Meanness & Sorrow & the Cross
Meanness and sorrow seem to be a part of human beings ... our history is an incredible blending of ghastly ugliness and incredible beauty ... of meanness and love. I once heard that was much of the thinking behind John Cage and his noisy popularizers like Spiritualized and Sonic Youth ... pour out sheer noise and see if you shake out a few glimpses of beauty that stand brighter and truer for falling among such thorny sounds of chaos.
It is in these moments of insight that the cross is so powerful. In answer to ugliness and beauty, Christ, the shining face of God, looks down upon us bleeding and marred with mercy upon his lips while we continue in all our meanness and ugliness. This idea of mercy bleeding enthroned between heaven and earth, between God and man, just before he disappears from sight, swallowed up by the ultimate enemy of Creation ... the dread beast, the aghast horror that is sins culmination. "No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up." (Job 41) And this stone-hearted beast, who conquers king and peasent, scribe and begger, Death seems to conquer and the sun cannot bear to watch.
But Christ does conquer and through the power of the Spirit rises to eternal life and opens back the promise of redemption.
Yet, we are in Lent and Lent is a time to touch the still tension of the age ... Christ rose from the dead, but he has not come again. He began a work and that work is poured out in our hearts, but we feel the tension of his work, his victory in our own bodies and in the world around us.
(Bonhoeffer, among other things would not deny his Jewish brothers in the faith and even secretly brought them out of Germany, he spoke out against Hitler and the German Church who joined in with the Riech ... he was ultimately hung by an order from Hitler just before the American troops broke through) Here is a man who knew the tension of the world writing and reflecting on Christ and Christianity in a letter to his best friend:
“The Christian has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the eternal, but, like Christ himself he must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in his doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with him, and he crucified and risen with Christ. This world must not be prematurely written off; in this the Old and New Testaments are at one.” (Letters 336-337)
Christianity is not about escape from this life, but the bearing of Christ, being full of the Holy Spirit in the midst of this hard and torn place. And perhaps in every moment where we look down upon our world, to do so with a head like Jeremiah (Jer. 9) and the words of Christ upon our lips: "Lord have mercy."
It is in these moments of insight that the cross is so powerful. In answer to ugliness and beauty, Christ, the shining face of God, looks down upon us bleeding and marred with mercy upon his lips while we continue in all our meanness and ugliness. This idea of mercy bleeding enthroned between heaven and earth, between God and man, just before he disappears from sight, swallowed up by the ultimate enemy of Creation ... the dread beast, the aghast horror that is sins culmination. "No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up." (Job 41) And this stone-hearted beast, who conquers king and peasent, scribe and begger, Death seems to conquer and the sun cannot bear to watch.
But Christ does conquer and through the power of the Spirit rises to eternal life and opens back the promise of redemption.
Yet, we are in Lent and Lent is a time to touch the still tension of the age ... Christ rose from the dead, but he has not come again. He began a work and that work is poured out in our hearts, but we feel the tension of his work, his victory in our own bodies and in the world around us.
(Bonhoeffer, among other things would not deny his Jewish brothers in the faith and even secretly brought them out of Germany, he spoke out against Hitler and the German Church who joined in with the Riech ... he was ultimately hung by an order from Hitler just before the American troops broke through) Here is a man who knew the tension of the world writing and reflecting on Christ and Christianity in a letter to his best friend:
“The Christian has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the eternal, but, like Christ himself he must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in his doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with him, and he crucified and risen with Christ. This world must not be prematurely written off; in this the Old and New Testaments are at one.” (Letters 336-337)
Christianity is not about escape from this life, but the bearing of Christ, being full of the Holy Spirit in the midst of this hard and torn place. And perhaps in every moment where we look down upon our world, to do so with a head like Jeremiah (Jer. 9) and the words of Christ upon our lips: "Lord have mercy."
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