Jesus as an Airbag

When considering the wide range of experience that a human being goes through during his or her existence, the truth of their personal theology is revealed. When existence that is usually internal synapse and sinew is exposed for all to evaluate, you often find out more than merely what one is made of. Laid open in life’s aftermath is something profoundly different than mere theory or science. Self evaluation in these moments is often far more devastating than the events pursuant to a cause initiating such searching. People of professed faith often state creeds or verses of sacred text that might favor a mantra more than a true statement of belief. During these moments of bare nakedness I find myself less resembling the Jesus of Gethsemane and more like the questioning, doubting father in Mark 9. Instead of selfless surrender to the one Hope I profess to have, I find more often a selfish, self-supporting, wandering, doubter calling out in disparate late moment need.

“It is nearly killing me! Help me. . . if you can.”

Painful divorce. Senseless death. Mind-numbing loss. 1-2-3! Deploy airbag! Jesus be near, NOW!

Please do not misunderstand what I am saying and bear with me as I progress through my own internal logic diagram towards a coherent statement. I think it quite obvious that Christ and his Holy Spirit are those on whom we are supposed to call in time of disturbance or unrest. This, I think, even my most diametrically opposed comrades would agree on. None the less, it is foundation which must be poured so that no one can confuse what is being stated as something other than what it is. That being a person who values a side of cognitive coherence with his meal of spiritual submission while working out his salvation with a very localized sense of fear and trembling.

It is within this context of working out my end of this salvation process that I find myself challenged and sadly lacking. Please again, do not purpose to me various flaws in my soteriology. Simply stated there are things we’re responsible for in the process of becoming more like Christ and those are the stairs of which I am stumbling up and down in this post. In Christ in his place of prayer in a garden historical moments before his salvation act was put into play, I see the model of a human life so otherworldly from the one I am able to approach. Because He was and is God he was fully aware, not merely of his pending physical torture, but also of coming face to face with being made sin for an entire history of people living and yet to come. From this he was not able to escape his human emotion as exhibited by his prayer for God to potentially intervene. But in the next, in my imagining, excruciating, exhaled, exhausted statement he offers the submission that I find so lacking in my own life.

“Father, not mine, but your will be done.”

And from there all of history is different, regardless of your understanding of the historical value of the synoptic gospels. At some point Jesus, fully God, gave himself to his Lord and Father. Willfully, though not without a recognizable humanity that questions even the most loving father. At various times in my life, profession of faith and creed have been self serving and passionately fear based responses to distasteful circumstance. But a question arises in my soul in these moments. Where does my human hard work and desire to get the job done while relying on no human assistance infiltrate my spiritual humility to acknowledge basic existence, Christian existence, is only but a gift hinging on the next God given breath? No intent is here being offered to spiritualize the basic things like getting out of bed and taking a shower or shifting in a seat while watching the 6 pm news. Interestingly though, when those precious human faculties are take from us by disease, accident, or age we suddenly crawl humbly to a merciful God begging his hand to make sacred those abilities that were wholly our own but a few days, weeks, or months ago. In a humorous and not intentionally offensive mental metaphor, I picture myself driving in a car nearly externally wall papered with Christianese bumper stickers, maybe even a God is my co-pilot somewhere on the rear. Sticky note Bible verses are at every eye level on the interior and are completed with a ‘Smile! Jesus Loves You!” air freshener on the mirror. But never is Jesus consulted before or after every voyage in that car. I travel on and on in all directions. Is God in the seat next to me? And Jesus surely loves me, but what of me towards Him? Let me not pretend I feel for His nearness as I operate that vehicle and certainly not on a sunny day. But when the accident happens, without fail I call out, “Help me, if you can.” Hoping for the Jesus air bag deployment. Hoping.

Of course as the vehicle spins slowly in freeze frame I do not expect that God desires us to offer the blood tinged sweat of Jesus as we cry out “not mine, but your will be done!” But I do think that He might like more than the occasional deductible payment in acknowledgement of the debt we owe. Instead He gets the auto pay, direct deposit version from us for weeks and months and years between incidents with maybe a few verse-a-day recitations and Passion Live album sing alongs while commuting so we do not have to change our life to model His. A life that, when made flesh and lived among us, was not a marketable “counter culture” figure head nor a slogan engineering entity, but instead was the One and Only full of unfailing love and faithfulness which led Him to bare the scorn of our sin and close the divide between us and our heavenly Father. And all to often I realize how separate I allow myself to get from that Love and Faithfulness which shines in the darkness that masquerades itself as light when life is going by so smoothly.

Obviously these thoughts are tied to the first chapter of the Gospel of John. In that text there is a statement about darkness that I miss often when I breeze through that early text before the testimony of the Baptist in regard to our Savior. The later portion of verse five says, “..and the darkness can never extinguish it.” But my NASB has a footnote that reads, “and the darkness has not understood it.” That sounds more familiar to my experience. Because my life exists in a darkened world its all too easy to misunderstand the Light, misunderstand my Savior, my salvation. Salvation is always salvation. Not just on days where the water is deep and the wind is strong. Not just on days when ease of life is mistook for self sufficient light.

Reading through an old book that I was to have consumed as a freshman in college ten years ago this fall, I found John Fischer and his writing in Fearless Faith. His question resonates within this internal conversation.

How much does my faith in Christ have to do with what I actually put my faith in? How connected to the things of this world do I remain place of willful and prayerful reliance on Christ and Him crucified, dead three days, and risen again? How much of my existence is based on my grasp of who I am in this world verses who I am in the eyes of my Savior? I am in deed far short of the model set by our Lord and no one I have ever met who has truly set out on that goal has ever felt differently. To pursue Him is only to find out daily more and more how Great he is and how small I am. None the less there is more than the way I have known the true Light that is the Life for man.

Being deeply wounded or afflicted in our day to day existence is authentically painful. But often my fear is certainly greater than my faith and that is the greater pain now realized. I cannot really have immobilized faith. More truthfully that would be doubt realized. Jesus response to our recognizable friend in Mark 9 reveals the offense I feel guilty of when he tells the man, “What do you mean, if I can? Anything is possible if a man believes!”.

There is no certain answer that I can know about the journalism questions of life. The five W’s and an occasional H of our human challenges and struggles will crush and rebuild us over and over again and in that I have no doubt. Who, what, when, where, why and how are never so easily deciphered as the issues they cause. Inside of these questions however is the life we are living. No one completely ever knows except God himself. Questions like the ones connected to an old man’s suicide or a young girls sudden unexplained death will most likely go by our sphere of understanding no matter the examination process we put them through. People who operate much like myself will certainly lose sleep at various times in those foggy paths.

My roommate and HQBR comrade Sports Dave and I have often stated that theology is not so much written as much as it is lived. Everyone is living an orthodoxy regardless of their awareness to that. As I experience more of the devastating quandaries this human life creates, it has become more and more of my desire to live a theology of belief. That is so simple and really silly and my seminary friends will all quickly lunge forward with their far more polished or at least examined views. There are choices we all make and within my life there is a thirst to be something closer to consistent. Something closer to not just a lonely everyday sameness, but a regular functioning believer despite circumstance. Choosing to believe will create a new frame to my everyday life because I will always be living what I believe whether I acknowledge that or not. Pairing down those beliefs is a never ending task that is a part of that working out my salvation that I spoke of earlier. Trembling and fear need not be regarding my situation, but instead in awareness of a great and mighty God who did for me what I profess to believe he did. Forward progress is difficult to discern in something as challenging this, but it is my hope that the orthodoxy I live is not made up of trite scripture quotation but the feel of my Savior speaking his words to me through the truth that was hidden in my heart as I grew in Him through out my life. It is with an intellectual understanding being connected to my spiritual need that I pray the words of the father in Mark 9.

“Lord, I believe, forgive my unbelief.” For with that unbelief lessened, it might be that my Lord is more of a savior and less of personal flotation device.