The Perfect Story of Lent
The world doesn’t know love until it sees the Easter Cross.
If you can slow down enough to listen and watch, the Lenten season points us homeward to the real lessons of life – to the perfect story.
When you have enough decades behind you, you can see the recurring patterns that youth ignore. Nothing is happening today that did not occur in the yesterdays of thousands of years before our brief time on Earth.
For many, this decade has been disheartening. Its first years were enslaved to a microscopic virus that set in motion a cascading series of events, draconian personal restrictions, lockdowns, and massive legal and ethical confrontations. The medical and media establishments were caught in bald-faced lies and public manipulation while tens of thousands of people died needlessly.
There was great physical and emotional pain for many during the pandemic. For others, it was a cage of excruciating isolation and loneliness that has lingered on. Some battled every day to make it to another tomorrow. Others didn’t see that next day. For others, little changed, and their daily regimen was hardly interrupted — their most significant dilemma was how to get their hair done. For a tiny few, their immense fortunes grew astonishingly due to the captive markets they commanded at the expense of the many, imposed by capricious law.
Also, there was a tumultuous election, whose legitimacy remains questioned by many, which led to installing a government seeking to “fundamentally reshape” the nation, whether welcomed or not. An already fractured society became, deliberately, more so. Equality under the law was exchanged for a nebulous demand for “equity” enforced by the mob and mindless bureaucrats.
There was new national and international chaos, and yet another contentious election that promised to challenge and undo what had been done.
The nation’s economy was roiled by staggering inflation, and domestic corruption and violence surged. The decade so far has brought both war and rumors of war. The far-off invasion of one country by a godless state suddenly renders the unthinkable possibility of war with a nuclear-armed foe, or foes, thinkable. Tiny Israel battles yet again a relentless evil demanding its extinction.
But like every Lenten season, we are called back time and time again to the ancient words that have relentlessly come down the pathways of history – setting before us the Way of hope and the song of redemption’s promise.
Habbakuk Wrestled, Too
Some 600 years before Christ, a Jewish prophet named Habakkuk tussled with God over these same conundrums of life he saw all around him. His story is captured in a brief, little-visited three-chapter book in the Old Testament.
This prophet was infuriated about why God would make him witness the injustice around him. “Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?” He asks God. “Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. [The] law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails, so that justice is perverted.”
In the category of “be careful what you ask for,” God answers Habakkuk, warning that He is raising the Babylonians, a “ruthless and impetuous people, who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwelling places not their own. They are a feared and dreaded people; they are a law to themselves and promote their own honor.”
Habakkuk continued his complaining with a subtle taunt, “O Lord, are you not from everlasting?” Then another question, “How can the wicked swallow up the more righteous?”
God tells Habakkuk to write — and make it “plain.” What followed was a devastating depiction of man’s wickedness, cruelty, and corruption over other men, as accurate today as it has ever been. And God tells of His justice to come. (In this chapter, we find God’s exhortation, “but the righteous will live by faith,” a recurring theme in the New Testament and one that helped fuel the Protestant Reformation several thousand years later.)
In Chapter 3, Habakkuk recalls God’s everlasting glory, immense creation, and faithfulness. He concludes, “…yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will be joyful in God my Savior.”
Both Habakkuk’s lament and his joy are ours today. God only ever tells us what we need to know in our time — not necessarily what we want to know.
Rescue Plan in Action
His rescue plan for a hell-bent world has been at work since the Garden of Eden, when the first human couple trespassed into sin — going their own way. It is when God first told us to keep watch and that He would set the world right.
That time came precisely at the planned moment over 2,000 years ago, on Judea’s dusty, hot roads, ending in Jerusalem’s ancient city. A traveling teacher had been gathering great crowds with transcendent words of hope and miracles, and his statements were the most thought-provoking and perplexing anyone then, or now, had ever heard. They were words harder than diamonds, and the religious authorities were bound to see him dead because of them.
This teacher didn’t come to preach peace, though he was the Prince of Peace. Nor did he come as an avenging King, though he was the King of Kings. He was not the expected warrior, though he was the mighty Lion of Judah. And he was not timid, though he was the Paschal Lamb, the perfect sacrifice.
He was in human form an itinerant preacher, born under a cloud of scandal, and a carpenter by trade. He had no easy looks or great stature that would lure us. Yet his words swept away the world’s knowledge, for they were the words of the “firstborn over all creation.” Through a simple craftsman from Nazareth, “all things were created, visible and invisible,” and “in him all things hold together.”
He still commands even the universe he crafted.
The Instrument of Love
When he was taken to trial on Good Friday, he did not defend himself as the King of Kings to his accusers or Pilate, the Roman governor, but as a truth-teller: “[For this reason] I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
One can still hear Pilate’s wistful reply murmuring down over the ages as he looked at the bound and beaten man: “What is the truth?”
On that day, the Cross became the instrument of divine, perfect love. In the tempest, Christ saw all the churning, billowing storms of the sin of every single person then — and every single person down the thousands of years since.
The world doesn’t know love until it sees the Easter Cross. There is a wildness about God’s love. It is beyond our reason and imagination that the God of the Universe should love us so much in our sin that He ransoms us from its penalty.
Scientists tell us that the average human body has 25 trillion blood cells. The teacher died that Good Friday on that terrible instrument meant to shame, humiliate, and inflict unbounded pain upon him. His body was emptied of blood.
I like to think that just one of those blood cells has my name written on it — the receipt of my purchase, and yet another yours — each an eternal love letter that makes us part of the Perfect Story.
Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.