WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4
Psalm 22:27 All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.
For something like a 25-year period in my life, although I was raised as a young lad in a Presbyterian church, I was indifferent to religion and was a member of no congregation. Yet I often felt a compulsion in those years to attend Good Friday services. For an 11 year stretch, I worked in downtown Detroit, and it was an easy walk to Fort Street Church; I would drop in on the Tre Ore services there. Such a visit might be my only religious participation of any kind for a whole year.
I have never really questioned the miracles wrought by Jesus, and as to the culmination of the Gospel story, the resurrection, it has seemed to me a logical and predictable sequel to the crucifixion and to the miracles God was working during Jesus’ life on earth. But it is the three hours on the cross to which my thoughts often return. Just imagine: a God so loving and concerned with us humans that he would actually suffer his Son to be persecuted and put to an agonizing death on the cross. For the three hours on Good Friday, God and man suffer together. What other god in human history could do that?
One of my favorite figures in all of literature is Piscine Patel in Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Young Pi begins life in India as a dedicated Hindu, though his parents are not at all religious. But soon Pi meets a Catholic priest, and then a devout Muslim, and thereafter he avidly pursues being all three at once: a Christian, a Muslim and a Hindu. In his enthusiastic search for God, it doesn’t bother Pi that he has to make leaps of faith. The important thing is that he wants to believe.
Let me conclude this Lenten message with what Pi has to say about doubts – the doubts that we all experience:
“I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
Stanford Evans
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