Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, May 27, 2023
So much of the faith is weirder than we’re used to thinking, not just the sensational stuff like angels and Nephilim, but ‘simple’ concepts like Union with Christ. It’s the heart of the Christian view of salvation, yet I rarely hear it talked about in our churches. It’s weird, it’s enchanted, it makes us much smaller and the world much bigger—there are depths beneath your life that we cannot fathom, ‘full of mystery and hope’ as B. F. Westcott puts it.

Walter Bruggeman, in his book Interpretation and Obedience, said that:
The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination, so that we are too numbed, satiated, and co-opted to do imaginative work.
We’ve lost our ability to imagine, and the world is flattened for it. The horns of Elfland are silenced, but for those who have heard them there is a hollowness to the sound of this little world, that yearns for something greater.
That yearning, that longing, is the spiritual gift of dissatisfaction, and the ground of joy. Imagination is one of the ways to get to it.
Perhaps you aren’t convinced that we’ve lost our ability to imagine, you can imagine perfectly well, thank you very much! And you can find flights of imaginative fancy cast in glorious technicolour on large and small screens everywhere you go. This is of course, true.
I could point to the two pitfalls of Hollywood at the moment: either the nostalgia trap where we remake old stories again less well or retell the stories of very recent history, or the sequel trap where the films that really make money are just the same story churned out over and over again in different configurations (here’s looking at you MCU).
At the bottom they are of course the same pathology; they’re a lack of new stories to tell. Though, to gently nuance myself, telling the same story in different configurations is an imaginative literary trope that we call ‘typology’ and is all over the Bible. I don’t think the writers of Marvel films are doing this, but you could do something that has repetitive elements with great literary artifice if you are a very skilled writer.
Bruggeman was writing before this was the case in our visual storytelling, though, and you would be able to come up with counterexamples that demonstrate originality, I’m sure. The real way we can tell we’re losing our imagination is that all the fun stuff is now confined to fiction.
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The author of Hebrews realized that Christians in his day (as in ours) are capable of giving detailed attention to almost everything (a football game, new clothes, our appearance, school studies)—often, sadly, with one exception: the Lord Jesus. Hebrews teaches that we must reverse that trend. More than that, it engages in reversing the trend by showing us how captivating our Lord really is. Let’s be captivated by Him—for He lasts forever as Savior (Heb. 7:3; 8:16, 23, 25)!

“He’s going through a religious phase.” How often did you overhear that being said about you in your early days as an openly professing follower of Jesus Christ? Admittedly the sheer force of conversion on an untaught mind can lead to us drawing confused notions of exactly what has happened to us. Looking back on my own conversion I feel sure my parents must have thought I was going through a decidedly unbalanced “religious phase” as the golf clubs to which I had long been devoted (even at the tender age of fourteen!) were relegated to the cupboard for months on end. An unenthusiastically completed entry form and an ignominious second-round defeat in the national junior golf championships followed. What had happened to their relatively normal golf-adoring son? I am thankful for their love and patience with a young teenager who took a little time to realize that conversion called him to an ongoing life in and engagement with this world—not to monasticism!
Yet, when you are only three weeks old as a baby Christian, finding your feet in an intoxicatingly new world, whispers such as, “It won’t last!” can really hurt, and they can readily sow seeds of doubt that grow into the trees of mistrust and the forests of confusion.
Yet, whatever pressures we feel as contemporary Christians in the West, they pale by comparison with the obstacles that confronted the new converts to whom Hebrews was written. If indeed they were Jewish converts, each one became persona non grata in both family and community—big-time non grata—disinherited, ostracized, and alienated from the tight network that provided personal, educational, emotional, and financial support. They had joined the notorious “third race of men” that followed a claimant Messiah who had been roundly rejected, humiliated, crucified, and accursed. Now they too experienced reproach and the loss of family, property, and security (Heb. 10:32-4; 13:13). From now on they had to camp outside.
Would they last? Will I last? Where should I look (or point others to look)?
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Our only comfort in life is that we may belong to another. If we are our own, our demise is a welcome thing. Finally, the trouble is ended. The pain will stop. But if we are not our own, our problems lie in the hands of someone else. We have an end to which we are headed. There is a solution to all our problems. There is one who cares even when we struggle to anymore. There is one who makes it all matter, who gives it all deep meaning.

My back hurts almost all the time now. It starts when I wake up. I turn on my left side to stop the alarm from waking my wife and notice the slight twinge of discomfort. If I am not careful, laying there on my pillow with my head tilted the wrong way will prepare me for a day of nagging ache.
I suppose this is part of what it means to grow old. Pain comes more quickly—if it ever really leaves. Like the birds of morning and the crickets of night, the noise of pain exists in an ever-present state, sitting in the background of everything else going on. The difference, of course, is no one considers the pain beautiful. No one stops to listen to the pain. What’s the point? It only makes it stronger.
When I finally put that first foot on the floor and rouse myself from the warmth and comfort of the bed, the pain moves to my heels. When I sit down with my coffee to read in my leather chair, the back pain returns. It is dulled only by the thoughts racing through my brain of the upcoming day. The meetings, the problems, the conversations, the projects, all of it sitting on my shoulders. I am Atlas without the strength to bear it.
However, even a bad day for me is a better day by far than most in the world both now and before. I am, after all, starting my day in a warm bed and with hot coffee. I drive a nice car to a well-paying job with enough challenges for a lifetime. I am surrounded by people who require only my attention and effort. I go home to a big family with a good dinner. Seven months out of twelve, Major League Baseball is in season. It is not a bad life. Not by a long shot.
But the pain is still there. Life is good, but it is not easy.
The right attitude would help, I’m sure. Gratitude would make a world of difference, I know. I get there sometimes. I force myself into it. But it doesn’t remove the ache. It doesn’t solve the problems. Seeing the good side doesn’t make the bad side less real. It doesn’t shine it up enough to camouflage it from the rest of life.
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