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God: If someone hits you, turn the other cheek.
World: Your life is worthless.
God: Your life is everything to me.
World: Give into the desires and temptations you long for.
God: Let me chisel you into the original masterpiece I made you as.
World: Life is meaningless. Kill yourself.
God: Life is meaningful and full of wonderful mysteries from Me. Be patient just a little longer, I am coming soon.
World: Love is sex, money, and pleasures.
God: Love is defined by what My Son, what He did for You on that cross.
World: Give up.
God: Try it one more time my child. This time trust in Me and it will happen.
Jesus is born to teenage peasants under questionable circumstances. His mother gets pregnant before marriage. He’s born amid the dung and straw of a stable. He’s placed in a feeding trough. His brothers and sisters think he’s out of his mind, and after his first sermon in his hometown, the people he grew up with form a mob and try to kill him.
And who does Jesus identify with? The outcasts, the people of the land who aren’t good enough, clean enough, wealthy enough, and pure enough to be a part of the establishment. He’s invited to dine with the elite and the rich, which he does numerous times, but he also eats with the lowest of the low—and he enjoys it. He enjoys them.
He touches people with infectious skin diseases, he lets questioable women touch him, he lays his hands on dead bodies, and he engages in conversation with promiscuous women alone in the middle of the day.
His entire life is about the stripping away of power and control. Jesus always chooses the path of love, not power.
Inclusion, not exclusion.
Connection and solidarity rather than rank and hierarchy.
Touch rather than distance.
Compassion rather than control.
He comes on a donkey, not a horse.
Weeping and broken, not proud and triumphant.
We find Jesus’ message putting him more and more in conflict with the religious and political leaders of his day. He’s threatening their power. This is what love does, it threatens the empires of power and control and wealth and manipulation.
He’s eventually arrested and put on some sort of trial, at which he’s asked to perform miracles. He refuses…He’s eventually beaten and flogged. When he doesn’t fight back, he’s mocked, and he doesn’t say anything in return. He’s hung on a cross and says, “I am thirsty.”
Naked.
Bleeding
Vulnerable.
Thirsty.
There is a weakness that is actually strength.
And there is a strength that is actually weakness.
It takes quite a spine to turn the other cheek.
It takes phenomenal fortitude to love your enemy.
It takes firm resolve to pray for those who persecute you.
This isn’t true on an individual, relational level. It’s true for families and people groups and even nations. Consider Ghandi. Think about what he accomplished. A short, bald man from India wearing a white robe and spectacles stood up to the British Empire.
And won.
Without a gun.
This appeared at the time to be incredibly weak, but history teaches us, in this and many other cases, that there is a better way.
Jesus sees the lie for what it is and is willing to go the whole way to resist it. Including his own death. He is confronting an entire system of rank and exclusion and hierarchy that says that some people are better than others and some people are worth more than others, and some are good enough for God and some aren’t, and some should triumph while others suffer at their expense.
In Jesus’ public exposure, he exposes the lie of the empire.
In Jesus’ vulnerability, he shows how vulnerable the “strength” of power and corruption really are.
In Jesus’ thirst, he shows us how greed will always leave us thirsting for more.
It’s all upside down: an obscure Jewish rabbi challenging a world-dominating regime, and yet several days later, rumors spread that he’s risen from the dead.
Our healing begins when we participate in the suffering of God. When we don’t avoid it but enter into it, and in the process enter into the life of God. When we see our pain not as separating us from but connecting us to our maker.
And in this connection, there’s always the chance that we’ll find a reason to risk again.
Perhaps you have had your heart broken by something. You risked and extended and offered yourself, and they rejected and turned away and didn’t return your love.
There is something divine in your suffering.
Really good, loving people get hurt. It’s how things are.
This is so reassuring to me. To know that all the times I thought I was weak, when people told me I was being weak, in reality there was some strength in there. And that Jesus sees the inherent worth in people, starting from the inside.
