The dwelling place of redemption

Jesus didn’t die to fix something about the laws of his country, or the collective consciousness of his country or conventional attitudes. He didn’t die to adjust social mores or social stigmas or historical imbalances. He died to save individual souls. He died to bring the dead back to life. He died to free people from the individual burdens of their own sin.

Because that is where suffering lives, that is sickness lives, that is where power lives (for good or evil), that is where life springs forth, that is where goodness and beauty live. This shift toward the significance and primacy of the individual, in responsibility, in sovereignty, is terribly important. People live short, often insignificant, limited, little lives. And the world is vast. The world of human society is vast. Your part in it arises and passes in the blink of an eye. How can you claim that that is where any significance dwells, that the world of meaning begins and ends with the expression of your little life?

I think the answer is, you can’t. Unless you believe that some transcendent value has been placed upon individual human lives, that there is some preciousness to them, endowed in them by an ultimate purpose of which they are a beloved part. Unless they bear the image of something transcendently holy and significant. Unless something has made the smallest stories as sacred and eternal as the vastness of time and space.

Jesus did not come to empower anyone. Power is neither good nor evil, but is simply a measure of how strongly either nature can be expressed. Deliberately seeking of power, even for the good but most especially for yourself, has a corrosive effect on the human heart. The best causes have been corrupted and brought down by their desire to secure power for their noble ends. Power adds reach and force behind human action and human instinct. And the easiest instincts, those quickest to join you, are anger, fear, jealousy, resentment, and pride. Seeking and venereting an accelerant will favor those feelings that are quickest and most urgent and easy to sieze upon and rely upon.

Jesus came to serve. To give himself up. To draw close with others. To spend time with them and talk with them and eat with them and teach them. He was the most worthy to rule all, but chose instead to serve all. He did not consider it beneath him. There is something hidden there in his example. A warning that we may not have the right idea of what we need or how we should fix the world. That maybe it is ourselves that need fixing. That maybe power lives best inside service and love, in the hands of God, not in our hands.

It’s tricky figuring out what the message of Jesus means in our world today. Jesus taught us the pathology of our own worldly power and natures, and he also taught us the pathology of our righteousness. He showed us how our best efforts to serve the good could be all for nothing and even make the problem worse. So what is the pathology of the world today? What is its sickness? And what does it mean to seek Jesus as its cure?