Pathos.

“Jesus is the answer to all your problems.”

~ a street billboard in Boone, NC.

I drive past that billboard each time I go into town, and I flinch every time it catches my eye. I appreciate the heart behind it: Obviously, someone is wanting to convey that we do have problems and that Jesus wants to be with us in our struggles. That we don’t have to go it alone, that many of our sorrows and injuries can indeed be healed. But… stating it this way feels seriously misleading. The implication is clear that, once you accept Jesus as your “personal Lord and Savior,” no more problems. Life is all roses and daisies. Seriously? If that message is what brings someone to Christ, eventually they’re going to wind up pretty disappointed. Maybe even deeply disillusioned.

Much of the church has been guilty, in my opinion, of selling this false message, perhaps unconsciously. Trusting young Christians wind up believing in an unspoken social contract: If you’re a good boy or good girl and do what’s expected of you—have your daily devotions, go to church, volunteer, tithe, whatever—then God is committed to buffering you from the blows of life. And all the “promises” of God get cross-stitched onto their souls. The social contract is bolstered by periodic testimonies of God providing parking spaces, holding back the rain for their kid’s birthday party, or boosting their 401k.

This troubling message is reinforced: God’s job is to look out for your personal comfort and convenience. Anything that gets in the way of your personal comfort and convenience is from the devil. It’s spiritual warfare… and if you learn how to pray better, you can keep the devil of discomfort and inconvenience away!

It’s an appealing story, I just don’t think it’s true.

In fact, all evidence points in quite the opposite direction. God could have designed the world so that everything pretty much worked perfectly; God could have started with heaven instead of ending with heaven, but that wasn’t the plan. Even the “fall” wasn’t a surprise to God, forcing a Plan B of human misery. Evidently, heaven alone could not bring forth the beauty and glory of God in humanity. No, that great potential requires something decidedly uncomfortable and inconvenient: Struggle. Pain. Conflict. And ultimately, the freedom for evil.

I know, I know… Does it really have to be so hard? Do we really have to struggle, inside and out, to find our way, to love others, and to constantly try to heal what seems to constantly get broken? Yes, I think it has to be that hard to become that beautiful. And yes, I think we have to struggle that much to bring forth the glory of God in this world. I wish it could be otherwise, I really do. Even Jesus lamented the pathos of the human condition—a pathos he shared in very, very personally (Mt. 23:37, Heb. 4:15).

The most pervasive Christian narrative pits the forces of good locked in cosmic war with the forces of evil. I understand that imagery; it’s an easy explanation for a lot of biblical language and even our personal experience. I do want goodness to thrive, and I do want evil to be vanquished. We all do. But if we could snap our fingers and make it true, I am convinced that we would lose the beauty along with the struggle, the glory along with the pathos.

About the same time as the Desert Mothers and Fathers sought to escape the Church-hijacked-by-Empire (4th century), Chinese philosophers were struggling to articulate this same mystery on the other side of the globe, and they came up with the now-famous Yin-Yang symbol, artfully rendered in the top image. They saw male and female, light and darkness, activity and passivity more as a holistic interplay than warfare: “Yin and yang can be thought of as complementary (rather than opposing) forces that interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts,” according to George Ohsawa. I wonder if that insight might help us Christians better understand God’s story in this world.

Many people are now familiar with a famous line from Saint Julian of Norwich (1342-1416): All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. I return to this powerful perspective regularly as anxiety seeks to intrude into my world. Most people, however, do not know the beginning of Julian’s sentence: Sin is behovely, but all shall be well… Behovely? What the heck?

It’s not a word we generally use, but behovely means something necessary or required, something ultimately beneficial or profitable. In what universe could that idea be applied to sin? Well, apparently this one… and I think Julian is spot on. While sin damages and causes pain—pain we rightfully attempt to avoid—sin is the crucible, the furnace within which goodness and beauty can be refined and forged. Without the struggle and pathos, it cannot emerge. And this is the terrible wisdom of God that both sobers us and invites us into the redemptive drama of this world.

Jesus was getting at this when he said that we must be “born again,” a traumatic experience for both mother and child. Paul was getting at it when he said that only in weakness was he strong. Ultimately, the behoveliness of sin is what preserves us from both pride and despair. It is the way of hope and transformation, both individually and communally.

“Jesus is the answer to all your problems.” Catchy. I guess it fits on the billboard better than, “Follow Jesus to become (at least metaphorically) poor, homeless, persecuted, and crucified.”

growing the soul

Where have you been able to see failure give birth to redemption in your journey? Why might this change your perspective on sin in your life?

serving the world

How could this sobering truth inform our view on the great tragedies of war and evil in the world, not to justify it for a second, but to frame it as a resurrection story?

takeaway

The phoenix has to struggle and die before it can rise.