The Man of Sorrows Would Like A Word

Life is hard, and then you die. The best a person can hope for is to pass through the intervening years with as little pain as possible. It is better to mourn than to celebrate. Life is full of hard lessons because life is hard, cruel, and complicated, and the sooner you learn those lessons the more pain you will be spared. Don’t be too bad, but don’t be too good, either. Walk that middle road. Keep your head down. Don’t make waves, or noise, or enemies. Just do your best to get through without getting noticed. Also, women are mostly bad and will destroy you if you let your guard down for a moment. So says the wisest man who ever lived.

But it is the wisdom of a worldly man, a rich man, a strong man, a man powerful by the measures of the culture around him. This is the strength and wisdom Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 1:25, when he declares, “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

Jesus came to show us what the weakness and foolishness of God looks like. It looks like forsaking power, safety, and the middle way. It means speaking the truth no matter how many enemies it makes you and then accepting their judgment upon you, even upon your body. It means trusting God utterly with the outcome of your obedience to him, even if that means forsaking utterly the wisdom of the age. It means letting the will of God crush you, even kill you, and then raise you up again to life you could not imagine. It is a sign of contradiction to our age, to Solomon’s age, to all the ages of man who say that the purpose of your life is to be as comfortable, as pleasurable, and as pain-free as possible.

The Man of Sorrows would like a word, and that word is Trust. The world we can see and feel is not the end of the story.

Respond in Prayer

Dear God, please help us to understand what these strange and difficult passages of scripture are saying to us. Please speak to us through them about where we and our society are, and where we should be. Please take us by the hand and lead us through these dark and crooked ways to where you want us to be.

Michael Bonikowsky