Sacred Neighbor. Sacred Self. Part 7
My favorite modern-day philosopher, the late Norm MacDonald, once said:
Some people believe that man is divine. I can't believe that because I know my own heart, and I know that's not true. Other people believe that we're all just wretched nothingness, just animals, just creatures. I can't believe that. It doesn't make any sense that we're just beasts. I will say that Christianity has this interesting compromise where we're both divine and wretched, and there's this Middleman that's the Savior, that through Him we can become divine, but we're born wretched. I kind of like that one because it sort of makes sense.
We’re so afraid to be them, though—the wretched. We’re so afraid to be found in association with them. They’re so easily overlooked and despised. The idea of being excluded or marginalized is perhaps our greatest fear in life, so the very idea of being counted as The Other is a dread of cosmic proportions. We will sacrifice just about everything of value to avoid feeling outcast. In this very company, however, is where Jesus set up exclusive shop. Among the broken is where Jesus lived, taught, ate, and slept. Jesus fellowshipped with the broken, laughed with them, loved among them, and identified with them. Despite our fear of the label, The Other was the very company Jesus claimed as His own.
Many of the comforts and upward mobility we are blessed to experience in the West today, the earthly Jesus would not recognize. He would, however, recognize our scars, our tears. So, despite our incessant desire to pretend we have our act together, perhaps it is in our most depraved state where we are nearest to Him, in the dark. Perhaps when our shoulders are back and our chins held high is not when God chooses to draw us close, but when our posture slumps forward and our tears flow freely is when our Creator moves to cradle us and call us friends.
For those of us who attempt to follow Christ, we are attempting to follow a man who at one point stepped aside from His divinity and immersed Himself in the fallenness of the pale blue dot. He relinquished all accolades and esteem and jumped squarely into the trenches of our humanity, with all of our wars, fears, narcissism, and diseases. There He chose to live the life of the broken. He did not turn away from the repulsiveness of that fallen condition but enveloped Himself squarely in it.
If Bonhoeffer was right about Christ being weak and powerless in the world as we know it, then Christ won’t be found in the halls of power but in the dark, despised gutters of humanity. It’s not in the purity of our hearts where Christ awaits to heal us, nor in the perfection of our discipleship, but in the deepest gullies of our inner person—the parts we’re afraid to show the world, indeed the parts we’re afraid to show ourselves. There He waits, incognito, as a beggar to the beggar in us, as a criminal to the criminal in us, as a diseased outcast to the diseased outcast in us all. Let us not be afraid to find ourselves in those depths and in that darkness. Those are God’s preferred places of meeting.
Zoom in close enough on that pale blue dot. You’ll find a broken, blood-thirsty, war-torn Earth. Above it, you’ll find the beauties and the mysteries of the heavens. Keep zooming, and you’ll find a broken man suspended squarely between the two, perfecting the tension of both.
The great G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The whole point of Christian theory is that pain is so real that even God Himself could experience it.” The message of the cross is that even the Creator felt the same agony and wounds we feel today. Brokenness is such a force in our world that even the Christ could not help but succumb to it. No one escapes the pain of a fallen world—not even God—and that’s oddly comforting.
If the biggest act on the world stage was a death on a cross, then the biggest act on the world stage was an act of love. As we float around on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, crafted from dying stardust a few billion years ago, perhaps we should remember that her finest moment was when love was injected into an otherwise indifferent world. We’re surrounded by love and stardust on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, and never for an instant were we left alone there.
The wretched cross might mean many things to many people, but one thing it undoubtedly means to those desperate enough to follow the wounded man nailed upon it is that God has not once turned a blind eye to our pain, suffering, mistakes, self-doubt, depravity, shame, or tears. Indeed, He meets us there. As long as we’re in The Dark, so is God.