Good Men or God's Sons?

I have been up nights about what this Jesus the son of God said, and what we’ve gotten ourselves into.

There are people who would put Him away by having Him be another itinerant revolutionary, one of many other Jewish preachers, only another nice man with a message of peace and love. But this shoe has never fit him. If He was in fact only a man—if He was not the son of God—He was not a nice man. If He was not what He said He was and cannot do what He said He could, there remains only one fate for Him, that of a cheat and a fraud. What good man, what friend of sinners, would take our deepest fears and hopes and mess with us like this? If He wasn’t the son of God, he was instead the father of lies, a brother to small-time messiahs such as David Koresh or, closer to home, our scissors-snapping Sam Mullet.

So we’re staking our lives on him. And claiming his claims, believing those things He said to hold true. And when we call ourselves His, we bring upon ourselves this same potential indictment—we are either people with hearts made new in ways this old world has never seen, or we will fall away into the oblivion of the deluded.

He said He would make all things new. That we could get up with hope, breakfast with joy, and step out the door in wonder. That His mercy would be new every morning, and every day would be good.

He said He would be enough for us. If we had Him, we wouldn’t need fat profit statements, bucks on the walls, lawns without dandelions, converts in the pews.

He said He would vanquish death. As our lives on earth run out, we’d reach forward with anticipation.

He said He would loose all our chains. Those things we know should not be yet think we cannot help, those things men do in the dark, and those things women carry in their hearts—all would fall away under His touch.

He said He would give us love—for those people we maneuver to avoid at church, for people who loot and riot, for leaders who are fools, for spouses and children who show us up for what we really are.

He said he could give beauty for ashes—when our lives are wrecked by our own wrongs or by the sins of others, when relationships lay in ruins and His bride’s white dress is smudged by the devil’s dirty hands.

He said our sins could be forgiven. When we cannot sleep, when we do what we do to ourselves because of what we’ve done—He said he could take it all away and give us rest.

He said He would be in us and never leave us. Sunday morning or Friday night, with people or alone, recognized or unnoticed, He could make it all the same by being with us.

The fate I fear most for me and mine is not apostacy. Not worldliness or deception or the decadence of the Gottlos. I fear the fate of living happy lives jingling with the trappings and bling of pop-Anabaptism, living our retrofitted sub-culture with its built-in rote servility to the seven ordinances and the eight articles, and having as our only strength the comfort culture of being loving only to our friends, and only Republican in our morality. Only followers of Him on our bumper stickers and Bible covers.

And being as oblivious as drunken fools to the raw and transformative habitation of the Son of God.