students of jesus

Once there was a man who could not see beyond his wife’s great beauty. And beautiful she was: deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, porcelain skin, rich red hair, and the picture of health. Yet she was more than this. She was kind and gentle, strong and determined, insightful and wise, but these qualities he did not see. Her manner of life was more beautiful still. She moved with grace between the roles of woman, wife, mother, and friend. What’s more, she possessed the rare ability to teach and encourage others in all these skills. But he was blind.

“I’m the luckiest man in the world,” her husband said, and even though he was indeed correct, he saw a mere fraction of his good fortune. Blinded by her beauty, he was insensible to the thousand other values she possessed.

Eventually he grew old and died: happy and ignorant of his true wealth.

What if we are that man? What if we live in the company of beauty—and grace, and wisdom, and strength, and vision enough for a lifetime and beyond, but we receive only a portion of our good fortune? What if, in Christ, we are partakers in the divine nature but we stop at the beauty of the cross?

We love the cross because it is the place forgiveness. We love the cross because Jesus paid a debt he did not owe, and paid a horrid price we could never ourselves pay. Because of the cross we live forgiven and free, our sin is washed away. What if we are blinded by its beauty?

The work of the cross is complete. Through its divine exchange we will live with the Father forever.

But Jesus was more than the cross. He did more than die. His manner of life was beautiful as well. He is kind and gentle, strong and determined, insightful and wise. What’s more, he has the rare ability to teach us all these skills. Jesus is more than the cross. His life is a gift to us as well.

If we see the cross as the ultimate expression of the Lord’s purpose we limit his mission to forgiveness. If we see ourselves as only recipients of his ministry, we stop at the cross. His mission, his aim, his gospel began before the cross, and extended beyond. What a blessed span are the days between Good Friday and Easter, yet it took Jesus more than a weekend to accomplish his work. The cross is a great gift, yet it is more, it is a portal—an entry-point into a new world, a new kind of life.

To become a child of God everyone must come to the cross. There is no other path. But there is beauty beyond the cross; the new life it offers is only the beginning. Can we see more?

I did not grow up a church-boy. After becoming a Christian I wandered through backyard Bible studies, late night prayer meetings in odd places, and lived my Christian life among strange, semi-cultic fellowships of networked home churches. I was baptized by a college kid, who dunked me into a suburban swimming pool just after midnight. One of the people who got baptized that night shouted, “Hold me under a long time--I’ve got a lot to die for!”

I must have been 25 years old before I ever saw a proper church baptism. When I did, I was fascinated with the phrase repeated over and over again, “Arise to walk in newness of life.” The words rang with freshness and truth. They also sounded vaguely familiar, so I used my New American Standard Bible and tracked down the words to Romans, chapter 6: “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

It’s an amazing assertion: that the born-again experience produced an entirely new creation, a new order of being. My amazement, though, gave way to an observation: these words were too good to be true. Most of us gently changed the meaning to something easier to grasp. “I’ve been clean-up by God,” or, “My sins have been washed away,” or, ”My past has been forgiven.” All these things are true, but they are something very different from a new creation. Eventually I began to wonder, what good is it to have your past forgiven, if you are essentially the same person? When someone is only forgiven--merely forgiven--the recidivism rate for sin is sure to be 100%. We will do it again.

But imagine a new creature, something--someone--born from another realm, with different desires, different needs. Someone who feeds on different food, breathes different air, and drinks from an entirely different fountain. Imagine that the change is wrought inside-out, so that the outer appearance is unchanged, but the spiritual body chemistry is other-worldly. What if we could be redeemed versions of the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

It’s worth meditation: what if newness of life actually meant a life of another kind? But that would be too weird, right?