His passion is our passion

Meg’s maternal grandmother was a dear and sweet lady named Margaret Stringer. She was “the” piano teacher in Wauchula for decades, everyone knew her and she was beloved by her family and the community.

When the family would gather for a big gift exchange at Christmas, we’d watch the kids tear into their presents, only pausing to look at the tags or cards on them because their parents would remind them. The adults would open theirs more calmly. Grandma Stringer would very carefully slide her finger so as to lift the tape without tearing the paper, then carefully unfold the paper and remove the bow. Then she would carefully fold the paper and stack it so it could be used again.

Her whole house was like that.  She was not a hoarder, not at all, but she never let anything go to waste. Why? She had grown up and come to adulthood during the Great Depression. She had lived through World War II, when saving, rationing and recycling were accepted, mandatory and patriotic realities of life. Her husband died when they were in their early 60’s. She lived into her early 80’s, so she had to live over 20 years without him and without his income. They were not at all wealthy, but she always had enough. She and her whole generation learned hard lessons about thrift and making do that served her well her whole life.

I share that story because we are reflexively averse to suffering and hardship. We work very hard to avoid it and we set up all manner of programs to mitigate it for others. Yet, whenever I talk to most people about their lives, they will focus in on some excruciatingly difficult time that shaped them into becoming who they are today. Often it is in such moments that people find Jesus to be very much alive and with them.

That is not only a matter of life’s story. It is a matter of biological fact. Our brains have vast capacities of untapped potential stored in genomes inside our brain cells that lay dormant until circumstances wake them up. When we get into a crisis or a challenge, they wake up. On a CAT scan they literally light up.

The truth is, experiential and biologically, that we cannot fully become the people that we were ever meant to be without challenges, without suffering through them and thereby growing and finding ourselves.

That should not surprise us. If you want to get stronger you have to exercise, maybe lift weights, to have resistance and if you’re really serious about it, it will hurt. (I don’t mean by injury, but muscle soreness.)

If we tackle learning a musical instrument, it’s the same thing. A few weeks ago Maggie Franklin played violin accompanying her mother, Kelly Nelson, in a beautiful piece of music in church. Just beautiful. I suspect Maggie’s very first attempts to drag a bow across those four strings didn’t sound very good. I bet there were times she felt like giving up but her parents and instructors encouraged her to keep pushing through, to fight, to struggle to become great at it.

Maybe you had that same struggle with chemistry or algebra or farming or riding a horse or establishing a business or working cattle. That is life. That is how we grow and that is how we learn best. The path to truth, to true life, to the fullness of who we were ever meant to be necessarily includes suffering.

And if we were to ever run across someone who had not suffered, I never have, what sort of person would they be? Naïve? Shallow? Weak? Who would want that?

Getting back to Grandma Stringer, she was a great woman in large part because of the suffering she knew. That was true of Meg’s grandparents on both sides, and of mine on both sides. That whole generation took those lessons to heart. I fear that each generation since has lost more and more of those lessons. We may be learning them again. If so, then we shall meet the challenges together, head on. And we will lean on the One who suffered the most and for the greatest lesson of all.

Palm Sunday and Holy Week hold a very hard lesson that we are called to remember today and all week. And when I say remember, I mean we must bind ourselves to it as closely as we possibly can. This is true for each of us, wherever we are in our faith. Jesus took on this ultimate suffering for us, and by for us I mean standing in our place to overcome all evil, and also to open the path of eternal life.

You may say this lesson is too hard.  Well, yes, it is too hard.  This is impossibly hard. That is the point. Anything great and worth doing looks “impossibly hard” when you start.

First, remember that we believe, as we prayed earlier, that Jesus took our nature upon himself. Don’t let that slip by unnoticed. He was truly human. He was vulnerable to our physical needs and challenges.  He hungered, he thirsted. I imagine his feet hurt after a long day’s walk. His pain was real pain – physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual. His death was a real death.

Jesus didn’t promise that once we accepted him as Lord and Savior everything would go smoothly. He promised that he would be with us. He was. He is. There is no greater illustration of him being with us than when we join him on that long, slow and hard walk to Golgotha.

We bind ourselves to His suffering, however best we can do it, however much we can take, to become radically transformed into who and what he is. That is astounding, radical, even outrageous. And it is necessary. We cannot be who Jesus calls us to be unless we bind ourselves, including our own suffering, to his suffering. We’ve got to turn on those genomes, light them up. We’ve got to grow.

This is why it’s no use jumping straight to Easter. We’ve got to awaken the fullness of who we are in the fullness of who He is. As Paul wrote, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…” (Philippians 2:5)

The key is to come as close as we can. You may not feel as though you’ve gotten very deeply into this subject, or come to know Jesus as you hear others describe their relationship with him. Wherever any of us are on that scale, we must approach Holy Week each year coming as close as we possibly can, surely closer than we were, to the reality of Jesus emptying himself. He poured out everything including his blood and his very life in great humility to save every one of us.

Jesus is not merely a giver of a new set of rules to follow (although he does give us new rules to follow.) He is not merely an historic figure to emulate (although he is surely the very best historic figure to emulate.)  He is the One, the One, we must bind ourselves to, to gain eternal life.

That is, after all, the rite of baptism, of binding ourselves to his death so that we may rise to new life in him. That walk is different for each of us, but he calls us all to it. I’ll close with the two verses that come immediately after today’s reading from Philippians:

“Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Philippians 2:12-13

God bless and draw you closer to Him this Holy Week.

AMEN