DEAR CHARITY

Part 9

Dear Charity,

Holy holly and ivy, Batman!  I cannot tell you how much I adored the picture that you included with your last email of your Christmas tree already up and decorated!  There is no longer a single shred of doubt — you and I are cookies made from the same batch of dough!  I’ve attached a picture of my tree and living room for your Christmas enjoying pleasure.

What you said in the caption of your picture was totally it.  Halloween and Thanksgiving could just fall off the calendar as far as I’m concerned.  Once September hits and the temperature starts to drop, I’m all about Christmas, baby.  My brother used to razz me to no end about how decorating for Christmas too soon takes the specialness out of it and I wasn’t letting all the holidays have their moment of glory.  And yeah, I used to feel that way to a certain degree.  It would be major eye-rolling time when I saw Christmas decorations in stores at the beginning of October (I think the earliest I ever saw was July, actually).  But the older I get, the more Halloween just kinda makes me sick to my stomach and I’ve finally been able to admit that Thanksgiving has always been nothing more than an exercise in how much my family doesn’t give a flying rat’s butt about me.  So now I say, kindly refer to the above statement about the holidays of October and November.  I know there are scads of people out there who feel about Halloween and Thanksgiving the way I do about Christmas and vice-versa, and you know, more power to ‘em.  Just give me my Christmas tree on the first of November and I’m jolly good.

As I’m sitting here typing this out, I’m realizing that it’s a wee bit odd, actually, that I am so keen on Christmas.  It’s not like that holiday was much better than Thanksgiving in terms of family fuzzies.  I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been able to carve out a meaning for Christmas that feels all my own instead of having anything to do with them.  That never seemed possible with Thanksgiving.

I guess one of the more off the beaten path things I’ve done to remove myself from the Christmas I grew up with is to read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ last Passover, His crucifixion, and His resurrection at Christmas instead of reading the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke every year.  Christmas is about hope in so many ways for me, so reading about Jesus’ agony and ultimate vindication reminds me where my true hope lies, you know?  Most of my friends think I’m a few Crayolas short of a box (if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard, “That’s what we have Easter for!” I could buy Christmas gifts for the entire North American continent...).  I think you’ll get me, though.

By the way, I promise you that I didn’t plan to be finishing up Mark’s Gospel right as we’re heading into the holiday season, but isn’t it cool how that worked out?  [Insert smiley face emoji with shades!]

Mark 13 in some ways doesn’t seem to fit with all the other things that are going on right then.  But something that always seemed to get overlooked in all the sermons and teachings I heard growing up was the timing of what Jesus said in this chapter (as well as Matthew 24-25 and Luke 21).  Jesus was in Jerusalem, He knew that His ugly death was right around the corner, and yet instead of focusing only on Himself and trying to find comfort, it was important to Him that His disciples be warned about what was coming for them.  God was about to rain down judgement on all sin in the form of Jesus’ crucifixion, but that didn’t mean that Israel was going to be able to escape the judgement of God that they’d been storing up for themselves.  And while it may not seem like there’s much hope to be found in what He told His disciples, every single word is actually dripping with hope because if He hadn’t warned them, they might not have known to flee and then the world would be a very different place.

It astounds me that Jesus could be thinking about that right before His own torment and death.  I mean, it really gives new meaning in every direction to David’s words about not fearing evil when walking through the valley of the shadow of death because God’s rod and staff would provide comfort.  Neither of those things seem very hopeful or comforting, but even in the darkest of nights, even through the greatest of agonies, God is leading and guiding.

I often wonder if Jesus thought of Psalm 23 in the hours leading up to His crucifixion.  There’s no doubt that He knew the broad picture in terms of what was about to go down, but I can’t say for certain that He knew every detail of exactly how things would play out.  I mean, I know He was God but I truly do not think there’s any biblical evidence for believing that God gave Him a blow by blow walkthrough so He would know what to do and how to react.  That would be more like an actor getting a script so he could rehearse and make sure his reactions were as genuine as possible.  Gonna go out on a limb here and say that’s NOT what God did for Jesus.

Think about it for just a minute.  This is what Jesus’ closest friends did:

* during their rabbi and friend’s greatest hour of need, they got into a ridiculously petty squabble about who was king of the hill

* a guy who had been with Him 24/7 for around three years decided it would be totally rad to betray someone he may have actually thought of as a good friend at some point

* three big, strapping fishermen couldn’t find it in themselves to stay awake with Him while He endured some of the most horrific emotional pain ever to crash onto a human being’s head

* when push came to lots and lots of shoving and ear lopping, every single one of them bailed in breathtaking self-preservation (not that I’m pointing the finger, mind you — I don’t doubt what my reaction would have been…)

And we haven’t even gotten to the crucifixion yet!  That brought on a whole new onslaught of special misery.

* being delivered by His own people to some of the most bloodthirsty military men the world has ever known

* being stripped naked and mercilessly mocked by said military men

* being completely and totally misunderstood even while dying an excruciatingly painful death by people who really should have known what He was saying

* being verbally abused (again, while dying an excruciatingly painful death) by passers-by and the other victims of Roman “justice”

Seriously, how could one man bear all that?!?  Like you said in your email, there is so much drama and human experience in these last few chapters of Mark.  The emotions and feelings swirling around and inside Jesus must have been absolutely soul-crushing.  It’s no wonder at all that they say His heart actually burst.  The weight, the enormity of His emotion is almost incomprehensible to me.

Then we come to Mark 16.

A whole lot has been written and postulated about Mark 16 and its multiple endings (think Peter Jackson’s Return of the King). Without the additional endings, though, Mark actually ends on a pretty powerful note.  I don’t know how you felt when you read it, but every time I stop at verse 8, it leaves me with that feeling of “to be continued” where you know there has to be more, and that something more is going to be absolutely earth-shattering and totally life-altering.

Maybe Mark intended to continue and wasn’t able to.  Or maybe he was  intentionally cryptic so that the reader would have to do more looking into things on their own and discover the truth of the resurrection for themselves.  Then some “helpful” scribe or copyist decided to fill in the blanks (multiple times) and in a way, diminished the power and potential of what Mark wrote, in my humble opinion.

I mean, think about it.  What if Charles Dickens had ended A Christmas Carol with Scrooge weeping inconsolably after seeing his name on the tombstone?  That’s it.  The End.  I don’t know about you, but I’d pretty much be tearing the internet apart trying to find out if he’d written anything else about our dear old Scroogey McGrumpypants.  Was he crying because he felt sorry for himself?  Was he crying because he realized what a toadstool he’d been?  Was he crying because maybe — just maybe — his heart had found room for repentance?  Inquiring minds want to know!

That’s where Mark leaves me.  If I had been alive in the first century and somehow had the privilege of having Mark’s Gospel read to me, when we got to the end and the reader stopped, I like to think I would’ve calmly and gently suggested that maybe there were a few sheets of parchment missing.  Upon being told that there was no more, I would probably have lost all my beans and been like, “What?!?  What kind of an ending is that?!?  Who wrote this thing?!?  Where is he?  Where are these women?  How could you keep something this titanic to yourself?!?”

Except, of course, we know that the women didn’t keep what happened to themselves, not for long, anyway.  But until the other Gospels were written, it’s likely that a good number of people didn’t know that.  And they would have had to ask around, do some digging.  Find out if the truly outlandish tale of a man coming back from the dead on His own was in any way true.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it?  It’s not just that Jesus came back to life.  Israel had seen incidents of people being brought back to life.  Think Elijah and Elisha both raising only sons of the widow of Zarepheth and the Shunamite woman respectively.  Jesus raised the young daughter of Jairus as well as raising His friend, Lazarus.  In each case, there was a human through whom God worked, including Jesus.  But it was entirely different with Jesus.  The Bible says that God Himself raised Jesus (see Acts 2:24, 32; Acts 4:10; Acts 13:13, 15, 26, 33-34, 37) and He didn’t do it through anyone else.

And that’s super important because it has to do with Jesus being vindicated by God, by which you know I mean that He declared in no uncertain terms that Jesus was telling the truth all along about being who He said He was.  Just like God audibly told everyone how much He loved Jesus and how pleased He was with Him, just like any proud dad would do (see Matthew 3:17; Matthew 17:5; Mark 1:11; Mark 9:7; Luke 3:22; Luke 9:35; 2 Peter 1:17), God made sure the world knew that His Son was no liar or deceiver by not only breathing life back into Him but giving Him a body that was no longer capable of being corrupted by disease, decay, and death.  Every other person who had been given life after death died again, but not Jesus.  And remember what Paul said, also — if all Jesus had done was died a hideous death, that would’ve been it for us.  Game over.  No hope.  No future.  Just lots and lots of death.  But when God resurrected Jesus, He was basically saying, “NOW the Kingdom has indeed come in its full glory and everything about everything has changed forever because Jesus!”

I guess that’s what keeps me coming back to the chapters in the Gospels about Jesus’ death and resurrection, especially at Christmas.  As beautiful as nativity scenes are, it’s way too easy for me to get wrapped up in the almost manufactured serenity of them and forget that there was a whole lot of cruelty and humiliation and suffering that had to happen before that manger could mean a single thing.

That sorta brings me back round to Job.  His is definitely not a story Christians sit around the fireplace and tell at Christmas.  But maybe it should be.  Because what is hope worth if all it’s built on is the glow of that peaceful, easy feeling that people try to capture and put in an impregnable cage at Christmas?

It seems to me that before you can really understand what hope is, you have to find yourself without it.  And no matter what anyone tries to tell you, this is not a “God and me can handle anything” proposition.  You know that probably better than I do, really.  We absolutely MUST have someone willing to walk with us every step of the way, and we need to hear the stories of those who have been down that road.  Whose story is better to start with than Job’s?  It may be enigmatic and downright difficult to understand at times, but I can’t think of anyone better to help me see that hope is not some cheap word that only gets trotted out by greeting card companies during the holidays.

Charity, my dear friend and sister, I know this is the close of our journey through Job and Mark, but it’s most definitely not the end of our journey together!  You have helped me see God in ways you may not even realize just by sharing so much of your struggle with me.  It has been my honor and my privilege to hold your trust and I guard each and every word of yours with vigilance and respect.  I know you still have so, so, very much to work through and navigate as you keep pushing towards the Light of God, and I want to assure you one more time that I am here with you and for you.  We are walking the same road.  Together.  Your courage and determination and perseverance are a testament to your strength and I couldn’t be more proud to call anyone my friend and sister in Messiah.

Until the day when God makes all things new and dries every tear,

Beth