Sacred Neighbor. Sacred Self. Part 4
"God himself was crucified with thieves. Perhaps we all are, the good company of the crucified." - John Updike
On Valentine’s Day, 1990, Voyager 1 turned to take one last photo of Earth before departing for the frigid margins of our solar system. The photograph, taken 4 billion miles away, showed absolute nothingness except for a tiny, pale blue dot, floating in utter isolation. One solitary sunbeam gently highlighted what otherwise looked like an off-colored pixel on a portrait of darkness. It was not, however, an off-colored pixel… It was Earth… It was our home.
Distinguished astronomer and author Carl Sagan famously wrote of this picture in his book Pale Blue Dot:
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
I often get chills when I read Sagan’s reflective words about our home. Our issues seem awfully trivial and tidily arranged when viewed through such a 4-billion-mile perspective. Yes, we’ve had some adversities, but so has everyone who’s lived before us, as will those who’ll live long after. It’s all a grain of sand, so distinctive and complex at the microscopic level, yet melding beautifully into a serene beach once we zoom back a bit.
Unfortunately, that’s not the view of our daily existence. We rarely glimpse our lives from 4 billion miles away. When we zoom in, we observe an unstable, broken world. Corruption, arrogance, predation, mass inequality, famine, violence, disease, poverty, war, and death seem to be the accepted order of things, and this is hardly modern nor localized. In the last several hundred thousand years of human existence, around thirty percent of our species has died during infancy. In the twentieth century alone, the supposed modern age of civility, more than 100 million unique individuals—each possessing the ability to love and be loved—died in war.
This morning, after I dropped my boy off at school, after he grabbed his trombone from the back of the car, and after I kissed his head and told him I loved him, I turned the news on in the background of my home as I readied for work. My heart broke at the sight of a family mourning over their young children’s recently filled-in graves. Through tears, they prayed while missiles illuminated the gray skies behind them. The rockets hadn’t even given the family time to mourn. Their leaders had brought their country to war, and innocent children on both sides were suffering, every last one of them an image-bearer of their divine Creator. It was all just ridiculous brokenness.
Bertrand Russell wrote, “War does not determine who is right, only who is left.” Yet, those who are left do not seem to have it so great either. As I sit here today, with more than 700 million members of my humanity living on less than $1.90 a day, I sip an iced coffee with sugar-free vanilla, which cost me more than triple their daily wage. Six hundred ninety million of our neighbors are severely undernourished. While diarrhea is a mild discomfort for most people reading this book, nothing that a simple medicine cabinet pill wouldn’t cure, 1.5 million children died last year because of it.
As I write this, two islands of garbage, both spanning an area around the size of France, are floating in the Pacific Ocean, destroying any marine life unfortunate enough to get caught in its tentacles. It’s becoming harder to find any area of our existence that isn’t sick, destructive, or self-serving. It’s hard to deny we live in a broken, broken world.
We’re lonely. When Scripture says humankind was exiled from Eden, we feel it. We know somewhere we’ve received but a small taste of heaven and yearn for it once more. Somehow, it was cruelly stolen from us while we weren’t paying attention, and now we hate ourselves.
Keep zooming in, though, on that pale blue dot. Zoom in close enough, and one just might find one of the most recognizable symbols in all of human history. Keep zooming in, and one just might see a jagged wooden cross.
There’s a broken man nailed to it…
Some say that’s God up there on that cross, bleeding and lonely, gasping for life.
Adherents of the faith behind the cross see that broken man, the one we all know to be Jesus of Nazareth, as not merely a man. They see him as Lord, equal to the Great Creator, the Oneness whom Christ claimed co-union with.
Yet, the cross was not for gods. It was an instrument of humiliation and torture. The cross was not even for members of acceptable society. So the question arises:
What is God doing on a cross?