*The Road to the Cross*" is a series of thoughts for the Lent season. These convey some of my hopes, prayers, and even fears as we traverse this season and prepare for the celebration of Easter.
Nobody likes pain. That's the point. Nobody is supposed to. It's a mechanism to tell us that something is wrong.
Sometimes, the worst injuries don't hurt right away. I remember when I was about 10 years old, I fell off my bike and broke my arm. Of course, I didn't know I had broken my arm right away....until I looked at it. It was one of those surreal moments, especially when I realized I could seen my bone through my skin. Then the pain began...and boy did it hurt.
My parents took me to the hospital and they had to set the bone in place before they could place a cast on it. Although they tried to put me to sleep, I have an unusual tolerance for anesthetics and they were unable to put me to sleep while they set the bone. I don't remember the pain today, but my brother remembers the sound of my screams echoing through the hallways of the hospital.
Sometimes it's an important reminder to us that healing hurts. We don't recover from the scrapes and bruises and bumps of life effortlessly. Mending takes time and often hurts more than the injury itself.
A relationship may be broken in a heartbeat. Repair efforts may take years and often hearbreaking in the process. An abuse victim may be spared from her abuser, but the scars may take decades to heal. A death can rip a tear in the fabric of life, one which may never fully heal and the pain continues on as the survivors live through life.
And this brings us to Lent and this journey we are on in following after Christ and walking with Him to the cross. Healing us...and the healing the world can hurt a great deal more than we wish.
The more travel on the road with Christ, the more aware we are of hurt. Not just our wounds, but the wounds of the people all around us. They begin to become more and more evident and we begin to wonder why we never saw them before.
We begin to see the loneliness in the widow missing her husband, the pain in the couple trying to make their marriage work, the hollow look of the teenager trying to figure out where he fits in and the frustration of the child who wonders why her parents won't pay any attention to her. More and more we experience the alienation that haunts all around us we begin to see the deep fractures that exist in our world.
Lent reminds us of the great reason Christ came into the world. Paul tells us in Colossians that "For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross." (Col 1:19-20). Jesus came into this world to deal with our hurts, our wounds, our pains, our divisions and the things that alienate us from God and from each other.
We live in a world that is broken and we suffer the pain of that. Jesus has come to heal us and that we must deal with the pain of that healing.
During Lent, this becomes more evident to us during any other time of the year. We abstain from the temporal delights of our temptations, so that we may learn to delight in the eternal. By restraining our desires, we learn to control our tempers, and our souls and to bring them into obedience towards God. We may view it simply as "giving up chocolate" or "not eating meat," but it becomes a way to heal ourselves...one that can hurt very much.
But not only this, during this time, we commit ourselves to the larger mission of God and the Church: taking care of the world He has entrusted us with, feeding the poor and hungry, and working towards social justice, because this is the work of the Cross, just as much as it was to save our souls.
If the Christian, or the Church, does not learn to take up his cross and take up the work of healing, has not learned anything during this journey towards the cross. The Gospel was never just between a 'sinner' and God....it has always been about creation and God. God's plan was not to save a few people and bring them to heaven, God was always concerned to heal creation. That is why God called the prophet and said, "I create new heavens and new earth and the former things shall not be remembered." (Isaiah 65:17)
But this process hurts....it costs something. It cost God His only Son. It costs us our lives. We need to get involved, to give up our comforts, our desires, and our prejudices. We must commit ourselves to the ending of racial injustice, to the end of poverty and hunger, to abuse against the week and the exclusion of the unwanted. We must be willing to sacrifice our status, our importance, our money, our time, at times our freedoms and for some, our very lives.
Healing hurts...this is what we learn....on the way to the cross.
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