The sheer bloodiness of the past 2,000 years of history is enough to cause me to doubt the victory of the cross sometimes. Like last night, when I was reading a handout from my daughter’s Advanced Placement Western Civilization class— poetry by Russian Osip Mandelstam.
Executed in 1935 by Stalin, Mandelstam wrote beautifully gripping, glittering and grotesque poems about the stench of death and the numbing anonymity of Stalin’s mass exterminations.
My mind can’t deal with such horror. To reduce it to spiritual propositions about sin and Satan and the Fall and hope of the afterlife fractures my sanity even further and makes God a caricature or a monster instead of the author and sustainer of life who sacrificed himself to exhaust such evil.
Less than 40 years after Jesus died and rose, Jerusalem lay in ruins following a brutal siege involving unimaginable suffering and carnage. And every century since has been marked by a mind-dulling tally of brothers and fathers and nephews and sons who marched off to fight and die, and by obscene numbers of collateral victims among women and children and elders and the infirm.
Yet, I can no more come to the point of unbelief than I can stop breathing. And I can accept the tension doubt brings. Doubt, like Paul’s thorn in the flesh, reminds me that my relationship with God—Father Son and Spirit—is not secure because of my unwavering belief, but in my willingness to trust even when I doubt.
I trust the Persons, and in Jesus’ example of emptying himself of every entitlement. And certainty is one of those entitlements I’ve given up in order to embrace trust.
For those of you who want to comment and tell me how to stop doubting, don’t bother. I’ve been down that road before. Certainty reduces faith to a loveless and self-aggrandizing proof and draws boundaries in places Jesus never would. And it divorces heaven from earth and severs spirit from body and cheapens those millions of lives whose blood irrigates the deserts of history.
I trust there was victory at the cross. I place my hope in the resurrection even though I’m not certain we understand the commission Jesus gave us, or if we truly surrender to the Spirit he gave us.
And what of those millions of nameless, ordinary people who died at the hands of evildoers over the past 2,000 years as if to mock the victory of the cross? I entrust them to the God I love, and trust that my ordinary life–modeling Jesus who emptied himself, and inviting others to do the same–is sufficient.
Posted on April 9th, 2008 by Kathy
Filed under: Spiritual Disciplines, Living by Faith
You have expressed so beautifully and powerfully something I deeply believe to be true. I am about as for from an apologist as you can get. I cannot powerfully defend what I believe and why, because I hear the questions people ask and they often make sense to me, but, like you, I can no more choose unbelief than I can stop breathing. I appreciate how you put into words the “cost” of certainty that is often not counted when we try to insist upon it.
Kathy - awesome stuff. thanks.
Yes, ‘awesome’. Stunning. Thank you.
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Kathy, this and your latest post really hit it for me. I have struggled more in the past two years than I have in all the years before that–in terms of my relationship with God. And lately, I think it’s really been about what you mentioned: the entitlement of certainty. I know I’ve been circling that concept in my mind, but your post solidified it. Thank you for being honest. It brought light to some of the still dim places of my heart.