Jesus Isn't Closed

The world appears to be shutting down. It's like I live on a high hill in the center of a great city called Normal, and the power supply that keeps Normal normal has just been cut off. I stand in twilight and watch as one section of the city after another goes dark, and the darkness moves steadily toward me.

I’ve been feeling a new kind of anxiety lately.

We live in the middle of nowhere, I work mostly in my basement, and my kids are home-schooled. We are probably some of the least at-risk people on the planet of catching anything from anybody because on a regular day we don’t even have to see anybody. Yet I can feel my anxiety level growing.

I went to the store a few days ago to buy a few things. Paper plates and Tylenol mostly. And as I stood in the aisles I felt this impulse to hoard. To buy as much as I could find of everything we might need. I stood in a well-stocked aisle full of crap I don’t want that we don’t need, yet I stood in fear. Fear that the Crap Fairy might stop delivering the crap—and that calamity would result.

And I wasn’t afraid that I would somehow wreak havoc on the world if the Crap Fairy stopped delivering. I was afraid that you would.

It is interesting to me how fundamentally intertwined our lives are. Partly because of the mind-boggling complexity of that interdependence. Mostly because of how little awareness I have of that interdependence on a daily basis.

Because I don’t want it.

I don’t want to know how much you matter to me, and I don’t want to know how much I matter to you. I prefer to think of us all as existing simultaneously yet separately. As if we all glide through our lives and past each other on the same crust of the same planet at the same time, and yet your gliding is intrinsically disconnected from my own. As if your rising and falling and flittering and fumbling has no bearing on my own.

And then some guy in a village in China gets a fever and suddenly we are all in this thing together. Suddenly the world is small and deeply connected. Suddenly your decision to go to the zoo affects me and my decision to stay home affects you. Suddenly you are my problem.

And slowly a very different kind of light begins to dawn.

We all have the virus. We have all infected somebody. And we are all going to die.

That is not the end of the Coronavirus story. That story will end very differently. It is the beginning of every one of our lives. I forget that. Sometimes by accident, usually on purpose. I forget because I don’t like to believe that there is something wrong with me. And because I don’t like to believe that I have done wrong to you. But there is and I have. 

I like to think that the real problem is some bad thing that happened to some unknown people somewhere out there and then started working its way in my direction. And my favorite part of that thought is that the bad thing is outside of me. Ideally far from me, but most especially outside of me. 

In the end it is far more comfortable for me to believe that the real problem is out there somewhere headed my way. But as I ponder the meaning of Easter the dawning light of truth reminds me that the real problem is in me somewhere and headed your way. The real problem is that I am so deeply broken on the inside that I will invariably try to break you from the outside.

The traditional diagnosis for the virus that I carry is sin. Tradition gets old, so we rename the virus from time to time and fiercely debate which are the symptoms and which is the cause. But the virus does not care what we call it, how we understand it, or if we understand it at all. It just does what viruses do. It is happy to do its work of breaking us as we spend our days in conference and committee debating if brokenness is even real while taking secret comfort in the belief that even if it were real for you it could never be so for me.

Yet all the while I am infected. The darkness is not moving steadily toward me. It radiates from me. If darkness can shine it shines from me. I carry it wherever I go, and I deliver it to all who come near me. And I am appalled. Appalled because I fear and hate the dark. So I scoop it up from my soul by the bucket full and toss it toward whomever or whatever I think I can reach. It is your darkness. You are the problem now. And my darkness refills and shines all the brighter.

And I am not alone in this pursuit. To the contrary; the spreading of the darkness is a primary symptom of the sin virus. The first two people ever infected immediately turned to the task of re-infecting the other in an attempt to empty themselves. The symptom continued in their children. And we are all their children.

One of their kids was named Paul, and he was one of the greatest healers of all time. And yet he was overwhelmed by his own infection. Overwhelmed by the light he wrote of his darkness and said,

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.  Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.  So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

-Romans 7:15-25

The victory of our brother Paul was not found in his purity from infection. It was found in his singular understanding of the Cure. He lived every broken day in growing knowledge of his Savior, even as the virus somehow held on, living to fight a lost battle.

Likewise, my true victory will not be found in hoarding enough crap to protect myself from you. You are not the infection and crap is not the cure. And my true victory will not be lived out in trying to perfectly protect you from me. A noble goal for which to try, but there is not enough try in me or toilet paper in the world to protect you from me. 

Your only hope against the virus I carry is that I be miraculously cured even as I carry it. And my only hope against the virus you carry is that you can be miraculously cured even as you carry it.

We share the classic sin symptom that we see everything in reverse of how it actually is. We are not clean in here and in need of protection from the infection out there. We are infected in here and in need of healing from out there.

And there is Somebody out there who can heal us. Someone who is forever immune from our infection because He took on a lethal dose of it. Someone who has a long and storied history of miraculously healing our brothers and sisters around the world from the exact same sickness. Someone who healed our brother Paul. 

And this one and only Clean One does not desire or require social distance from us. It is not our virus that keeps us from Him. It is all the ways that we try to hide our virus that keeps us from Him.

Brothers and Sisters of the virus, come to the Doctor with me. Come to be healed. Come to become a healer. Come that we might dance in the streets together in celebration of our present and coming victory. Come to lament your darkness even as you are filled with the light.