Sense or Nonsense?
Is God revealed in the stars? Yes. And birds and flowers, and fields of golden wheat; in little children? Is he revealed in a cancer patient, skeletal and complaining? In a beautiful girl? A handsome young man with a giant IQ? Yes. Is he revealed in a little child, twisted and drooling, brain-damaged and IQless? Hmmm.
Years ago I met a mother who learned, before the birth, that her baby was badly hurt. Would she want an abortion? No, she didn't want to abort the baby. When I met her, that child Jerry was twenty-nine years old and weighed about 70 pounds of twisted limbs. He grinned widely at any movement and when he was touched; and he laughed out loud when he heard the trash collectors outside his window. It was one of his real pleasures, his mother told us. Her days were taken up mostly with caring for her child who would never improve.
But she could have aborted the baby and spent all her time in other ways; ways demonstrably profitable. Shaping a healthy child perhaps who could shape and change the world. Yes. That "makes sense" to me.
But making sense might not be the main thing.
I don't say that making sense is nonsense; I'm just saying that the gospel didn't come to us in a "making sense" way. For starters, the signs were all wrong (the alleged Messiah didn't impress, didn't raise an army, and didn't obliterate Rome). And it made no sense! You really get to know God through a single historical event? A young man streaked with spit and sweat and blood dying in the dark? You reason from that to eternal truths about God?
No, you don't "reason from that" to eternal truths about God. You believe what the Spirit of God reveals in, through and about the event. You can never get to God by rational theorems and you can't rationally deduce truths about God reconciling the world to himself in and through the young man dying on the cross.
The cross of Christ doesn't require us to destroy our brains. In fact, the cross provokes us to set our brain-power and logic to work and shows that brain-power and logic can't arrive at the cross. Brainy, shrewd, religious and political thinkers looked the Lord of glory up and down, studied him intensely, and then promptly nailed him to a stake. They didn't see him as the Lord of glory and they didn't know that their killing him was the supreme moment of glory-filled revelation as well as the supreme lunacy of a world gone mad.
The young man on the cross might have lived a long life and taught in Rome and Athens; might have started hundreds of schools and changed the world in significant ways. That "makes sense" to me. And Jerry's mother could have acted sensibly.
Yes, but would it have been cross-like? If common-sense is the final and only arbiter by which we construe life and the world, and react to it, there would be billions of abortions. There would be billions of "crosses". Common sense would create a world after its own image--a world covered with "common sense" crosses. But there couldn't have been the cross of Christ and there couldn't be even one cross like his.
Whatever else you make of abortions, no one pretends that it's the same thing that Jerry's mother chose. And it's only within the Christian Story with its own grammar and way of construing things that the cross of Christ makes sense. Without the input of the Spirit, it remains opaque, lightless. Even with the Spirit's help the cross goes deeper than our hearts and minds can fathom.
The event itself must be the source that generates and controls all our thinking about the event. It is never to be used to approve of our already existing proposals and agendas. What we can come to without the cross-event is not distinctively Christian even if it is correct.
Jesus Christ was put to grief by his Father! It was God who delivered Jesus to death by his determining counsel and foreknowledge. So the cross was God's idea!
But Jesus Christ was put to grief by his fellow-humans. He bore the sinful hatred and cruel self-serving in his body up on to the stake. He was both the object of human evil and the death of it; he was the means by which God reconciled wicked humanity to himself. In the cross sin plunges to its lowest low and climbs to its pinnacle of arrogant self-assertion.
You can't, without revelation by the Spirit of God, come to such a faith. Rational thinking, the use of logic, empirical testing, the reading of signs or the reading of tea-leaves, stars or tarot cards--none of this can arrive at the wondrous gospel of reconciliation. Even with the Spirit there's much that's mystery. Without him there's only barren, sterile "common sense".
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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