Hearing the Music

Forgiveness Floundering?

I hope that your post Easter week has you encouraged. I know for me the weather has been a major boon to couple with a fresh reminder of God's grace and victory over death.  

Two significant things as we go into this weekend. First, I will be starting an Adult Institute class on the topic of forgiveness. We will be using Tim Keller's book Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? as our guide. It will be helpful if you read along with the book, but it is not necessary. The topic of forgiveness can hardly be more relevant culturally and remains before us personally almost daily. One of the reasons that forgiveness is so hard is that it demands that we look both at ourselves as well as those that need our forgiveness through the cross. Where, if we have eyes to see, we recognize simultaneously how much we are loved and how much our sin cost God. Miroslav Volf sums it up well in Exclusion and Embrace:

“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude my enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion — without transposing the enemy from the sphere of the monstrous… into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows [as the cross demonstrates] that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and imitate God’s love for him. And when one knows [as the cross demonstrates] that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.”  

I am looking forward to exploring this topic together.

Second, we will be welcoming Dr. Hans Madueme to our pulpit this Sunday. Dr. Madueme is an Associate Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College and was one of my son Josiah's favorite professors during his time at Covenant. Dr. Madueme is in Grand Rapids assisting the college to connect with local churches by serving pastors and elders with a talk on Monday morning. For our worship Sunday he will be opening Luke 9:28-36, the account of the Transfiguration. If you know of folks who you think might benefit from exposure to Covenant College, invite them to join us for worship.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Is It Nothing to You?

In Handel's Messiah there is a short Arioso surrounding the crucifixion where the composer quotes Jeremiah "Behold and see, if there be any sorrow like my sorrow." The full text (in the ESV) goes like this:  

   “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
        Look and see
    if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,
        which was brought upon me,
    which the LORD inflicted
        on the day of his fierce anger.
                                                                                             Lamentations 1:12

Jeremiah is speaking of the desolation of Jerusalem, but surely these words find their fulfillment in the one who embodies all of the sorrows of the Israelites; our Lord and Savior. Is there any sorrow like his sorrow?

It is good for us on this day to pause for a moment and try to think about the horrors of the cross. It really is difficult for us to comprehend due to the cultural distance and the way images of the cross have become part of the wallpaper of our lives, hanging around our necks and decorating our homes and churches. There is NOTHING attractive about crosses and crucifixions. It was a particularly brutal form of punishment aimed at not only death, but through shame and degradation sought to eradicate the recipient from the human race. "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?"

As brutal and as shameful as crucifixion was, the particular depth of suffering that our Savior experienced had as its focal point the hours of darkness from 12-3 when all of the just wrath of God was poured out on the innocent Christ, who willingly stepped forward as our substitute (cf. Mark 10:45). It was this torment that evoked the cry of dereliction, "My, God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34) It was the only time that Jesus addresses God the Father as "God" and not as his "Father", so deep was his affliction on the day of the Lord's fierce anger.

Why the crucifixion? Why go to such extremes? Couldn't the purposes of redemption have been accomplished in another way? Rudolf Bultmann, a 20th Century German Theologian had this to say about the cross, "The way to God leads not to hell but through hell, or, in Christian terms through the cross. It leads us not to hopelessness but to a hope which transcends all human hope; and we must silence all human hope, if that divine hope is to dawn for us."  Surely this is the answer. The cross of Christ is the gateway to hope. He was forsaken in order that we might be forgiven. He bore the crown of thorns, that we might receive a crown of glory. As you pass by the cross today, may it not be nothing to you. Rather pause and drink in the love of God displayed in sorrow.

Hold It Before the Lord

 In the LORD I take refuge;
how can you say to my soul,
“Flee like a bird to your mountain,
for behold, the wicked bend the bow;
they have fitted their arrow to the string
to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart;
if the foundations are destroyed,
what can the righteous do?”
Psalm 11:1–3

It is amazing how fast the news cycles turn and how quickly we move from one story to the next. As I was scrolling through my NY Times news feed Thursday morning I could not find a single article with continuing coverage of the shooting in Nashville (to be fair there were a couple of articles related to guns and additional Covenant school stories did appear later in the day). Earlier in the week, I had commented in the office to Grace that I was thinking about touching on the tragedy in the Friday Letter, but that it might be too late. So much has almost instantaneously been written and now it seems like many are ready to turn the page. Like rubberneckers passing an auto accident, we look, we stare, and we are soon carried on by the traffic of life.

I make these observations knowing that over and over again I have been guilty of the same tendency. So how do we steward a tragedy like this? How do we look and not look away? As David asks in Psalm 11, "if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?":

• Recoil. Grieve. Lament. Let the sting of this, the horror fill you. Don't look away too quickly. Write out the names of the lost, their families (don't forget the shooter). Take them to the Lord. Cry out to the Lord. He can handle your questions. He can handle your pain. We have Studied and practiced Lament. This is the time for it. 
• Remember. Our God does not look away from suffering. We are in the season of Lent.  Ahead of us is a cross, a Roman instrument of execution, Jesus did not eschew this cross but rather embraced it, resolutely, with love for his Father's plan and love for his people's wounds. Diane Langberg puts it well:
         “The Crucified is the One most traumatized. He has borne the World Trade Center. He has carried the Iraq war, the destruction in Syria, the Rwandan massacres, the AIDS crisis, the poverty of our inner cities, and the abused and trafficked children. He was wounded for the sins of those who perpetrated such horrors. He has carried the griefs and sorrows of the multitudes who have suffered the natural disasters of this world--the earthquakes, cyclones, and tsunamis. And he has borne our selfishness, our complacency, our love of success, and our pride. He has been in the darkness. He has known the loss of all things. He has been abandoned by his Father. He has been to hell. There is no part of any tragedy that he has not known or carried. He has done this so that none of us need face tragedy alone because he has been there before us and will go with us.
  
• Hope.  We live in a world that is caught between denial and despair; a world where cynicism and anger cover the more vulnerable emotions of sadness and loss. We live in a world that desperately needs hope. It is only the gospel, with a Savior who has not eschewed pain but embraced it and conquered it, that can truly offer hope to the world.  Christian, it is your great privilege to tell a story of healing and renewal. In Jesus' own words, "I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33 )
• Help. Friends, our community, our nation, our world is filled with these stories. This one has struck closer to us than others have, but literally throughout the world, throughout our country, day by day, tragedies such as this happen. (The shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville marks the 123rd mass shooting of 2023, or the 130th, depending on how you measure it.) How will we work for justice, for peace, for the common good?  For some it will be the cup of cold water that comes as we practice hospitality, open our homes and our lives to those who are hurting; to those who are on the edge. Others will seek for systemic change through legal processes, new laws, community advocacy, etc...  But can we really stand by in such a world with no thought to help?

This Sunday we continue on the road to Jerusalem. In Luke 18:35-43 we see Jesus encounter yet more brokenness in the world. He doesn't look away or rush by, as those accompanying him were pushing for. He stops. He engages. He asks, "What do you want me to do for you?"  Thank you Jesus for seeing our pain.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash