Holy Week Vs. The Complacency of the World

As we prepare to enter into Holy Week, I would like to present some reflections on the core of the Christian mystery. In its very essence, Christianity is a contradiction--sort of a paradox that fits. There are too many examples to name of times when we as humans tear down what we have celebrated, when we turn away from our only hope for rescue, or when we are forced to die in small ways so that we may live in large ones. Paradoxes (or simply contradictions) are difficult to wrap our minds around. Sometimes we must struggle greatly to internalize and act upon what we come to believe is true.


G. K. Chesterton said, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." This has to be one of the most true sentiments ever expressed (yes, I am a Chesterton groupie), because it cuts straight to the most vital difficulty in the Christian life. We don't witness the true glory of Christian life because we are not really committed to living it. Of course there are degrees of success with the Christian life, as with anything else we do, but I am very convinced that the World has made the majority of Christians flabby contenders.  We don't train ourselves well for the contests we will face in life.  At least not the important ones.

In my Wabash days ("thy loyal sons shall ever love thee!") I had a somewhat surreal experience that drove this idea home for me. Around the Wabash campus is an arboretum that forms a border with the campus buildings. I would often walk through this stand of trees from one point to the other after dark, and it was an excellent place for a young man to achieve solitude. On one such occasion, as I was crossing the arboretum I happened to cross paths with my friend John (although it was a clear night, I prefer to remember him coming mysteriously out of a bank of fog). I asked him where he was off to, but his response was that he was simply out for some fresh air and to think about death. I suppose this might be thought of as a strange activity for a twenty-one-year-old to engage in, and to be honest, that was my first reaction too. Secular influences have long argued that this type of thinking puts us out of synch with the world around us. We are not supposed to consider our own demise, and think as little as possible about what will happen after that, because it will break us away from what is going on in the here and now. It might make us "sad." On the contrary, thoughts of our own demise put us in orbit with the one certainty we all have in life (yes, quite a bit more certain even than taxes): that we will die some day. Why should it be strange to spend time thinking about and preparing for it? Death forces us to give some serious thought to what we believe about a second life, as well as what we want to leave behind in this one. These thoughts have the power to transform a person, before it is too late to change.

Jesus Christ had enough influence to focus the crowds on how to be better people. He certainly spent some time on this, as the Gospels tell us. However, he never lost sight of the ultimate message he came to earth to send, nor of that message's medium. Suffering and the cross are the words with which Christ speaks to us. This Holy Week, let us become students of the language.