Dear Faith Family,
How much effort do you put into living? Making a living? Living well? I'd wager that most of us spend most of our time and resources on staying alive--and striving to more than survive, but thrive in our living. As living creatures, we instinctively do whatever is necessary to stay living. Our drive is only natural.
Our instincts don't disappear when it comes to our life with God. Even when Jesus bursts onto the scene declaring, "Times up!" (i.e., life is over), "God's kingdom is at hand" (i.e., life with God is here), "repent and believe the good news"; our instinct to make every effort to stay alive with God continues to drive us. We are willing to do whatever it takes to get in, and, once in, everything it takes to stay living there. So it's no wonder when Jesus says in Luke 14:25-33 that what it takes is to "hate living," "accept death," and "renounce all efforts at staying alive," we think he must be joking. And so we give our best efforts to finish building the life started and keep the peace of the life we have. The sad irony is, as we discussed Sunday, Jesus was indeed joking, but we tend to miss the joke.
It's been said that before the gospel is good news, it is news both tragic and comedic. Tragic in the sense that it is news that every one of us is dead in our sin; whatever life we are living, good, bad, or otherwise, ends. But it is also comedic in the sense of "a kind of terrible funniness and of a happy end to all that is terrible." For, it is news that we living-dead are loved anyway, cherished anyway, forgiven anyway. As one author put it, the hilarity is that we are "bleeding to be sure, but also bled for." As life leaves us, it seems, life is given to us.
If I am honest, I hear the tragic news more reticently than the comedic. I feel the weight of life bleeding out, the struggle to stop the bleeding in any and every way possible, and the helplessness of not being able to do so, at least not entirely. I am, admittedly, ever so slowly discovering the levity (a.k.a., joy) that all I need to do to stay alive is to stop trying to!
Truth be told, the only thing I am sure not to fail at in life is dying. I'll certainly fail to complete many an aspiration, and inevitably pick the wrong battle or be in a place where no negotiation can get me out. And even when I feel like I've figured it all out, something will come along and prove me wrong. That's the tragedy. But, the hilariously good news is that one thing I am sure to do that, like you, I am not able to keep from doing is all that is required to truly live--and to live forever.
"We are not raised, reconciled, and restored because we are thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent," says Robert Capon, "but because we are dead and our life is hid with Christ in God--because, that is, Jesus has this absolute thing about raising the dead. In the Gospels, he never meets a corpse that doesn't sit up right on the spot," nor tells a story where the dead don't come back to life, and the lost aren't found.
The thing, says Jesus, required to live in him, just happens to be the one thing--despite all my efforts to the contrary--I am able to do: stop living. Inevitably, my life ends, but the good news is that is precisely when life actually begins. I still have a ways to go to exist consistently in the "zip and zing" of the Good News as "a divine comedy," but I think I'm starting to get the joke! How about you?
Love you, faith family!