When did you last feel fully alive?

I’m reading Tom Wright‘s book, The Day The Revolution Began, and it’s giving me great insight into Jesus’ death on the Cross.  Here is a fairly long section I found very helpful:

Few readers of this book are likely to have seen, except on screen, the kind of violence that was common in the first century. Even those who watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ might either screen out the gratuitous horror of it all or be so overwhelmed by the physical brutality as to miss the point that such a death was designed to degrade as well as kill. Crucifixion was one of the central ways in which authorities in the ancient world set out quite deliberately to show subject peoples who was in charge and to break the spirit of any resistance.

The point is often made but bears repetition: we in the modern West, who wear jewelled crosses around our necks, stamp them on Bibles and prayer books, and carry them in cheerful processions, need regularly to be reminded that the very word “cross” was a word you would most likely not utter in polite society. The thought of it would not only put you off your dinner; it could give you sleepless nights. And if you had actually seen a crucifixion or two, as many in the Roman world would have, your sleep itself would have been invaded by nightmares as the memories came flooding back unbidden, memories of humans half alive and half dead, lingering on perhaps for days on end, covered in blood and flies, nibbled by rats, pecked at by crows, with weeping but helpless relatives still keeping watch, and with hostile or mocking crowds adding their insults to the terrible injuries.

The horrible personal and physical aspects of crucifixion were matched by the social, communal, and political meaning. Continue reading “Tom Wright: The Word of the Cross”

Tom Wright writes about part of one of this week’s readings, Acts 14:1-7, in his book Acts for Everyone (Part 2):

I once knew a young man who suffered seriously from depression. He was grappling with all kinds of issues, memories, buried fears, imagined guilt (and some real guilt, too). He had, on my recommendation, been to see one or two doctors, because his condition was becoming clinical. But, he told me, he got frustrated with the medication he’d been prescribed, and which he had taken for a while.

‘All the highs and lows disappeared: he complained. ‘OK, I don’t like the lows. In fact, they’re terrible. But the highs went as well. I just felt like a cow, mooching around, never getting excited about anything. I can’t live like that. It’s just not me.’ And he came off the medication and went on working with a counsellor who, through patience, wisdom and prayer, brought him steadily through the worst.

Now for all I know they may have improved the medication since then. I’m not an expert in that area. Sometimes medication may be the only way to help someone out of the deepest part of a depression so that they can begin to work on the real issues. But that notion stuck with me, of doing away with the highs and the lows. And I find myself thinking of it as I read a passage like this and compare it with what I know of ordinary church life in today’s Western world.

“I can’t afford to live in reaction to darkness. If I do, darkness has had a role in setting the agenda for my life. The devil is not worthy of such influence, even in the negative. Jesus lived in response to the Father. I must learn to do the same.”
-Bill Johnson