Jesus holds open the door

Part 7: There is an answer to evil that cannot be extinguished

How then, is the door open, and how can we enter?

The door is open because Jesus – whoever he was, and is – is a universal person, because he represents the human condition of us all. From all that we can tell, he was a person of supreme compassion, intent only on lifting our burdens, on setting us free from guilt, failure and regret, on uniting us in love, on empowering us to live with truth and justice, and all this by opening us fully to God’s love – his freely given grace. The foundation of this new life is communion with God, which Jesus made possible by embodying the presence of God and inviting us to share in his love.

Yet this very graciousness was perceived as threatening by those who turned to fear and hatred, to closed minds rather than open hearts, to restrictiveness rather than liberty. It is this fact of the love of God being met with the hatred of humanity that makes the life of Jesus encompass the essence of the human condition. And, as we stated earlier, it was God’s genius to turn human wickedness against us, so that our plans to extinguish Jesus became the means by which God set free the opportunity of new life in all its fullness to enter the human experience. Jesus deserves our honour for it seems clear that he understood the suffering he would endure, and chose it because he simply believed that this was the way that God would liberate the human race from the dominion of sin, evil and death. There is nothing more that evil can do once it has declared that it will kill you unless you give up loving, but you choose to go on loving anyway. And that is why, ultimately, love and life win, and hatred and death are shown to be powerless to stop it.

Jesus holds open the door

Part 6: We declare: “Grace and truth have come into the world. There is a redeemer”.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never overcome it”. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. And we have seen his glory – look past the word; we have seen what God looks like in a form that we humans can recognise. It is simply a declaration. It hangs in space and time. It is the spiritual equivalent of the Big Bang. It can have no supporting evidence. It is just there: a declaration of truth. Though it may be a lie. We have to choose. And really, we have nothing to go on. Well, this isn’t quite true; those who want to call it false have all the evidence in the world on their side. And those who believe it true have only a glimpse of a gap in the darkness, a chink of light coming through a door that Jesus is holding open. They have no evidence; it is only a belief, a hope, a commitment. But they are looking at all the other evidence, and especially, they have seen the smirk on the face of evil and they rebel against his triumph; they will not accept that he has won. All they have is the understanding that they hold more true than all else in the world put together: their insight that a door is open, and it is possible to pass through it. Grace and truth are visible through the door, and just enough of it has slipped through into our world, flowing unrestrained by evil’s rage into the hearts of those who see. It is drawing us to the opening.

And here, now, is the fullness of Christ’s work. The door is not a feat of nature; it is a spiritual door. And everything we know about ourselves tells us that the immense force of humanity is intent on slamming that door closed shut. Call to mind the fear, the horror, the hatred and we know that this is true. The door is not like a fortunate cleft in giant rocks that allows the path to cross the mountains; the tide of human nature is rushing in to close the opportunity to reach through to safety, to joy, to peace, to resting in the love of God.

Perhaps you feel a lucky few, gifted by the chances of life, find themselves born on the threshold and they can slip through at a moment’s notice, but even those who have battled through the hatred, greed and stupidity of our kind, find themselves tripping on the last step when their own guilt or hollowness or hypocrisy causes them to step aside, even though the way to enter is clear. There is something in us that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

Jesus holds open the door

Part 5: If we truly look, it is horrific; evil is set to win; yet still there is hope

A person on life’s journey confronts reality.

“Fear consumes me. Horror overwhelms me. Hatred has swallowed me – and hatred for those who harm me is harnessed with the self-hatred I constantly regurgitate and greedily gobble down again. The darkness closes in. Dread rises. Unimaginable torture, realised by the fiendish ingenuity of man, made incarnate for all to see, fills my mind even as I turn away my gaze. Hope has come and gone, and come again, only to be knocked down again, so casually, for this is the nature of evil, that what took a lifetime to build can be destroyed in a moment – and not even deliberately. Though the pain is even worse when it is, and so often it is”.

Yet this hateful human nature, a monster inadvertently set free, like a malignant virus, wonderfully, gloriously still dares to hope, to believe, to strive to reach out for goodness, to find truth, to be compassionate. But we cannot do it. We cannot reach our goal. We cannot overcome. We are beaten, and ultimately we will be beaten. Our weaknesses are too strong for us. And evil smirks with this self-knowledge that it discovered deep at our innermost depths.

But Jesus holds open a door. Ridiculous! Absurd! A fantasy! Impossible! A myth! Not a myth that a man called Jesus once walked the earth, but a myth that one person could possibly have universal significance. His followers call him God to express this truth, but this must be a lie. Perhaps it is a lie that God exists, but even if he does, it certainly cannot be true that a man can be God. He was just one man, living in one place, at one time; he cannot mean anything to me, to everyone. It is embarrassing to monotheists, and laughable to atheists. But it is this absurd claim that makes redemption possible. It is the genius of Christianity and why, taking all things into account as best I can, I declare Christian faith to be the supreme message of hope, and for now I will just lay the word “salvation” gently in our laps, and see what we have to say when we return to it.

Jesus holds open the door

Part 4: See and hold everything together. The dynamic changelessness of God.

We must stay clear-sighted and hold our capacity for both good and evil clearly in mind at all times. Somehow, we have to rejoice at the wonder of life, even while we weep at the suffering of others. If we take seriously the truth that God is with us – with all of us, all the time, that he shares our lives with us, and that he loves each of us to the uttermost, then this is what God must be doing. We, in our limitations, move from times of sorrow to times of joy, we focus on one thing and only later remember another. But God holds all things simultaneously in his heart, all the time. To us, this might look like he is unchanging, but this is again only due to our limitations – as when we look to the sun and it seems to us as a constant glowing ball, but close up it is a raging turmoil of dynamic energy. But God, in his intimate sharing with each one of us, continually resonates with all that we experience, with one person’s joy overlaid with another’s sorrow, with another’s hope, with another’s weariness, so that, if we could see God it would appear to us that he is unchanging, when, in reality, he is utterly dynamic, responding to each person’s needs. Not that God is merely a cipher for us, a recording box for human experience, for to each person he is in relationship, and giving himself to that person, in each moment, adding his own personhood. And ultimately, because God is God, and he gives himself, it is life that overcomes death; it is hope that rises to the surface, not despair; it is love that wins through, not hatred; truth that trumps lies in the final hand; redemption that is victorious when defeat seemed certain.

But this is God. How are we to become like God in this? It is because Christ holds open the door.

Jesus holds open the door

Part 3: The human condition is crushing, but it’s in our nature

So, Christ holds open his arm in love, but what is he doing? He is holding open a door.

How are we, we members of humankind, to cope with the anguish of being human? How do we bear with being ourselves? How do we come to terms with the central truth that we are capable of doing both good and evil, that life can be delightful or terrifying? How do we keep going under the burden of being human? How cope with our sense of loss? With the terrible injustices done to us, with the terrible injustices we inflict on others, with the suffering of those we love? How do we enjoy the wonderful gifts of life, the beauty of creation, the freedom of self-expression – while others suffer agony? How do we cope with the gross injustice that we might have enjoyed all these gifts, but do not? How accept that once these things were ours, but are now lost? How deal with our hatred at those who took them from us? Or cope with our guilt that we lost them through our own greed and stupidity?

Anyone keeping in tune with heart and mind cannot simply congratulate themselves on their good luck, and shrug their shoulders at others: “Bad luck mate”. We cannot just refuse to think about these things and enjoy ourselves. We must not avariciously and fearfully defend our benefits against the claims of those who suffer. We must not glibly dismiss the human lot as all part of the system – again quietly chuckling at our own good fortune – or raging impotently at our misfortune. We cannot just blame others as though we are helpless to act. We must not harden our hearts and close our minds to the cries of others. We must not just give token service to those in need and absolve ourselves – though we hardly dare even consider what that might mean. Neither must we give way to despair, hopelessness or cynicism. Life is a wonderful gift and we must rejoice in it, so we cannot even escape by giving our everything to those who suffer if that entails being lost in anger, weariness or despondency. We must not even salve our conscience with the love of God as though knowing his love is our only priority. We cannot escape into religion, or activism or distraction, or self-indulgence.

Jesus holds open the door

Part 2: God’s masterplan of salvation achieved through the love and sacrificial suffering of Jesus

Christ holds open his arms in love, held in place, not by nails, but by his compassion. The love of God cannot be restricted, pinioned in place by human actions; he is always free, unrestrained. If his arms are stretched out, it is because he wants it so. This has been long understood, and is Christians’ triumphant song of God’s loving purposes, achieved, not simply despite of, but through the evil, hatred, anger and fear of humankind. This is what makes the redemption that Christ offers so effective. In Christ, God does not over-rule our human actions; he does not replace what we want with what he wants; he does not miraculously transform our desires to become like his own. Instead, God uses our hatred in order to achieve the triumph of his love. If those who killed him had held back, thought again, somehow found softened hearts and a glimmer of compassion, Jesus would not have died, and the redemptive love would not have flowed. God could not have forced this; salvation could not have happened if he had. It had to be our free choice. Did God manipulate us, trick us, make us dupes of his masterplan? There is no reason to think so. Jesus gave his all to exhort us to turn again and find God; to repent of our sins; to receive forgiveness and love; to embrace life. And still we killed him. I say “we” for we must not hide behind the illusion that it was someone else who did this. Christ’s death is a cosmic drama of universal significance – this is the very thing that gives it its power. We recognise the common humanity we share was what caused the crowd to shout, “Crucify!”. So, we were not tricked, more it was God’s understanding of us, his Fatherly love, which enabled him to foresee what we would do, and use it to turn the tables on us, resulting in the triumph of love and life, not hatred and death. God’s respect of our freedom is clearly seen in how even this event needs to be embraced by each individual in order to realise its power, and we are equally free to ignore or reject its message.

(A devotional piece in 8 parts. The style is more analytical than my usual devotions, but, because of the content, I place it as a devotion)

Jesus holds open the door

Part 1: Introduction: focussing on Jesus Christ

Religion is the deepest answer to the needs of humanity.  It is the repository of the wisest, most profound, insights that the greatest minds have discovered, accumulated through centuries of struggle and wrestling, pain and exaltation. It expresses, and holds, and nurtures and celebrates the cries of the human heart, in agony and ecstasy, and it ponders the sublime and tormenting paradoxes, inescapable truths and delightful and frightening possibilities of life. Why does our society treat it as false, out-dated, superfluous, damaging? That many in our society do this is a sign of the intellectual and moral corruption of our society.

I have studied the great religions of the world for many years now, and their underlying unity is absolutely obvious to me. Even striking superficial differences, such as between Buddhism and Christianity, or Christianity and Hinduism dissolve once we delve deeper. I have no doubt that if I had been brought up a Buddhist or a Hindu, or any other great world faith (and many of the smaller ones too), I would very likely be convinced that that was the pinnacle of religious truth, and what follows would be a tribute to that faith. I also accept that it is nigh on impossible for me to step outside my own upbringing to make an objective decision. However, I won’t let that stop me attempting to make the assessment that follows! As someone who gladly accepts that all the major religions are true paths to God, I perhaps have some small insight to enable me to make the assertions that follow. Even if I should be wrong about the primacy of Christianity, I hope that the following devotional exploration of Christ will be helpful in drawing us closer to the God of love.