Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, 1518
I'm not sure what it is about this summer--whether it's an all-time high in public awareness due to the 24-hour news cycle, or whether the last 8 to 12 weeks have been objectively more terrible than average for the citizens of planet earth--but this summer is starting to remind me of the title of one of my favorite albums by Modest Mouse: "Good News for People Who Love Bad News."
Ebola. War in Israel/Gaza, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. Unaccompanied minor refugees. Unrest in Missouri, and the ever-present demon of institutional racism. And to top it off, a U.S. legislature that has pretty much proven itself incapable of legislating.
Considering that very few of our own personal lives are the proverbial "bed of roses" to begin with, and that there are real, measurable effects on our brains from being exposed to news like this--especially if it's sensationalized, as so much news today is--it would seem a natural reaction for Christians to view their faith as a kind of "escape." To sing songs like, "I'll Fly Away", to focus on "positive thinking", to just praise God, keep smiling through it, and know that our present sufferings are not forever. Maybe things are bad here on earth, but my, oh my, won't Heaven be great?
Well...yes, it will, but there's more to it than that. Especially at times when things seem really bad, we get tempted by what Martin Luther called the "theology of glory." The idea that God is only really visible in strength, in power, in positive experiences, in good vibes, in the warm-fuzziness of life. The idea that faithfulness to God comes hand in hand with happiness and success, and that if you don't have one or both of those things, all the time, then there's something wrong with your faith.
Luther believed the opposite. He wrote, "He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering." If we are unwilling to look into the darkness in our lives and in our world, then we will never find the Savior who entered into that darkness for us. If we are unwilling to admit that suffering exists, then we can not claim that Jesus suffered for us. Without looking at the cross of Christ, any suffering, injustice, sin, and death in our lives becomes a plague, which we must escape at all costs to avoid infection. But looking directly at the cross, we see the face of God hidden in the face of an executed criminal, being tortured to death by a reigning Empire--and once we see God's face there, we realize that there is no darkness into which God can not go, and has not gone.
Without the cross, we dare not face reality. If it's all up to us to fix this world, then it's most certainly time to "fly away". Turn off the TV, unplug the computer, power down your phone, and run off into the woods somewhere, hoping the world won't catch up.
But if, on the cross, we can indeed see a Savior--the one who accepts every moment of our lives, no matter how awful, into his own body and fills it with God's forgiving presence--then we can stare down anything else in this life, knowing that God is there, too.
This does not make us as Christians responsible for staring down every last dark hole, much less crawling into it and personally rescuing all those inside. We aren't obliged to be tied to our TV's, computers and phones, having the latest info on every emerging crisis and taking the next plane to head it off. In fact, just the opposite. A theologian of the cross knows that the final word in the face of sin and death was spoken from the cross: "It is finished." Therefore, we bear in our hearts the Good News to all who suffer, that Christ suffers with us, and that with death comes resurrection. We need not be saviors, because the world has only one of those, and he did the "saving" 2,000 years ago.
A theologian of the cross is a person with no need to "escape" this world, nor to be perpetually martyred for it: a person set free to do what she can to love her neighbor as herself, while trusting her entire life to the One who first loved us.
