Good Friday thoughts

It’s Good Friday and many thoughts are converging in my head right now, on topics from gay marriage to my life in Swaziland to suffering, and actually they all relate.

First, the Supreme Court’s hearing of oral arguments this week on gay marriage has meant that I have been spending more time than I should, probably, following online the debate and commentary and coverage in the US. The debate over homosexuality has been raging with increasing intensity and heat within the church, and I’ve been spending quite a bit of time for months now reading articles and blogs, and thinking a lot, and grieving over how the church is struggling with this issue and losing its way, it seems to me, in quite a fundamental way. The central question I keep hearing, over and over, is “How could God be against someone (in this case, a person with homosexual desires) finding love and happiness (in this case, through meeting those desires within a homosexual relationship)?” And the way I feel so much of the church is losing its way is in our understanding of who God is and what he really wants for and demands from us. In this paradox of the Christian life God wants our good, happiness, and fulfillment, but he also wants—and even demands—our holiness, humble obedience, and willingness to be disciplined through means that will not make us feel happy and fulfilled at the time. We lose our way if we lose sight of either truth in this paradox.

Last night I read some excerpts on a blog from a book I haven’t read yet, Wesley Hill’s Washed and Waiting. He’s an evangelical gay Christian with deeply orthodox views on sex and marriage (i.e. God has created sex for and only for a marriage between a man and a woman), and writes about his personal struggle to lead a holy life as a celibate gay man. I was deeply convicted by some of his statements. His struggle is not my struggle, but the things he is discovering about the character of God apply, I believe, to all of us who are followers of Christ.

Besides seeing God as intimate, loving, and full of grace, Wesley also writes that God is out to “challenge, threaten, endanger, and transform all of our natural desires and affections… Engaging with God and entering the transformative life of the church does not mean we get a kind of ‘free pass,’ an unconditional love that leaves us where we are… Instead, we get a fiercely demanding love, a divine love that will never let us escape from its purifying, renovating, and ultimately healing grip. And this means that our pain—the pain of having our deeply ingrained inclinations and desires blocked and confronted by God’s demand for purity in the gospel—far from being a sign of our failure to live the life God wants, may actually be the mark of our faithfulness.”

Pain. These last few five months since we’ve been in Swaziland have involved a lot of pain for me. The circumstances really don’t matter much; you might think the things I am walking through were really difficult, or not much at all. You might be walking through things that are far more difficult. I certainly know my experience of pain isn’t unique. We all face difficult times, circumstances that we don’t want, challenges that we don’t want to face, costs that we don’t want to pay. My general response these last few months has run mostly along the lines of anger, depression, questioning God’s love for me when he allows this or that, and plain refusal to walk a path of obedience that seems too hard. I’ve realized how weak my faith, trust, and confidence in God are, sobering realizations indeed. I am still struggling on this precipice of choice: To obey, wholeheartedly and joyfully (choosing joy even when obedience hurts), or to take the path of least resistance because it seems easier, even though I know it is not the path of life. To accept the cross, or to run away from it as much as possible.

The point is that all of us who have committed to following in the footsteps of our Lord will sometimes find that the way involves a cross. Jesus himself is so clear on this: “If any man would follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me”, and “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it,” just to name a couple. I’ve noticed lately that a lot of people want to boil Jesus’ message down to nothing more than universal love and non-judgmentalism, and don’t seem to realize what else is right there in red letters in their Bibles. Jesus preached a hard message.

And here we are on Good Friday. In this three-day march of hours towards the joy and hope of Easter, these are the hours in which Jesus hangs on the cross, suffering, doing what he pleaded through sleepless hours and bloody sweat with his Father not to do, if there was any other way. There was no other way. Jesus didn’t get a free pass. He had to suffer.

How often we forget as Christians, as we sing our happy Christians songs and talk our often trite Christian talk about grace-love-hope-blessing-redemption, that all these things came through a monumental act of suffering and sacrifice. We have access to the throne of grace and to lives that can be infused with the joy of fellowship with God because Jesus submitted himself to a divine plan that took away his happiness, because he gave up the right to fulfillment of his desires (not just on the cross, but through 33 years on Earth, during which among other things he walked the hard path of celibacy), because he obeyed. How often we forget that we also are called to suffering and sacrifice as the only way that we can become like Christ and fully enter into the abundant life that He purchased for us on the cross.

I can only speak for myself. I want the happiness and blessing of the Christian life without the cost. I want the joy without the pain. I want my desires fulfilled, 100% and now, without the self-denial of surrendering those desires to the one who set an example of suffering, and calls me to follow in his footsteps. I want true fellowship with Christ without first being crucified with Christ. But it can’t work that way.

This morning at our Anglican church’s Good Friday service the priest preached a pretty hard message, on how Jesus was always found outside his comfort zone, and how we have to leave our comfort. I guess there is no other message Biblically faithful message to preach but a hard one, on Good Friday. I cried out of the realization of what Christ did for me, and also out of the realization that obedience hurts and costs and I both want it and so deeply don’t. Oh wretched woman that I am! Who can deliver me?

The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different. (Romans 7:25, The Message)

I have no neat and tidy way to wrap up these thoughts, other than to observe that I think we all face pretty much the same choice between obedience and comfort, whole-hearted surrender to God and sin. May this day be a day where we all find some space to reflect on the choice, and on the choice that Christ made out of love for us.