Found

Good Friday is special for Christians everywhere.  We remember the last day and death of Jesus, who trusted the Father so completely to go to the cross to save humans from the tyranny of sin, death, and evil.  We also remember that is was love that kept His focus on what had to be done; love that took Him to that cross and to death.

Good Friday is also special for me.  It is the day that Jesus found me....

I am not sure what happened that night in 1987.  I went into the building at the invitation of a friend and I left having fallen deeply in love with a Man who would change my life.  I thought I had come to watch the play, so elaborately set up on stage.  But really, I was to encounter the drama not as a spectator, but as a participant.

It was Good Friday.  I was a sophomore in high school struggling with teenage angst - friendships, purpose in life, where I fit in this world.   I was not particularly religious.  After all, I was raised in Canada, a country known for its multiculturalism not its Christianity.   I received the invitation from my friend to attend an Easter Musical and since I believed it was good to go to church a couple times a year, the Easter season seemed like a good fit for that (Christmas being the other one!).  I went with her expecting to see the story of Jesus’ last few days of life and his supposed raising from the dead.  We would watch quietly, then clap for all the actors and go home.

That plan of mine was well on its way to being carried out when that Jesus character, having had that Last-Supper-thing with his guys, wandered into a garden to pray.  As all his friends fell asleep around Him, he began to talk to this invisible God.  Here is what I heard the actor on stage say that evening:  “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah….Father, I am praying not only for them (the snoozing friends), but also for those who will believe in me through them...blah, blah, blah, blah…..Father, I want those you gave me to be with me, right where I am….so that your love for me might be in them...blah, blah, blah, blah.”

I am pretty sure I did not hear anymore of anything from that point on.  I am sure the Judas-actor came and betrayed Jesus with a kiss. I am sure Jesus was nailed to the cross and then rose again.  I am sure the pastor came up front to recap all we had just seen and to give us an “invitation” to believe in Jesus.  

But for me, the whole universe stopped on that solitary figure, agonizing in prayer in a garden.  All I knew was that I was no longer just watching a play about Jesus.  My heart was breached and as it ruptured, the floodgates sent out such a torrent, I found myself trying to tread water in a raging storm of affection.  All I knew was that in an instant is that Jesus had found me and I had fallen in love with that Man.  

His prayer was the only invitation I needed.  Like a person sinking in raging waters, I wanted to reach out and grab him. I wanted his life to be in me and my life to be in him.  And I knew nothing else - I didn’t know the right things to believe, I didn’t even know I was a sinner - all I knew was that love compelled me to want Him.

Thus began my journey with this Jesus.  I have learned many things since that beginning day of our romance - lots of facts, lots of doctrines, lots of religious opinions - but my journey began deeply rooted and grounded in this thing called love. By love, He found me...by love, He opened my heart...by love, allowed me to grab hold of Him...by love, He has never left me these 28 years. By love, I am absolutely sure of all these things.

I am so grateful for two Fridays in history!

The Symphony of the Temptation

Traditionally, a symphony is written in four movements, each a distinct section in and of itself, but also part of a larger whole.  Beginning movements are great vehicles for development through the entire work of art.  Themes and variations, like carefully hung Christmas tree ornaments, can be heard throughout the full piece.  

So has been my journey with the story of The Temptation of Jesus.  A Masterful Composer has brought me back to this account many, many times. The key of the story has never changed, but He’s introduced contrasting styles, interlinking melodies, harmonies, dynamics and rhythm alterations.

Movement 1: Sola Scriptura

As a young believer, I was taught this account was all about scripture. In his temptation, Jesus answered with quotes from the scriptures and that was the point of the story.  It was about combating lies with truth.  It was about answers, fixing the problem, and Jesus being an example of how I was to live.  This movement of the symphony was very geometric, formulaic, and easy enough to understand.

Movement 2: A New Human

As years went on and my faith suitcase was shaken up a little, a new variation emerged from this supposed mathematical story.  In the temptation, Jesus, the Messiah, was being the Israel that Israel had failed to be.  The temptations of hunger, testing God, and who to worship were ones that Israel, as God’s chosen people, had failed in the desert.  Here, however, Jesus was, in one sense, re-writing the story.  He would be the truly human one - the one who really acted like God’s chosen.  He used scripture not just because it was a confrontation between truth and lies, but because he was pulling the ancient story of the Israelites in the desert into the present and saying, “This is how it was supposed to be done”.  His actions and response gave credibility to his call of “Follow Me”.

Movement 3: Solidarity

The symphony slows down at this point, almost to a funeral dirge.  The overtones turn dark and haunting as the Wilderness became my habitation, not just words I read on the pages of my Bible.  Jesus being led into the wilderness by the Spirit, his extreme hunger, his aloneness, were becoming my experience too.  I knew the picture of Jesus sitting alone on the dark, jagged rocks of the wilderness.  I knew weakness and a great weight bearing down on my shoulders that threatened to crush me.  My life became part of the symphony and I felt, perhaps for the first time, a wholly human Jesus.  He chose solidarity with humanity!  As my life and the story were woven together in the adagio (slow music), it became clear that Jesus was with me (and I with him) in the wilderness.  The oh-so-human experience of temptation was breached, not by an army but by a God who chose to experience it himself.

Briton Riviere, The Temptation in the Wilderness

Movement 4: The Way

Much to my embarrassment,  I think I’ve always been cynical of whether or not Jesus actually was tempted in all the ways I am...until the fourth movement of the symphony.  While the specifics of the tempting offers were important for the music of earlier movements, these now gave way to the greatest temptation in all of it.  When faced with the choice between wanting legitimate pleasures in life and intimacy with the Father, Jesus chooses the Father.  The crescendo of the symphony is Jesus singing (between the lines), “I’d rather have the Father and nothing else than everything without Him.” (quoting Larry Crabb).  That is the root of my temptation too.  Do I want the Father more than I want anything else I desire, and will I chose to stay close to Him?  Jesus not only sympathizes with my temptation because he’s experienced it, but he says to me that I can do what he did.  Because I follow him and his Spirit is alive in me, my greatest desire can be (is) the Father and I can choose Him even when hard pressed.

Photo by Jennifer Kitson

Thank you for the symphony, Lord!  One movement does not have to be thrown out or negated, but rather in the hands of a Master Composer, each piece takes its rightful place, adding to the beauty of the whole.  Though I am stubbornly impatient, I am so grateful for the years it took to fashion this beautiful symphony.  You were in each movement...and I am sure you will be in the ones I cannot yet foresee too!

On the Edge of Ashes

Last year's Hosanna's have gone.  Palm branches have been burned and what is left resides in a small container no larger than my hand.  The ashes, the dark, smudgy ashes are ready for marking.  But what do they mark, really?  What do they remind us of?  Why do so many in the world chose to have this mark imposed on them?

DIRT

These sooty ashes are applied with the words "You are dust and to dust you will return", and so they remind us of our earthiness.  They speak of our mortality, for we shall return to dust, but they also remind us of our humanity.  They whisper the ancient story of a God who fashions creatures out of soil.  These ashes remind us of our beginnings and endings, ans so teach us to number well our days.

LIVE

Yes, they may remind us that someday we may die, but they shout at us to live!  To live, not in sin, but in new life.  To not get stuck but to walk toward something (or Someone) with new practices.  These ashes beg us to live by letting go...or taking up some new action.  They cheer us on to life - not half-lived in mediocrity, but toward rigor, challenge, and a robust faith.

REPENTANCE

Ashes have long been a symbol for sorrow and grief.  These ashes remind us to take inventory of our lives, and in the ensuing sorrow, lead us to repentance.  The cross of ashes whispers what many in our world do not know:  there is freedom in serving only one Master.  Repentance becomes the door to transformation.

TRANSFORMATION

The ashes declare that transformation is possible, and we do not go it alone.  Through the renewing of our minds, through allowing God to change our psyche, a new person can emerge.  We are not left to ourselves in a fatalistic universe.  God has intervened and we can become new creatures!

PRAYER

The ashes also offer us an invitation to come and follow Jesus into the wilderness.  They invite us to fast and pray for 40 days.  Jesus, the Master, dis it and we are to follow Him.  These cinders invite us into a new kind of humanity that we find in Jesus.  A humanity who chooses the Father and His will over and above the screeching temptations of "take care of yourself", "prove yourself", and "indulge yourself with power".

Coming to the edge of ashes takes courage.  Will we allow them not to just mark our foreheads but our whole being as well?  Will we let them do their full 40-day work, even long after we've rubbed off their smudges?

"Oh God, let something essential happen to me, something more than interesting or entertaining or thoughtful.
Oh God let something essential happen to me, something awesome, something real.  Speak to my condition, Lord, and change me somewhere inside where it matters.
Let something happen which is my real self, Oh God."     (Ted Loder, Guerrillas of Grace)

Desire

Is our desire in the redemption of circumstance?  

Is our trust in a resurrection of well-being?

Desires drive us, and so at the turn of a year, a good question to ask is, "what do we most desire?"  Is it our greatest ambition to see all the parts of our life work?  Do we most yearn for a positive change in our circumstances?  Do we thirst most for a healing somewhere deep in ourselves?  A wholeness that makes us feel put together?  Or do we desire a Person?  Do we really want God Himself - to know Him, and love Him above all else?  To know His beauty, His kingship, Him as Lover?

Desiring the Person may actually satisfy our appetite for the first two but in ways unexpected as we abandon ourselves to Him.  Making the first two our central aims will take us down paths of "never enough" and keep us grabbing all we can for ourselves.  We would do well to pay attention to what we are chasing after. We can make it look "spiritual", but it may keep us frenzied, easily satisfied, and turned in on ourselves.

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”  - CS Lewis