The Death of Dreams

I know this isn't a Christmas meditation. Actually, I wrote it in my NIV Noteworthy Bible last spring, on Easter Sunday, and I ran across it this past Sunday, when our pastor was preaching from John 19. But this isn't an Easter meditation; it's about trusting God, now.

The death of Jesus was the final destruction of a dream, of many dreams: of Messianic deliverance from the brutal rule of Rome, of the presence and charisma of a mighty prophet. It was, as we can see now, two millenia hence, the birth of a new Dream, a dream that was inconceivable to those hopeless mourners in those first few bitter hours, those first two days.

Without the death of Jesus those old dreams, which had to die, couldn't be laid to rest. So he gave himself up to the brutality and treachery of his enemies. He was "obedient [to his Father's will] to the point of death." All hopes had to die -- hopes of rescue, of justice, of divine intervention -- in order for God's Plan to be set in motion.

Once Jesus was well and truly dead, once all those old dreams and hopes were abandoned, God's people were ready consider God's Better and Bigger Plan -- Jesus not just alive but resurrected to a new kind of bodily life. Jesus at work not just in first-century Palestine but God's Spirit at work throughout history all over the world. A people of God made up of not just of Jews but a people "from every tribe and every language" -- all of this inconceivable so long as the Rabbi Jesus was kept from the hands of his enemies, so long as he was treated justly and humanely.

The Suffering of Misunderstanding

Jesus calls us to serve Him by the way of obscurity and misunderstanding, and He has shown us what that kind of service looks like. On the day He died, He was the only one who understood what was actually happening.

The day He died His followers saw catastrophe, and His enemies saw triumph. All of them saw the end of something, they had no way of knowing it was really the beginning of something completely new in the world. On that day only He knew what His death really meant. Part of His suffering was His willingness to be ridiculed as a buffoon or pitied as a martyr.

It is this suffering Jesus who has called us to follow Him, to serve Him in this same way, with this same willingness to be misunderstood.

This kind of suffering is not easy. There is a kind of glory in suffering while people are cheering us on, but that is the privilege of the home team. Christians are not competing in a home game; we know we are in enemy-occupied territory.

Christ-followers must be willing to suffer, in addition to everything else, the embarrassment of being misunderstood. But we would not be the first Christians to be called fools.