contrary, I think that there are as many creative ways as there are creative truths that will take you there. In fact, I think the gate to hell is wide enough to accomodate for the Christian with even the biggest ego. Those who refuse hisway are just as far from receiving his life as those who refuse his truth.

Christians who quote John 14:6 out of context almost invariably do so in order to indicate who is going to hell, and almost just as invariably do so with delight. But Christians who delight in the damnation of the lost are in the same boat as Christians who reject the damnation of the lost. It is a lost boat. The life of Christ is indeed unavailable apart from the truth of Christ, but so too is his life unavailable apart from his way. Those who claim his truth are bound to his way, just as those who claim his way are bound to his truth. God did not write the truth in the clouds. He proclaimed it along an unwavering path on this earth until he was red in the face, red in the hands, red in the back, red all the way down from his crown to the dribbling drops from his toes. So those who proclaim it to try to paint others red are rendering themselves twice the sons of hell as the damned.

All are damned. Jesus died for all. Not all will be saved. Salvation comes in a human sized package, not a globe sized blanket. God did not cuddle the world into his loving arms. His arms revealed a much more violent, passionate, particular love. It is a love whose truth must be received and whose way reflected by its recipients, who proclaim its particularity by loving the world in the same particular way, a dramatically persuasive way. The truth without the way is hypocrisy. Just one smirk over even one for whom those arms were splayed reveals a heart that is liable to be thrust over the precipice. If you see a wandering sheep struggling to find its way, then it’s time to get into character: climb up to the highest hill and hang yourself as a signpost, like a dead snake on a stick, until that sheep sees God’s way in you and believes it to be the only way. But don’t for a second think that the Gospel was a silent film, as do those who fight against orthodoxy in the name of orthopraxy. The Good News is not good unless it points to something better than you. The so-called “incarnational gospel” proves to be both deaf and dumb if it thinks that incarnated things should stop speaking. It was, after all, the Word, not the way, that was made flesh. It proves also to be arrogant, because it assumes that its love is as holy as Christ and as humble as his cross, as though their is nothing higher to point to. So the one who proclaims a voiceless, referentless Gospel needs to make sure he or she is powerful enough to save those who hear it. The way with out the truth is humanism. If you let that sheep wander up to your demonstration and never confess it as mere parody, if you act as though any old shepherd will do, as though all shepherds have loved the same, saved the same, bled the same, as though there is nothing unique, nothing worthy of any special praise, as though God loves with other shepherds’ arms, then you better hope that those other shepherds can save you as well.

Christian heartlessness and Christian spinelessness are two symptoms of the same problem. It is the problem of pride, which either tries to raise itself up or bring God down, so that we are either as good as God and therefore God accepts us or as bad as a devil that God is too indifferent to damn. Whichever god pride creates, they both end up looking like the devil. Why is it the tendency for us to assume, despite our view of ourselves, that we have an inherent attractive force on God; that he is near to us in our self-righteousness and near to us in our unrighteousness? We concede a measure of oppositeness, but in the way magnets are opposite, so if God is high and lofty, we are pulled nigh; if God is low and humble, he is helplessessly pulled to our side, an incarnated pat on the back. The first think they are seated at the foot of his throne; the second don’t think there is a throne. The first are the waves that think they can reach the moon; the second are the waves that think the moon is an island in the sea. The first are right to see that God is holy but blind if they see something holy in the mirror; the second are right to see a devil in the mirror but wrong if they see God smiling in the background. Both mirrors reveal the same thing—a god who was molded in the reflection of a man.

God is holy and humble, lofty and low, and we are not attracted to that. God forced contact with his creation and the only attraction that was revealed was the attraction of some iron rods that had his hands in the their crosshairs from before he hit the ground (Mt. 2). God revealed his attraction to us and we revealed our repulsion to him. We are opposite in the way magnets are not. The image of God hated God because he would not let it be more than mere image. A mirror that reveals a different face has to be fixed. God stared his image in the eye to reveal how distorted it had become. So to fix the distortion the mirror was shattered. Better to gouge out God’s eye than let him cast you into hell. Besides, the reflection of the Son was too hard to look at, something like the reflection of the sun. His image had to darken him up. So it scribbled feverishly with the broken glass. With swords and spears it panted and prodded and gritted its teeth until finally some reprieve from the glare—overcast (Mt. 27; Mk. 15; Lk. 23). The light came into the world, but it was darkness that the world sought (Jn. 3:19). So God became dark, dark red so the world could behold his glory without being consumed by it. With the final touches and his final breath, the masterpiece was complete. They stepped back to behold their divine portrait only to discover a mosaic of human effort. The picture they painted of God turned out to be a picture of human condemnation.

God didn’t save you in Christ because he loved you, as though God’s love can be located outside of his saving act. “God has demonstrated his love for us, in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). God’s love is not ethereal and hollow like human love. Love is as concrete as red is a color. Love has limitations and not all colors are red. But the limitation of God’s love is the source, not the amount. It is a ray come down to the world, not a line running through the world. Its point of origin is the Son. Those who turn away from the Son will forever live in their own shadow. Many choose the shadow way by denying the truth of Christ. He will not force their hand to accept him. But many choose the shadow way by denying the way of Christ. And they will not force his hand to accept them.

I don’t pretend to know anything concrete about the referent to that word so carelessly tossed around by some Christians and so carelessly tossed out by others. But I do know that it has a referent. And there is enough description surrounding it to indicate that whatever hell is, it is a big problem. I also know that I am not God, so how I may handle this problem is irrelevant. God handled it by sending his Son to be killed by and for the world. He only requires the gratitude due, which, if genuine, will produce a commitment to the truth and a commitment to the way. Only to the grateful will the life be granted. As one old preacher once said, “This is God’s universe and God does things his way. You may have a better way, but you don’t have a universe.” So the next time you proclaim John 14:6, make sure your mouth and your body are in sync with your bumper sticker. And if they are not, sit down and shut up until you become grateful. Do the world a favor and just be still until you know that you are not God.