To be a man is to be in the whirlwind of others who want to control you, and who you think you need to control. Yet, when we try to control others, we end up banishing love. Compulsion is just a way we try to answer our need for safety in a world that seems cruel and distance. The irony is that when we try to control, we increase distance and make the world appear more hostile to us, making us to try to gain control more over it.
The only way we can control more of it is to shrink the world to a manageable size. So we create gated communities. We build border walls. We wall off others and we close them off. The end game of such a process is being alone in the hell of our own making. For we can never control the world. Death will take us. So we will waste our lives searching for security in a world that can never be secure. When we enter the whirlwind of others, we find that we are not in control. We will find suffering as people will hurt us, betray us, and abandon us. We will also face the truth of how we hurt, betray and abandon others in our lives. Yet, we want to be in the space of others, but fear it. So why enter this space and open up to others? We know we will be hurt. For only in this space can we hope to love and be loved.
When God became man in Christ Jesus, God entered into the whirlwind of human beings. The cross became inevitable in the process of reconciliation. Good Friday was our need to control Christ’s love for us. The cross event, with the abandonment of God by his disciples, by the injustice of our political institutions that gazed upon innocence and still killed for power, and the mocking and the taunting of Jesus, shows the darkness of the human soul. We killed God out of our need for safety, control and power. We reject love because we cannot trust it and this is the whole of the human condition. We need love and reject it out of wanting to be the little gods of our lives. This makes o our lives a hell. So, what are we to do after we kill God to take the mantle ourselves?
Easter morning the truth reveals our lies. We think we can kill God and reject love, but love returns offering us a pierced palm. God returns and still knows us by name. Our gated community, our border walls, our need for safety have been revealed as the lie they are. We are then left a choice, pick love and pick up our own cross or continue in the hell of our own life. God in Deuteronomy 30:19, says, “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.“
Choose life!
