Dear Caldwell,
Today is Holy Saturday, the second day of what the church calls the Tridium, the three day period from sunset on Maundy Thursday to sunset on Easter Sunday. Taken together as part of Holy Week, the commemorate the full cycle of Christ’s journey from Cross to Resurrection.
Some like to debate where the risen Christ was on Holy Saturday, before his resurrection appearance on Easter. We know the tomb did not hold him. Some point to the Apostle’s Creed’s mention that Christ “descended into hell” before he rose on the third day. Why? Some say to demonstrate there is nowhere Christ has not been, nowhere that Christ does not reign.
As I visited our member Zoraida Stewart this morning, we talked about the vital importance of the Easter truth that God in Christ knows every aspect of the human endeavor, our sorrows and our elation, our feelings of abandonment and our joy in embrace, our physical pains. My prayer is that will encourage Zoraida as she begins what will be a sometimes-challenging road of recovery from her wounds and broken bones from being hit by a car, as I reported yesterday.
She is already much better, sitting up in bed and eating and even laughing some. She is in room 11121 at Carolinas Medical Center Main. Visits are life giving but I suggest no more than 15 or 20 minutes as she needs rest. I told her 300 here were praying for her. Thanks to all who have already volunteered to help. We are coordinating a number of needs and solutions right now, including looking for homes, at least temporary, for one and maybe two cats. I am sorry to say that her service dog, Zsa Zsa, died.
As we might think today about where Christ was in the universe on Holy Saturday, we also might ask: Is there anywhere inside us where we have not allowed Christ to go? As I said Sunday, atonement is not just about our outward change in status. It is much more about a change within us.
The battlefield, the prison, the courtroom – they all describe a change in our outward status, our position as the world around us sees us. We survive the battle. We are freed from prison. We walk out of the courtroom because someone else took our sentence.
But, none of these metaphors speak to a change within us, an inward undoing and rewiring. That begs an important question about this atonement business: Isn’t there more to it than just a change in our status? Isn’t Christ’s trial, death and resurrection meant to lead to something, to inspire something, to change not just how the world sees us but how we see the world and our place in it? Christ’s death was real and it came at the highest cost.
Might we think about this as a compelling moral demonstration, a model for living that is to transform us thereafter, not one that looks at Jesus as just a nice guy who said and did good things and got killed … but because the Christ was God’s very being among us?
If we as the church are to be transformed into the body of Christ, the heart of Christ, the mind of Christ, the feet and hands of Christ, are these just spare parts? Can we imagine using those divine feet to walk right back into a fight? To use those divine hands to make one bloody sacrifice after another, to buy one day of God’s forgiveness at a time and then do something that requires another sacrifice?
Are we to adopt the mind of Christ only to see the world the same old cynical and hopeless way? Are we to seek the heart of Christ only to hate our neighbor, to judge our brother, to resent our sister? Is that all that this is all about?
What do YOU think? Weigh in on the Caldwell Conversations Facebook page.
See you tomorrow.
In Christ,
John