To console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning… Isa 61:3 (NKJV)
Good News – Going Through Hell Series – Part 5
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7
Beauty for ashes.
Glory from pain.
Peace in chaos.
Strength in weakness.
Life from death.
Anyone else sensing a pattern here?
In our dualistic culture and mindset, we don’t often put pain and beauty in the same category. There’s beauty. And then there’s pain. There is suffering and then there’s joy. There’s strength and then there’s weakness. We treat and approach them like they are mutually exclusive – to have one is to experience the absence of the other. We don’t often have the capacity to sit with the complexity of pain and beauty, suffering and joy, strength and weakness, courage and fear, together, all at once, at the same time.
The start of Isaiah 61 says, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor…”
Proclaim Good News. The Gospel of the Christ. If we are still experiencing pain, suffering, fear, hopelessness, etc. then what is the Good News? Is it just the promise of a glorious afterlife? Is it a trade? “Do this and you’ll get that?”
If the Good News of the Gospel isn’t for the here and now, then what is the point? BUT if it is indeed for the here and now, how come it’s not a magic pill that when swallowed, makes everything wonderful?
What do we do with the leftovers? The areas that don’t seem to be covered by redemption? Swept up into glory? That parts of our lives that dwell in wildernesses and don’t testify to the goodness of God?
The Gospel, which is a declaration or message of Good News, is complicated.
What?
Yep. Think about it. It's complex. It’s not straightforward. It’s not easy to receive and it's not easy to give.
It is given freely by the Divine, proclaimed through the life and words of Jesus Christ, flown like a banner through his incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection. The giving of it by God is believable.
But receiving it and living within it, is another matter. It’s not clear cut. It’s not dualistic. It's not exclusive. The Good News isn’t the eradication of fear and heartache and pain and loss. The Good News is the inclusion of these things through grace.
Jesus didn’t obliterate sin when he died and rose again. He didn’t banish it from the earth, declared it null and void, erased it… no. Sin remains to this day. The Christ drew our sins – our disconnectedness from the Infinite Source, the Ground of Being, the Almighty God – into himself. He miraculously mixed humanity and holiness into one. The Good News isn’t the separation from all that pain is. The Good News is a divine ‘AND.' It makes two separate things into one. Draws them together. Graces our lives and all that they contain to be carriers of peace and hope and love and faith not because of the absence of suffering, but by the inclusion of it. The cross itself displays this to us. Christ’s suffering declares it to us.
That's why it is a grace, that's why we are anointed to be bearers of Good News. “The spirit of God is on me, the Lord has anointed me to proclaim Good News to the poor…”
Because even though it's announced and told and declared and sung and prophesied and written down and preached about on Sundays, people are still hopeless, people are still poor, people are still broken, people are still suffering.
Yep, the Good News is complicated. And that in and of itself is a comfort.
The Good News is that our pain is part of the story. It’s included. It becomes one with our joy and hope. The Valley of Deep Darkness that David experienced in Psalm 23, that we all experience, does not defy the Gospel, it compels it, unearths it, and reveals it.
In one of my favourite films, the Dread Pirate Roberts says to Princess Buttercup, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says different is selling something.”
The Gospel is not something that is traded, sold and bought, marketed and packaged. Good News is lived into. It includes our pain and suffering and takes a lifetime to unpack.
If the Good News includes our mess, what else could it include? Leave us a comment below.
Go to Part 6 – Deep Dark »
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