“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
For When Everything is Falling Apart
Christmas season can be an incredibly tough time for many. In the midst of a season of joy, people’s lives often do not tangibly change. The isolated remain lonely and separated from humanity. The single parent still has to trudge through the monotony of their everyday life. Broken families are not magically healed because of the date on a calendar. Those suffering in the hospital are not given a 24-hour reprieve to resume their ideal life.
I spent much of 2023 listening to others, discerning their hearts to get to the root of what is going on underneath. For some, there was apathy: their lives were ‘good enough’ so despite what they knew they should do, there was no driving force to change. Others, indifference: they had given up the belief that God would do anything for the problems they were seeing around them, and pursued other avenues. A different group were simply in the act of surviving: they lost their jobs, their roof was leaking, they didn’t know where they were going to get food to put on the table and feed their children.
As someone who grew up deeply invested in the Evangelical tradition, there is a children’s song that has been running around in my head the last few weeks:
Read your Bible, pray everyday, and you’ll grow, grow, grow.
Jesus told a parable about a shepherd leaving the 99 to find the one lost sheep. Traversing the mountainside, scouring the gulleys, and scaling the cliffs until that one sheep is lost. This is a tableau of a God who is relentless in the pursuit of those who have wandered away, and who invites all back into the fold. He does not wait for us to do the right things, but finds us in our most vulnerable moments to bring us back.
Perhaps we’ve gotten spiritual development all wrong. In our misguided attempts left those shipwrecked by life clinging to the boards of the ship, when God is waiting for them under the water. We’ve put our weight into the oars to keep them rowing towards the shore against the waves of the Almighty, and left others exhausted and burned out. It might take facing the Leviathan of our lives to polish the true character lurking underneath the stubborn patina of our hearts, and bring us to a place where we’re willing to walk into Nineveh.
Walking On The Road
Luke 24 contains a story of disciples, likely a man and a woman, walking down the road to a small village called Emmaus. They had heard that the tomb which had swallowed Jesus’ body had spit him out, but weren’t sure what to make of it. Spiritually curious, but deeply uncertain, they walked and talked together when an unknown man joined them and asked them about their discussion.
The disciples were taken aback that this newcomer was unaware of the incredulous, transpired events in Jerusalem over the past few days. Yet this man played dumb, and asked them to explain what had happened. The disciples unpacked for this man the prophetic nature of Jesus, the arrest, crucifixion, and potential resurrection. Their voices were laced with hope, grief, anguish, and confusion.
Little did they know, because their eyes were closed, that the man was Jesus Himself. He rebuked these men, without opening their eyes, and began to unpack the Scriptures for them. These two, who had likely followed Jesus for years, were reading the life and death of Jesus through the wrong eyes.
They wanted Jesus to crush the pagan conquerors. Yet Jesus had been crushed instead under their military might, succumbing to death. No doubt Jesus’ death on the cross was a moment of intense grief for all the disciples, but especially for those who viewed Jesus through this lens.
So Jesus laid out before them, as they took step after dusty step, the real story of Scripture. From the creation, through Abraham, down into Egypt, and back into the Promised Land. A story of a God who would leave the 99 to rescue the one, and through this precious people open a pathway for the entire world to be found.
They just couldn’t see it.
A Breaking of Bread
It wasn’t until that evening, when Jesus sat around a table with them and broke bread, giving it to them they they saw Jesus for who he really is. Eve had taken the fruit and given it to Adam, and their eyes were opened. Now Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them, and their eyes were also opened. The scales of millennia peeling of the eyes of their whole being to see their creator in a whole new light.
He disappeared.
Suddenly, every arduous step was recontextualized. They recognized a deep hope, a burning desire, in their souls when they talked to Jesus. The grief and anguish of a prophet murdered shed like an old skin, and replaced with an immutable and uncrushable hope for what God was doing in the world around them.
They discovered the possibility of a God who loved them.
The Year Ahead
Perhaps our journey is not to encourage others to do more. Instead to open our hearts, listen to where others are, ask great questions (“What are you two discussing?” v17, “What things?” v19), and to unpack the Scriptures with others. There is plenty of brokenness, shame, despair, and hopelessness to go around in our world today. It is into that story that the perspective of Jesus transforms our worldview.
The year ahead, for me, is one of boldness and hope. To be bold in the questions that I ask, bold in the hope that I sow, and hopeful to see the King rescue sheep that others would write off.
My prayer for you is that, like this couple on the road to Emmaus, you encounter the Living God, and have your world transformed. Once He opens your eyes, the hope spills out of us into the world around us, where we can proclaim, “It is true! The Lord has risen!”