Giving it all away...

"We are creatures that are totally alone,
precariously living upon a realm of myths - our fabricated realities".

Andrew Marr -BBC radio.

Edmund Burke famously once said that the only thing needed for evil to prosper is good men to do nothing, but as we touched on in a recent post, there are no good men, so evil is easily and often done, especially by those who deem it good to define our present alienated condition as the only reality we can know.

In His ministry amongst us, Jesus spoke of the true purpose of evil - like a thief, it comes amongst us to steal our actual identity, kill our longings to be more than strange, half-life creatures of the night, to destroy us, body and soul, by incarcerating us in the lie that we are no more that a bag of animated dust, limited to a brief moment, then gone.

Evil, a friend used to say, is de-personalization...defining ourselves in such a way that, in effect, we have no value beyond the moment - the thoughts and appetites that pertain to this instant. Christ tells us something very different. We are fallen, lost, broken and corrupted children, victimized and plagued by a lie that we can become 'free' in our rebellion by being less than we are - the heirs of a realm provided by a Creator who has entered into our very meaninglessness in order to rescue us from our terrifying peril, at a great cost to Himself.

The real fear of redemption, I sometimes think, is not that there is a God, or that He loves us so deeply, but that it carries such a great 'weight' of recognition - that we mere shadows of humanity were made and delivered for so much more, and the broken creatures we now are cannot but wail at but a glimpse of such vision - better to order and discipline ourselves in misery and pain, to inhabit the realm of non-being - the sphere of evil.

The call of Christ challenges our reality. It decrees such usurpation cannot last...
That the day approaches when all creation will once more be granted its full worth.
Only His renewing mercy can clothe us well for such a day.