“The Most Perfect Hope-Out of a Public Execution?”

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE:  “The Most Perfect Hope-Out of a Public Execution?”

By:  Ron Woodrum

 

     Our world has learned that civilization has failed.  Six thousand years of world history tells us on every page that our situation is hopelessly without answers.  It is only when history intersects with the Road of Calvary, and the Christ of the Cross-does that picture change for the better.  God has chosen to take the most horrible day of history and transform it into the most glorious.  Malcolm Muggeridge, the brilliant English journalist, who surrendered his life to Christ, spoke very poignantly on this subject.

 

“We look back on history and what do we see?  Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counter-revolutions succeeding one another; wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed; one nation dominant and then another.  As Shakespeare’s King Lear puts it, ‘the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon’.  In one lifetime I’ve seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, and the great majority of them convinced-in the words of a favorite song-‘that God has made them mighty and will make them mightier yet’.  I have heard a crazed Austrian announce the establishment of a German Reich that was to last for a thousand years; an Italian clown report that the calendar will begin again with his assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Ashoka, and more humane than Marcus Aurelius.  I’ve seen America wealthier than all the rest of the world put together, and with the superiority of weaponry that would have enabled Americans, had they so wished, to outdo an Alexander or Julius Caesar in the range and scale of conquest. 

 

     All in one lifetime-gone with the wind.  England now part of an island off the coast of Europe, threatened with further dismemberment; Hitler and Mussolini…buffoons; Stalin a sinister name in the regime that he helped to found and dominated totally for three decades; Americans haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring and smog settling, by memories of a disastrous military campaign in Viet Nam, and the windmills of Watergate.  Can this really be what life is about-this worldwide soap opera going on from century to century, from era to era, as old discarded sets of props litter the earth?  Surely not!  Was it to provide a location for so repetitive a production as this that the universe was created for homo sapiens, as he likes to call himself-heaven knows why-came into existence?  I can’t believe it.  If this were all, then the cynics, the hedonists, and the suicides are right; the most we can hope for from life is amusement of our senses and then death.  But it is not all!

 

     Thanks to the great mercy and marvel of the Incarnation, the cosmic scene is resolved into a human drama.  God reaches down to become a Man and man reaches up to relate himself to God.  Time looks into eternity, and eternity into time, making now always, and always now.  Everything is transformed by the sublime dream of the Incarnation-God’s special parable for fallen man and a fallen world.  The way opens before us that was charted in the Birth, Ministry, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The way that successive generations of believers have striven to follow, deriving themselves the moral, spiritual, and intellectual creativity out of which have come everything truly great in our art, our literature, our music, the splendor of the great cathedrals, and the illumination of the saints and mystics, as well as countless lives of men and women serving their God and loving their Savior in humility and faith.  It’s a glorious record-not just of the past, but continuing now.  The books are open, not closed!

 

     The Incarnation was not a mere historical event like the Battle of Waterloo, or the American Declaration of Independence-something that’s happened, and then was over.  It goes on happening all the time.  God did not retreat back into Heaven when the fateful words-‘It is finished’ were uttered on Golgotha.  THE WORD THAT BECAME FLESH HAS CONTINUED AND CONTINUES TO DWELL AMONG US FULL OF GRACE AND TRUTH.  There are examples on every hand; we have but to look for them.  For instance, the man in Solzhenitsyn’s labor camp who scribbled sentences from the Gospels that he pulled out of his pocket in the evening to keep himself serene and brotherly in that terrible place.  Then Solzhenitsyn himself-a product of this world’s first overtly atheistic materialist society who can tell us in shining words that ‘it was only when I lay there, on rotting prison straw, that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.  Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either; BUT RIGHT THROUGH EVERY HUMAN HEART AND THROUGH ALL HUMAN HEARTS!  So bless you prison for having been in my life’.  What insight, what wisdom, acquired in a Soviet prison, after a Marxist upbringing!

 

     It may well be that Western man has turned away from the cross in favor of some illusory pursuit of happiness.  YET THE PREACHING OF THE CROSS IS INDEED FOOLISHNESS TO THOSE PERISHING, BUT IT IS STILL THE POWER OF GOD TO THOSE WHO BELIEVE IT.  OUT OF A PUBLIC EXECUTION, (THE CROSS), COMES THE MOST PERFECT HOPE!  IT IS THEN THAT CHRIST’S HAND REACHES OUT SURE AND FIRM AND LIGHT BANISHES DARK FOREVER”.  (The Crisis Of Our Time-Malcolm Muggeridge 1985).

 

Peter would agree with that.  The only hope for the world of his day, and ours, Is the message of the cross, embraced by the first century followers of Christ.  While those pilgrims suffered the persecution and mocking of the society they dwelled in, and the government that ruled over them, he reminded them that their living hope was to found only in the death, resurrection, and soon return of Jesus Christ.  Muggeridge reminds us of that same truth!