Easy for Him to say.
Or so it would seem. But, of course, nothing was easy for Him, for whom the temptations and oppressions were endless, and unrelenting. And He never said anything lightly … because it was what people wanted to hear, or what was easy to say.
He could not have meant, “Look on the bright side,” although He saw more clearly than anyone the Light at the end of the tunnel. He also saw more clearly the tunnel. He had no illusions that the storm was not so bad, that life is not so hard, that those coming for Him had anything other than murder on their minds and fathomless evil in their hearts.
He couldn’t say, “Don’t sweat it,” because He sweated it. Great drops of blood, beading on His forehead, even as He lay face down on the grass of the garden, bracing Himself for the worst.
And yet, as strength failed Him, courage did not.
Strength and any hope for Plan B fled with the disciples, but the courage was still in His eyes as He stared down those who'd come to arrest Him. It was in His silence as He took the cruel taunts of those the people looked to for spiritual leadership. It was in the words He gasped from the cross.
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”
We see a similar ignorance right now, in those tearing down statues, torching buildings, demanding their endless, voracious vengeance. An ignorance that doesn’t want to know anything it doesn’t already know. And it doesn’t know forgiveness.
We see the same arrogance, that thinks itself and its wounds and its raw power greater than any government, any goodness, any God.
We hear echoes of the same vicious words, stabbing at ideas – at people – they don’t want to understand. A generation drunk on the delusion that life should not be difficult, that people cannot be complex, that their Creator must not be reckoned with.
The villains haven’t changed, and God seems as oddly quiet, in some ways, as He did that long ago, bitter Friday. If He could stand back and watch the mob torture and murder His Son … will He stand back and leave us to the wolves now unleashed among us? His grace is our blessed assurance. But will we see it as grace?
The mob is not as frightening as the absence of courage … as the abandoning of every defensive post by those pledged to defend us.
The police, humiliated, fade into the shadows. The elected ones are paralyzed – one party by cowardice, the other by the prospect of its fondest dreams coming true. The troops are held on leash by their leaders, and their leaders stand enthralled to inertia.
That leaves the rest of us – seething, confused, demoralized – hoping suddenly for Rapture, dreading a Millennium dictated by millennials, tossing to restless nightmares of Armageddon.
“Let not your heart be troubled,” He says.
We look to our pastors for interpretation, but too many of them long ago gave themselves over to a one-dimensional gospel of tolerance … to a worship focused not on Deity but diversion … to petty politics that deny accountability for the souls they asked to shepherd. Many have nothing to say to ears that need more than tickling.
We begin to realize that it’s not so much our courage that has deserted us as our delusions of love, from which courage comes. We have taught each other that love is permissiveness, that love is indulgence, that love is lack of conflict. We have lost our comprehension of love as a cross.
We have forgotten that the cross we’ve been called to is heavier than the one that glitters around our necks. That where crosses are, there is pain. Unappreciated sacrifice. The death of things we cannot bear to die to.
Love and courage, it turns out, are one and the same, as defined by the One who embodied both. “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” It is the mandate He modeled for us, and it is why only He can give our suffocating souls the fresh, clean air of courage, as so much that we’ve placed our casual confidence in suddenly collapses around us.
“Let not your heart be troubled,” He says. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” The courage for the lonely conflict, the love for the hard forgiving, the clear head for the deepening fog – these are His free gifts; the taking hold (“let not”), our mortal responsibility.
Islanders of the Caribbean, ‘m told, have a saying: “It is hard for a man to be brave, when he knows he will face the devil at 4 o’clock.”
I wish I was on an island in the Caribbean.
But meantime, life's afternoon is fast slipping by. Past time to begin “let not-ing.”
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