February 11, 2024
Sometimes healing, rescue and deliverance doesn’t seem to happen. What then?
As life goes on it will throw at us all kinds of trials and tribulations. Some people seem to move through repeated triumphs and to emerge virtually unscathed. This is an illusion of course. If you live past 40, you will have battle scars, half hidden and perhaps even mildly infected wounds. Times when people, ourselves or even God ‘let us down’. Unresolved conflicts and relationships from which we just had to move away. Pains and suffering that leak into our emotional and spiritual health. But if the cross is anything to go by, there is a presence to be discovered there in the midst of our darkest place – the presence of the One who fully entered into the darkness of human agony and brokenness. There is God to be discovered there. It is not the comfortable God who promises that trials will only lead to triumph. It is instead the discovery of a different kind of God – one who is to be revealed in the darkest pit. One who knows the agony and brutality of life, but who, at the last, surrendered to God with the words ‘It is finished’. In others words, with an acceptance of God’s will – ‘even to death’ (Phillippians 2v8). In that darkest pit you will find the real God, not the easy one who only makes us comfortable – but definitely the real one. And what is our response when we start discovering that God? Surrender. Just like Jesus.
In his autobiography Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis describes his forty day sojourn on Mount Athos in 1914 with the poet Angelos Sikelianos. There he met Father Makarios, an ascetic, with whom he engaged in discussions about faith and doubt. Kazantzakis, who was heavily influenced by Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson, would rail against the established Church, especially what he called its life-denying morality. Though he rejected the asceticism of Father Makarios, he respected his rejection of spiritual mediocrity. One conversation went as follows:
“Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makarios?” I asked him.
“Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength! I wrestle with God.”
“With God!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “And you hope to win?”
“I hope to lose, my child…”
Just as Jacob wrestled with God and Israel’s name means ‘wrestling’, Jesus likewise wrestled to a point of surrender in Gethsemane. So also we who follow Jesus are called to wrestle with God in our doubts and pains until we surrender, accept and embrace God within the brokenness, doubts or lack of closure. This wrestling and acceptance will likely not be a one-off event, but as we journey in this way, we will discover something profoundly different to the God of popular culture – a culture that so often tries to deny the pains of life or to put theological band aids over gaping wounds. As we wrestle truthfully though, we will discover the God of the crucified Jesus – who may not lead us out of suffering, but will lead us through and in the process slowly transform us into someone ready for the resurrection.
May you know the presence of the crucified God whatever life throws at you.
Julian Holdsworth
BSBC Pastor