Have you ever watched one of your favorite movies, mouthing, “Houston, we have a problem,” along with Tom Hanks, or crying over the '88 U.S. hockey team, when suddenly you were surprised by the remembrance, “This is a true story!”? I had a similar experience yesterday driving home from Boomer's football practice.
As I crested the top curve of Leonard Road I was met by a sky like a Maxfield Perrish painting, huge and billowing, with shafts of sun exploding through rifts, light on dark and dark on light. For about three seconds, a flash of piercing imagination illuminated the idea of Jesus returning out of those particular clouds and I felt like the crew of the Dawn Treader felt when they realized what dreams coming true would actually mean.
I felt no terror of evil, of course, but there was the dread of all my safely ethereal theology becoming solid and arriving in solid flesh to require an account of my days.
In the middle of one of my favorite chapters of the Bible, Mark has tucked the story of the woman with the twelve-year hemorrhage. It says she had “suffered much” at the hands of physicians without being helped. But she was so certain everything she'd heard about Jesus was true that she assumed she needed only to touch some piece of Him to be healed. And she was right. Nothing ethereal about her theology.
For most of my life there has been a disconnect between what I believe and what is. I believe that the Bible tells great stories to learn from and enjoy, true stories. But what is are Abraham and Enoch and Adam waiting in Heaven dressed with skin and bones for me to serve with. I believe that Jesus is a lovely concept, a real man who lived 2000 years ago, and who still does. But this sky brought home to me that what is is a present-tense Man, someone with personality and fingerprints and preferences. Someone with His own agenda. All my life I've been like Mariann Dashwood as she falls in love with Col. Brandon in Sense and Sensibility: learning Jesus has been a matter of creeping awareness that here is a great man, the man, in fact, for me.
But yesterday I got to be Elinor Dashwood, just as she realized that by some eucatastrophe Edward can marry her. All our air-castles turn out to be real castles. The realization is so sharp and sudden, releasing and painful that emotion explodes. Jesus is not a figurehead! While He embodies every Christian concept, He is not a concept. He is real.
And so I finally begin to long to see the face of Him. Like Thomas, to put my fingers in the nail holes. To touch Reality.
As I crested the top curve of Leonard Road I was met by a sky like a Maxfield Perrish painting, huge and billowing, with shafts of sun exploding through rifts, light on dark and dark on light. For about three seconds, a flash of piercing imagination illuminated the idea of Jesus returning out of those particular clouds and I felt like the crew of the Dawn Treader felt when they realized what dreams coming true would actually mean.
I felt no terror of evil, of course, but there was the dread of all my safely ethereal theology becoming solid and arriving in solid flesh to require an account of my days.
In the middle of one of my favorite chapters of the Bible, Mark has tucked the story of the woman with the twelve-year hemorrhage. It says she had “suffered much” at the hands of physicians without being helped. But she was so certain everything she'd heard about Jesus was true that she assumed she needed only to touch some piece of Him to be healed. And she was right. Nothing ethereal about her theology.
For most of my life there has been a disconnect between what I believe and what is. I believe that the Bible tells great stories to learn from and enjoy, true stories. But what is are Abraham and Enoch and Adam waiting in Heaven dressed with skin and bones for me to serve with. I believe that Jesus is a lovely concept, a real man who lived 2000 years ago, and who still does. But this sky brought home to me that what is is a present-tense Man, someone with personality and fingerprints and preferences. Someone with His own agenda. All my life I've been like Mariann Dashwood as she falls in love with Col. Brandon in Sense and Sensibility: learning Jesus has been a matter of creeping awareness that here is a great man, the man, in fact, for me.
But yesterday I got to be Elinor Dashwood, just as she realized that by some eucatastrophe Edward can marry her. All our air-castles turn out to be real castles. The realization is so sharp and sudden, releasing and painful that emotion explodes. Jesus is not a figurehead! While He embodies every Christian concept, He is not a concept. He is real.
And so I finally begin to long to see the face of Him. Like Thomas, to put my fingers in the nail holes. To touch Reality.
1 comment:
Woah. I second your last sentence.
Well said friend. Well said.
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