Self-Image

"Pleasant words are a honeycomb,
       sweet to the soul and healing to the bones."
  - Proverbs 23:24

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival." - C.S. Lewis

"Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives." - C.S. Lewis

"Without the gospel, your self-image is based upon living up to some standards – whether yours or someone’s imposed upon you. If you live up to those standards, you will be confident but not humble. If you don’t live up to them, you will be humble but not confident. Only in the gospel can you be both enormously bold and utterly sensitive and humble. For you are both perfect and a sinner!" - Dr. Tim Keller

Bitter Death

I listened to a Tim Keller sermon the other day and he brought up an interesting point. Dr. Keller said that Jesus was the only person ever to choose death. He admitted that there are, of course, many noble people who have died voluntarily, but they did not really choose death itself; they merely chose when they would meet death. For humans death is inevitable and unavoidable, so we have no choice in dying. Instead, we can only choose when we want to meet that end. For Christ, God incarnate, death is anything but inevitable and unavoidable, so death must be a deliberate and heavy choice.

Christ's death was wholly voluntary, and I believe that he embraced and experienced death to its fullest extent. There will never be another who will feel the most blatant experience of death in its truest form than he.

Matthew 27:34 says, "There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it."

This verse struck me, because it seemed inconsistent with the Jesus we are shown everywhere else in the gospels. In countless places Jesus reads people's thoughts, emotions, and even their pasts. So, in verse 34, are we really supposed to believe that Christ didn't know something as simple as the fact that the wine he was offered was mixed with gall? Did he really have to taste it to find that out?

My take on this is that he knew that the wine was mixed with gall. I think that this seemingly small occurrence speaks volumes about who Jesus was and what he did.

Now, I'm probably being a little speculative here, but I think that Jesus voluntarily chose to taste the bitter wine mixed with gall in order to fully taste the bitterness of death. Verse 34 displays his full and inexorable surrender and embrace of death and all its bitterness, to the point where he would physically taste its acerbity in order to fully "taste" death for himself, and maybe even to show us his steadfast willingness and commitment to this cup, which was not taken from him.

He could have easily refused the wine mixed with gall before tasting it and still accomplished the wonderful work on Calvary, but he still chose to taste it.

(This is a stretch, but could the wine and gall in verse 34 be figuratively related to the "cup" that Jesus references to in Matthew 25:42, where he prays "My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done"?)

What Dr. Keller said and what verse 34 seems to tell me convey the same thing. They both amplify the truth that Jesus fully accepted his fate, his death, and our punishment. He really, truly chose death, and chose to taste it in all its bitterness, for us.

When I think about this, I really find myself at a loss for words.

On a related note, I just read what is now my favorite poem of all time. It's called The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde. It is quite long, but it tells a story of a man's impending hanging from the perspective of a fellow inmate. (Wilde actually spent two years at Reading Prison, and signs the poem "C.3.3," which was his prisoner identification there. You can read more about the background behind this poem here.) I like it because it uses some rhyming patterns, and the story moved me greatly. If you want to read it, you can do so here. (It's quite long.)

I will end this post with a few great lines (there are so many) from the poem which seemed fitting for the topic at hand.

Alas! it is a fearful thing
To feel another’s guilt!
For, right within, the sword of Sin
Pierced to its poisoned hilt,
And as molten lead were the tears we shed
For the blood we had not spilt.

The warders with their shoes of felt
Crept by each padlocked door,
And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,
Gray figures on the floor,
And wondered why men knelt to pray
Who never prayed before.

All through the night we knelt and prayed,
Mad mourners of a corse!
The troubled plumes of midnight shook
Like the plumes upon a hearse:
And as bitter wine upon a sponge
Was the savour of Remorse.

. . .

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

. . .

For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:
And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ's snow-white seal.

Toynbee & Lewis

"It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it." - Arnold Toynbee

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"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither." - C.S. Lewis

Consumed By...

A dead deer has been lying on the side of a street near my house for the past few days.  When I drive with my windows down I can smell its stench.

When I think about it, it almost concerns me that I do not feel much, if any sorrow at all that this deer (which looks young) had its life cut short at the hands of a human driving a metallic monster.

This apathy towards death is not something foreign to me, nor is it something that is isolated to dead animals.  It extends towards humans, too.

Every time I hear or see something about a death on the news I think about how unfortunate it is, but rarely do I feel emotionally stirred by it.  Even when the mass murders at Virginia Tech occurred, though I felt shock, horror, and sorrow, it was all a bit muted because of my distance from the events...not just physical distance, but emotional and relational distance from the massacre.

Yes, even on 9/11 I only felt this muted sense of sorrow, despite living less than 1.5 miles from ground zero.

Of course, the matter takes on a different form when a death that is near to me occurs.  I thank God that I have not had to mourn a close family member's death yet, but when my dog died I genuinely felt true sorrow.  For a while after his death I really did mourn and felt such a precise and stunning pain, but even then I could not embrace the mourning and sorrow as much as I wanted to.  I don't really know how to explain it, but when I mourned I wanted to be completely consumed by it, even if it would just be for a day or two, but preferably for much longer.  I felt that was the only way I could really agonize.  But I was never wholly consumed...very nearly, but not completely.

In fact, when tragic events do occur, I think that I feel just as much frustration as sorrow because I find that I can never fully allow myself to be consumed...as strange as it is to type that, I think it's true.

If I allow myself the license to let my thoughts wander a bit, I think that this separation from sorrow, this dullness to it, is the result of the fall.  When sin entered the world through the fall, "I" became the most important person to each of us.  A hateful stake was driven in between not only man and God, but between man and his fellow earthly companions, and that division means that we become effectually separated from each other..mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.  This, I think, is the reason why our mourning, sympathy, and empathy for others' sorrows will never be whole and all-consuming while we are on this earth.  It will always be the slightest bit dulled.  We will never be able to perfectly empathize with someone's pains (and even their joys) because we are still "I."  So long as "I" remains intact, sorrows can never take a genuine hold on us.

And this is why I think I feel such frustration at not being able to sufficiently mourn with my fellow humans when they experience pain, loss, and death.  We are all born of the same flesh, yet we are always being driven further and further apart because of sIn.

No matter how much I can try, try, try to be consumed by another's sorrow and their condition, I cannot.

Thank God that he did not only try to be consumed, but actually allowed himself to be wholly consumed by our condition, sorrow, and even death for us, so that we would only be wholly consumed by joy.

And because of that, I believe that heaven will be a place where those dividing stakes will be plucked from our midsts (can you see it happening already?), and we will return to being one body that perfectly feels (for) each other.  Since "sorrow and sighing will flee away," we won't even have to worry about sufficiently experiencing each other's pains, but only each other's joys, and since all of our joys will be realized and met in Jesus Christ, we will be experiencing our Lord and Savior fully and perfectly, forever.  Imagine that...experiencing infinite and eternal joy...

What a beautiful future we have!

We were made for God.  Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.  It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving.  It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger.  When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it.  He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love.  All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His.  In Heaven there will be no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds.  First, because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love Himself.  But secondly, because we shall find them all in Him.  By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do.  - C.S. Lewis

"Hoping to Goodness"