My God, my God, Why hast Thou forsaken me? Mark
15:34
And so the Author of Life
finds his incomprehensible death on a cross hewn of hate. An irrational,
unjust, and apparently unexplained end to a life that was meant to show The
Way. The Way It Was Supposed To Be. How can it make sense, that a Father-God
who is defined by love—a God whose character actually gives us our definition
of love—would allow his Son to die apparently hopeless and alone? How can such
an event, there, hanging between Heaven and Earth, be pronounced as descriptor
of a love relationship, enacted by the author of love and relationships
Himself?
Perhaps
the cross was a meeting place. A heaving moment between two worlds: one bound
by the dimensions of time and place, yet riven through with the Other World, the
one filled with the shining truth of eternity, the Dimensionless Truth of
meaning. The events surrounding that rugged cross was the advancing of a
Kingdom.
We
have all had these crystalline events in our lives from which it appears we glimpse
the intersect of these two realities—the reality of the life we live by sight,
and the life we live according to things unseen. It is the intersection of this
temporal and that eternal, the present finite and the more present infinite—it
is at this intersection wherein lies the possibility of redemption.
“Aaargh!”
It
was one of the most fearful noises I had ever heard in my thirty-two years. By
that time of my life, I had had many experiences of perilous adventures in mountains,
caves, and rivers; so fording the icy, full-banked Colorado River in late
February on a backpacking trip in the Canyonlands with my brother Scott was, in
and of itself, not a cause for trepidation. More often than not, we sought “the
unexplored” and the “officially not-recommended.” Nor was I new to the idea
that Scott was pushing some envelope of courage in the face of
uncertainty—adrenaline-rush was kinda the idea anyway. Instead, it was probably
the combinations of these factors and the uncharacteristic display of pathos
from a brother who always held the most profound poise in the umbrage of direst
disaster. What shook me is that Scott really recognized that there was a good
chance he was about to die.
And
there was nothing I could do but watch.
Our
week-long trip into the Canyonlands saw us twice ford the Colorado River. The
speed, size, and frigid temperature of the water required that we swim the
river without packs, while we trailed a line tied around our ankle with which
to float the packs across after our traverse. Though the strongly-currented ford
was rapid-free, immediately downriver lay a bouldered decline that ensured
destruction to whomever the current caught. Scott had become disoriented in his
crossing, and had spent much of his life-dependent energy and time swimming
against the current rather than across it. I watched his disorientation unfold
before me, with my violent screaming drowned by the rushing river that sought
to now kill my brother. He had stopped for a moment to check his progress,
realized his error, and had yelled his hopelessness to the indifferent river.
And
his little brother watched, frozen in horror from the boulder and log-strewn
river bank.
I
stood, helpless, a spectator to my brother’s death. My fear was deep because my
stoic brother’s cry showed he had given up, the final punctuation after all
solutions were explored and found wanting. The yell meant a certain and
inexorable end. Utter despair; all hope had been forsaken.
This
morning, in Tucson, I heard my brother sobbing.
It
was not the sound that took me back to the banks of the Colorado; it was what
the sound meant. It meant that an end—that same, forsaken hopelessness had been
reached; that an inescapable current, relentless and sure, was pulling Scott to
a certain destruction onto ragged rocks of an isolate despairing.
And
from where I stood on the other side of our house’s entryway, there was nothing
that I could do.
We
both had watched a sleepy man that we did not know indifferently roll our dad’s
wasted corpse past us, ease it over the street curbing, and mechanically secure
his terrible cargo into a white paneled van parked in the street. The van, with
its indistinguishable lettering, wandered down 4th Street in the heat-rattled
night. Somewhere a volley of sirens began their wails across town. The van
paused at Green Hills Drive, turned left, its headlights poking a way through a
somehow hazy darkness, and was gone.
And
then the sound from my brother.
And
so I watched from where I stood, unable to throw a lifeline or physically bridge
the raging, emotional torrent. Such is the way of my brother’s deep and
powerful love.
Such
a fierce love that wrenches, tumbles, and pulls.
Such
a fierce love.
Scott
and I have talked a lot about eternity in the past few weeks, and the closest
that we can get to understanding it is that maybe eternity is realized in the
moment—the nearest we can perceive of the Dimensionless is when it passes
through the singular strand of our linear existence of successive moments. And
so the eternal gives its quality of potential to every moment in which we allow
it to bear. It’s in the “now.” The Greek word kairos is this “now”ness with the added idea of immanence, almost a
burgeoning moment that turns a single point of time into the exponential of the
event. Kairos means timeliness, like
a perfect union of what is and what can potentially be. Kairos is the word Jesus uses to describe the Kingdom of God in
Mark, chapter 1. In the Kingdom, there is not only a single strand of a
timeline. There is, instead, a dozen, a hundred, a limitless number of lines of
dimension that pierce every moment, which defy that single point on the
timeline and allow us to live in the moment rather than merely witnessing it.
Maybe
this is how all things can be experienced in eternity. We may call this “time
travel”—like traveling along a different line of dimension in some cosmic Twilight
Zone; but more importantly in a Kingdom full of the King and His Decree, this
is how all things can be redeemed. It’s likely that the nature of eternity will
reflect the character of its Source and Author—the kingdom will reflect its
King: Redeemer. In eternity, the
once-confined will be unbound, rife with the inevitability of redemption. In
such places where the Kingdom intersects with the kingdom of this world, there
is even now allowed the opportunity for redemption.
It
is in these punctures of time where life as we know it can stop, and the Spirit
can speak to us, can change us, and give us the words and understanding to
minister redemption to us, and us-to-others. Here, still living in our limited
strand of time, we can glimpse into the burgeoning realm of eternity that
Christ called the Kingdom. It is kairos, and we can see how we are made to love
in the same manner that He loves. It is an invasion, most militant, of a
Kingdom pushing its way by siege and thrust into another, into our world’s
lesser kingdom where despair and silence now sometime rule. That is the worst:
the silent response we receive to our cries of hopeless despairing.
Today,
in a predawn morning, I saw in an event which revealed to me the depths of a
Heavenly Father’s eternal love that exists in a perpetual domain that occurred
in three moments along an earthly timeline. In Tucson, Utah, and Golgotha
A love of father, brothers,
Son.
Such
fierce love.
Moments
all rife with the inevitability of redemption.
We
recognize the redemption reality of a pain and despair-strewn Son dying alone
on a cross. Such desolation was a set-up for redemption in the eternal realm
that would forever affect all that is time-bound.
And
there on a dark, Tucson summer morning, a passing corpse, a sobbing love-split
son:
It’s
another set-up for redemption.
