Spirituality Column #432
February 24, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Spirituality Column #431
February 17, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

On a spring Sunday centuries ago, the impromptu crowd cheered wildly as the peaceful, miracle-working young priest humbly rode into town on a donkey.

Palms and cloaks were laid in the man’s path.  Triumphant voices of common people raised glorious hosannas and hallelujahs.  On this next day after the Saturday Sabbath, the much-talked-about but mysterious Jesus arrived in Jerusalem.  “This is the son of God,” many believed.  “This is our savior; the Christ, the Messiah promised by God and the prophets.”  They knew of His startling teaching many had heard, and His miracles many had seen.

He healed the sick, raised the dead, talked of living water, life everlasting, love, freedom and the Kingdom of God.  Crowds followed Him.  Jesus fed them, loved them, taught them, challenged them, and comforted them.  He routinely, amazingly, outwitted and out-argued the Jewish leaders.  He suffered no fools.  He cried for the weak.

Jesus, sent of and by God, was the end of oppression, the beginning of true life, the fulfillment of freedom and the deliverance of God’s promised salvation.  The cheering people sensed things were about to change.

If only the people themselves hadn’t stayed the same … as before.

Within days the welcoming crowd was a jeering mob clamoring for Jesus’s death.  Unwilling to accept on faith the truth of His divine identity and purpose, people saw only their own fallen, fearful and self-centered desires.  Jesus had not matched their worldly expectations.  How could this miracle-performing Son of God now bleed as a beaten prisoner of both the fearsome religious leaders and the hated Romans?

The crowd possessing such great joy and hope on Sunday had lost its faith by Friday.  Consumed in their abiding self-interest, people did not understand the message Jesus was preparing to die to deliver.  When presented the choice to save Jesus or save Barabbas – the terrorist, traitor and murderer – the people chose Barabbas, the devil they knew instead of the savior they didn’t (Mark 15).

Barabbas – ironically in Hebrew, “bar abbas” means “son of the father” – represents our worldly appetites, sin and fear, personifies mankind’s flair for self-destruction, and is a caricature of our common human inability to discern the true good.  Familiarity beats faith; evil trumps virtue.  We ignore the true Son, Jesus.  We get mad at the true Father, God.  Faith wanes, and we embrace the familiar Barabbas who cannot, will not – and has no desire – to save us.  We obey man’s anger; we shun God’s love.

Tomorrow begins Lent, the season of contemplation and sacrifice leading to Easter and the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, who is so alive among us.

So what?  So is Barabbas.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows Barabbas by many names.

Spirituality Column #430
February 10, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Jesus wept.  Peter wept.  Mary wept.

Overwhelmed by love.  Devastated by shame.  Consumed with mourning.

From Genesis to Revelation, there is a whole lot of crying in the Bible for a whole lot of different reasons.  People cry out to the Lord in despair and pain.  God is beseeched amid the fallen world’s groaning chaos.

But blessedly, if only occasionally, like our Lord we cry to express our love.

Jesus dearly loved His friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  As Jesus reacted to the sadness of the two sisters at the death of their brother (Luke 11), we see the overwhelming love Jesus feels for all mankind as we deal daily with our down-fallenness.  Jesus knows what He is about to do – raise Lazarus from the grave.  He also knows what this act sets in motion – the frenzied ire of the priests who within days will insist that Jesus be crucified by the Romans.  Jesus also knows why He is going to the cross – for the redemption of mankind from sin, the defeat of eternal death, the rekindling of our fellowship with our Creator, and our adoption into the Kingdom of God.  Jesus weeps for all of us, because He loves all of us.

Peter wept because He had blown it.  He had blown it big.  He loved Jesus, but hated himself when his fear of the Sanhedrin (Matthew 26:57-75) surpassed his customary open bravado of identifying Jesus as the Messiah Christ, the Son of God.  In his weakness, Peter’s witness wobbled; his shame thundered in devastating cries.

Mary loved her son Jesus.  She knew from the angels before His birth that He was the glorious savior of mankind.  Yet she mourned His death on the cross and wept at His grave; convinced of her loss, consumed in her sadness and undoubtedly confused by His death and disappearance.  How much faith do we really have that Jesus is our “all in all”?  Too often, not enough.

The Bible contains roughly 400 references to all manner of weeping, wailing, crying and crying out.  It is obviously man’s natural reaction to great desperation and frustration.  Jesus presents a nearly unique dynamic of weeping as a sign of love.  (We also see it in Genesis 43:30, where Joseph weeps – albeit privately – at the sight of his beloved brother Benjamin.)

We can cry and curse, or we can weep for joy.  We can lament humanity, or glorify God by crying out in great praise.

Never forget that weeping can be a superior, though too rare, expression of love.

So I ask you … what are you crying about?

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notices that crying can be evidence of either a soft heart or a hard head.

Spirituality Column #429
February 3, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

If there is a common refrain among non-believers regarding heaven, with its eternal worship, praise, fellowship and participation in the glory of God, it is this:

“It sure must be boring up there.”

Endless loitering in some sort of ethereal “church” among the clouds, I agree, would get old.  The presumed forever-after absence of all the fun and mischievous stuff we can do in this worldly life – good, bad, productive, creative, competitive, nonproductive, idle, playful, hurtful, whatever – sounds crushingly unexciting.

Americans, for the most part, can look at heaven this way because we have a pretty good thing going in this country.

Freedom, the kind God ordained through Jesus Christ, is what makes America great.  That doesn’t mean all Americans have to be Christians or even have to believe in God or heaven or salvation or any of that stuff.  In fact, we do perfectly terrible things against God, whether individually or as a nation, on a daily basis.

Our cultural fabric is evermore rent with the tatters of God-dishonoring personal preferences, political and academic closed-mindedness, the exile of Jesus from social constructs, and the uncritical acceptance of media and entertainment driven distractions.  We are a nation vigorously attempting to vanquish Godly worldviews.  We aggressively promote the diminishment of critical thinking that defines freedom as a function of God’s divine love; the type of thinking that protects the blessing of our freedom because freedom is indeed a gift from God.  We broadly trumpet and underwrite progressively intrusive control on Godly thought, slowly but systematically erasing the fundamental blessings of eternal freedom, peace and joy God has provided.

Still … in our nation we are largely safe, for the moment, to “do anything we want.”  Nobody’s going to stop us.

Just be careful what you say about Jesus in public.

On the flip side, much of the world doesn’t have it so good.  Secular Europe is learning a hard lesson.  Religion in the Middle East, northern Africa and most of Asia, is blood sport.  American “let the good times roll” freedom in Christ isn’t something that manifests itself globally.  The suffering and persecution that come with following Jesus as described in the Bible (e.g. 2 Timothy 3:12), are commonly experienced.  Freedom for them is in heaven.

Heaven, through Christ (John 14:6), is unique from the “heaven” or paradise or hereafter of other religions or of secular legend.  It’s a place where everything is good in God’s will, and everything is perpetually new, forever (Revelation 21:1-5).

That’s why Jesus is important now.  And that’s why heaven won’t ever get old.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) urges people to understand that religions are very, very different from each other.  “They’re all the same” is dangerous ignorance.