Draw Near to God in Christ

December 08, 2017
in Lent & Holy Week, Lift Your Light

A Prayer for Holy Week’s Transformational Power

My prayer, as we go into Holy Week, is that we will hear Jesus’s story. Hear it so deeply, with all its jarring realities and winning joys, that it captures our hearts and makes us new people. This can happen because Holy Week not only “reviews” the story that most powerfully shows God’s love, it invites us to participate in it; it gives us many dramatic and tangible ways to transform our own stories with Christ’s good and glorious one.

Holy Week Challenges Our Comfortable Ideas About Life

The fond stories that we like to tell ourselves about ourselves, whose viability we are so desparate to preserve, aren’t like the story that Jesus tells in His body and blood. That contrast hints at one of our big problems. Our preferred stories about meaning and good living are fragile fantasies. Fragile, as in watching your favorite romantic comedy in hospice care. When we are being honest, we know that our idealized stories can’t stand against the real problems of life: we get hurt, we hurt others, and our vulnerability to sickness and death is the unavoidable crisis that awaits all of us, no exceptions.


Holy Week Helps Us Admit Painful Reality— In the Only Safe Way

Admitting need, coming out of denial…  Easy to say, not so easy to do. Especially if we try to do it at home, on our own. Compare it to taking up the instrument of your own eventual death, and carrying it with you every day, on purpose. Let’s be realistic. No one can really do that. Psychologically, it would be overwhelming. PTSD is what happens when we see the lacerating truth of our real need without help. No one can come to grips with their ultimate fragility, unless something or someone comes in and changes the very constitution of our humanity and, along with it, the ability to admit our sorry state without being mentally destroyed.


Jesus is that help. The love of Christ, His crucified love, can do what we cannot. Holy Week shows how the impossibility of facing human sin, suffering and death, becomes possible in Jesus. Following Christ on His way of sorrow in Holy Week makes possible both our confession of profound need, even as it offers His helping hand of deliverance from death, His forgiveness and reconciliation.
It’s help given from within the very heart of our real need.You have to go there to get it, and that’s the journey of Holy Week.

How Jesus’s Story Changes Ours From Within Our Deepest Vulnerability & Need

In Holy Week, Jesus brings necessary help very near, nearer to us than we usually are to ourselves. His love places help at the center of our most dreaded fears, and then offers a way through. If we draw near to Christ in His last week— by participating in His last supper, His loving service, His agonizing prayer vigil, His betrayal, abandonment, torture, mocking, piercing, death, burial and glorious rising— we can be changed by Him, in every dimension of our human existence.


By following Jesus’s storyline, even through horrifying death, we understand “the bad news of the good news.” And, it is here that nice life stories get turned upside down, and that’s hard to take, at first. But, His dying isn’t a terminus. It’s a portal. We will not be left traumatized and trembling. Upending our flimsy fantasies is part of how He makes sure our real story never ends.


With Christ and in Christ alone can we safely descend to the torn roots of our human vulnerability. Meeting God’s love in that place where the distance between us and Him is thinnest (in Christ’s wounds, His pierced heart, His broken and dead body), we also come present, in spirit and in truth, to the Life and joy that trampled down every terrifying trouble, including death. Through His sacrifice, the Lord shrinks the distance between us and God to nothing. In a mysterious way, by carrying Christ’s death within our real, embodied, lives, we manifest His eternal life (1 Cor 4:10).

Christ’s Story— So Real, So Hopeful— And, It Can Transform Our Stories

In Christ and with Christ during Holy Week, we remember and realize that His life story is relentlessly realistic and unsentimental. On that hard rock, Jesus pivots us into the only hope that brings real help for the real trouble we are in.


Jesus goes down, way down, on purpose, for love. His love, it turns out, is stronger than death. It transforms tragedy from the inside out, and banishes fear. It rises in power, and makes a promise to each of us: we can share in His life story.


His story has a better ending— the best of all—  because it’s real, and it isn’t really an ending. It’s a beginning that can become our own. 

Christ’s Holy Week Proposal & Promise

As we stand at the entrance to Holy Week, I believe the Lord is making a proposal:

  • Will we let Him write His story deep into our hearts and imaginations?
  • Will we enter His story and make pilgrimage with Him through the worst of what the world, our sins and the devil deals, in order to take in the best of what the Father’s love and glory offers?
  • Will we let Him make our stories honest and real, filled with love that puts fear to flight and blessed with joy that none can take away?

Draw near to God in Christ this Holy Week, go to every service you can, and the glory of His resurrection will give your life story a new beginning with no ending.

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