Wrong. This never happens. And this never will happen. We have more access to entertainment than at any time in human history, yet somehow, we’re far less satisfied than when we’d spend half the evening driving to Blockbuster to pick out a movie, which we’d then watch twice over the weekend before having to drive back to the store to return it.

This paradox of our moment — having more choices yet feeling less satisfied — captures the essence of our struggle for control. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa explores this phenomenon in his short book The Uncontrollability of the World. The original German word unverfügbarkeit in the title is normally translated to “unpredictability,” but this failed to capture the emotional depth Rosa and his editor were aiming for. They instead landed on “uncontrollability,” a word that better captures modernity’s obsession and spiraling result of trying to make the world predictable, available, and disposable. Rosa explains his thesis:

The tremendously powerful idea that the key to a good life lies in expanding our share of the world has worked its way deep into our psychological and emotional life.

We’ve subscribed to the belief that if we can just bring more of the world within our reach and under our control, we’ll find the good life. The idea permeates every aspect of our existence, from toddlers mastering new skills to the elderly seeking security. It’s become the mantra of modern life, though it often goes unspoken: always act in a way that increases your share of the world.

But how’s that working out for us? There are apps that let us monitor our homes, control the temperature, and even see who’s at our door. But when the power goes out, all that control evaporates, leaving us more helpless than before. We’ve created a new kind of uncontrollability. Apps like Headspace, Calm, and Happify monitor our moods, but soon enough, that monitoring morphs into optimizing. Before we know it, we’re trying to control our emotions and natural body rhythms. Rosa argues that this relentless pursuit of control doesn’t lead to the good life, but rather burnout and a pervasive fear of burnout. We become numb to the world, unable to experience it in a way that resonates. As Rosa puts it, “The fundamental fear of modernity is fear of the world’s falling mute, of which burnout and depression are only timely expressions.”

This numbness bleeds into every part of life, especially parenting. Recently, the Surgeon General issued a warning about the pressures on parents today. At first, it sounded like satire — something straight out of the Onion mocking our culture’s fixation on mental health and over-therapization. I mean, where is this warning sticker supposed go — on bed sheets?? But reading the actual warning, a well of empathy begins to form. Not only are parents overwhelmed by the rising costs of childcare and the impossible maze of social media, but also the endless flood of information they’re supposed to both manage and master. Just this week, I received separate text messages about fluoride levels, radio frequencies, and forbidden foods for my own children. Behind each message was an expectation of understanding the argument and picking a side or else ending up on the wrong side of history … or worse, being labeled a bad parent. No wonder two out of five parents report feeling so overwhelmed they become numb. Our attempts to control have backfired, leaving us more anxious than before. The world is becoming cold and mute.

So where do we turn when our efforts at control have not only failed us but also created a worse form of uncontrollability?

Rosa suggests that instead of doubling down on more measuring and maximizing, we ought to instead discover resonance: a meaningful, responsive connection with the world around us. Resonance requires something outside of us calling out to us in some way. It can happen when you are compelled by a story, captured by a sunset, or moved by a song — anything that reaches out and touches you or causes abreaction. This movement leads to a form of transformation that you can’t cause or engineer. It is more than a psychological state or feeling and it can never be coerced or manipulated. Resonance is uncontrollable.

We see literal resonance in a tuning fork: when struck, the vibrations affect everything around it. Another tuning fork held up to the first will begin to respond in harmony. Or for those who ever played a sport to the point of exhaustion out of self-forgetful delight, resonance is like that “flow” state where in responding to the movement happening on the court or field, you become so immersed in the unfolding drama that you completely forget about yourself and your performance. Most players describe their peak performance in that state, but you can’t force your way in — it always just happens when it does.

Resonance finds its deepest expression in the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul describes Jesus as the rock that was struck in the desert to provide water for his people. Like us in the twenty-first century, the Israelites wandering the desert felt closed off from the world around them. The solution wasn’t to engineer a way out but to resonate with what God was doing by Moses striking the rock. They merely had to receive the water and be reminded of the God who was at work.

The good life is not about bringing more of the world within your grasp. Instead, it’s about being grasped by the one who gave himself for us. It’s about finding rest in the uncontrollable grace of God and being freed from the exhausting pursuit of control. In a world that demands more of our time, attention, and energy, the good life is Christ and him crucified.

What does this look like practically? It’s something like the simple children’s book The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. The child, experiencing snow for the first time, is captivated by wonder — even his own footprints in the fluffy powder draw him into a world of transformation and discovery. Like us, he tries to control and keep it, packing a snowball in his pocket for later, but it melts away while he takes a bath. The next morning, despite dreaming the snow would be gone, he wakes to a fresh covering of snow — a picture that God’s grace is not something we control but a gift that renews every morning, inviting us to resonate with what he’s up to in the world around us again and again.

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Why include such a petty detail here at the apex of the story? Some argue it adds a layer of forthrightness to the scriptures that make it more believable. In other words, while religious texts often seek to paint their followers in a positive light, this one doesn’t hide from seeing people as people. 

Undoubtedly this type of honesty strengthens the trustworthiness of the text, but it still doesn’t answer the question of why it’s here – at such a pivotal moment in the story. There is an abundance of sights and sounds from the first Easter Sunday to choose from so why land on this offhanded, gloaty comparison?  

One possible answer can be stated in the form of a question: instead of reading these words as John bragging, what if we consider him to be confessing?  

John has a front-row seat to the most exciting moment in history and yet he’s still stuck thinking about himself. Imagine sitting courtside to watch Caitlin Clark break the NCAA all-time scoring record, but you don’t clap because you’re trapped in your own head considering the ways you’ve made better life choices than your sister…or how that dumb friend from high school’s salary is double your own…or how the emotional intelligence of your supervisor could possibly be that low… or on and on we go. The scores we keep may be petty, but their grip on our thought life is undeniable. 

And maybe that’s the point. John’s confession is one of many invitations from God heading into Good Friday and Easter. Our intuitions during Holy Week often include doing spiritual things to feel closer to God. John’s approach here is to show how the doorway to things above, that is, holy (literally set apart) activity is never what we expect because it’s upside down. God is not saying to step up or speed up, to moral high ground, but instead to step down from the ladder of our ideal versions of ourselves and back into reality – to look at who we actually are in the dark recesses of our own hearts. Holy Week is all about acknowledging the things we actually think about because here is where we find our great need for rescue.    

Jesus died on Good Friday to deliver us from our daily scorekeeping and petty comparisons. He passed us up in our race to self-deification and showed us the end of those things is only death, but he rose again to bring us into a new reality, never again to be marked by our place in relation to others. Freedom looks a lot like self-forgetfulness, and the surest way to forget about yourself is counterintuitive: confess the scores you keep and watch them lessen their grip because the last will be first. Jesus wasn’t in the tomb awarding John with a first-place ribbon. Our races don’t flatter him, he’s never at the finish lines we expect, because he’s already out there working to find us apart from our best efforts. 

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The miracle of seeing two brothers continue to work together professionally without breaking up or killing each other is almost as remarkable as watching a love song be created ex nihlio right in front of your eyes, like when they riff “I Wish I Was” from chicken scratch ideas on napkins to chords and production and onto the big stage. 

Hands down, however, my favorite part of the film is everything that surrounds and is behind the harrowing song: “No Hard Feelings.” The lyrics bring us listeners face to face with our mortality – inquiring about the possibility of being ready to die when our time comes: 

When my feet won’t walk another mile?

And my lips give their last kiss goodbye?

Will my hands be steady when I lay down my fears, my hopes, and my doubts?

The rings on my fingers, and the keys to my house

With no hard feelings?

But more than this, the face of death brings a sharp, visceral confrontation with all the jealousy, lust, and nasty inner-angst we experience most days that end in the letter “y”. We’re invited to see how little these feelings do for us besides keeping us afraid and cold, ignoring all we’ve been given to have and enjoy. From there, we’re taken to a place of wonder at the freeing possibility of laying all these down and encountering supernatural laughter, light, and love: 

When my body won’t hold me anymore

And it finally lets me free

Where will I go?

…

Will I join with the ocean blue?

Or run into a savior true?

And shake hands laughing

And walk through the night, straight to the light

Holding the love I’ve known in my life

And no hard feelings

The song is poetic and palpably moving. But what happens next in the film is profound. The room of producers and support staff congratulate and praise the song: “Home run, boys – beautiful song” they’re profusely told. But rather than smiling and receiving the high marks, the brothers have taken a visible toll with this song, as if power had somehow gone out from them. They almost look like they’re crawling over the finish line of a long week at work after playing this one song.

And it’s here that we’re given a front-row seat to what truly draws people together. “It’s weird to be congratulated on mining the soul,” the younger Avett says before his older brother describes the elephant in the room as the fact that this is the hit song of the album – the one that’s going to make the money: “It’s the best song because it’s taken the most sacrifice to make. It’s taken the most living to make. You’ve sacrificed deeply, and the evidence of that struggle came out in something beautiful.”

The brothers have taken a resolute look at the lives they’ve been given and brought out things that we’re all afraid to confront. The song cuts through all the haze of life’s perpetual shallowness and “hey how’s it goin?…fines”. It takes the presence of death to see how often we’re overwhelmed by hard feelings that divide and leave us empty and cold. 

And yet we’re drawn in. We play the record over and over. Why is this? Because whereas other people’s strengths often keep us at bay and pretending, weakness invites us in and allows us to open up to our own inadequacies and experiences of being trapped. When someone metaphorically bleeds in front of you, a doorway opens. We’re brought into something more than the daily lists and measurements that wear us out with hard feelings of jealousy and insecurity. 

In 2 Corinthians 4:10, we’re told we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus. It’s a strange thing to say and perhaps an even more strange way to live. But these two brothers singing folk songs are showing the beauty in this strange way of being. The death of Jesus, like this song, gets to the point and silences all that traps us because our trappings are draped on his shoulders as he is strung up on the tree. It’s in his death we see with clear eyes that there really is a Love that rests at the heart of the universe. A doorway opens in the wound in Christ’s side, his poured-out blood making a way for our insecurities and shame to be absorbed and destroyed in the shame that Jesus bore on the cross. It’s an Active Love that finds us and replaces our coldness and the very existence of enemies with friends. Because in the story of Jesus, we were the enemies, and he died to make space at his table for us. In him, we have no enemies…and no hard feelings. 

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The flood in Genesis 6-8 is perhaps the closest thing to a Red Wedding in the story of the Bible. It’s one of the most substantial accounts of judgment and death we have on record. Things had moved from bad to worse since human beings one and two rebelled against God in the garden. Evil had filled every human being to the brim and the world once called good, even very good, needed a cosmic reset button that went as follows:

• Genesis 6: Instruction to build an ark
• Genesis 7: Judgment comes through an apocalyptic flood
• Genesis 8: Waters of judgment recede 

This is one of those sections in the Bible we may be tempted to skip over, censor, or even separate “The God of the Old Testament” from that of the New. Because let’s face it – it’s a dark passage. All that is alive that isn’t on the ark comes to an end: 

“The waters prevailed above the mountains…Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died” (Gen 7:20–22). 

Like the Red Wedding, a massacre abruptly shows up in the presence of things that are good and beautiful, like a wedding. Indeed, here in Genesis, we’re only 6 chapters away from the very first wedding and scenes of celebration at the song of creation. But suddenly, things descend into violence and devastation. The loss of all, save the eight people on the ark. 

Unlike the Red Wedding, the author of this story doesn’t hide his intentions or reasons for the plot surprises. The judgment that happens here is neither capricious nor tribal. It’s an act of cleansing. The New Testament invites its readers to see accounts of passing through and over waters of judgment as a type of baptism (see 1 Corinthians 10), where that which belongs to an old empire of evil in God’s world is being brought to an end to make way for that which is new and eternal. 

This is the Apostle Peter’s reading of these events. He sees Noah’s account of water deliverance as a type of baptism. It becomes all the more intriguing when we see how. Far from saying don’t watch bad things or fast forward this part, the New Testament invites us to ponder deeply how you and I are not the ark riders, worthy of deliverance, but the villains – drowning in the sea of judgment. And if we’re the villains then who is the Noah in our story? 

The answer rests at the very heart of reality, indeed the Apostle Paul calls it a profound mystery that has now been revealed. The Bible’s true and better Red Wedding flips the script on both the Noah story and The Game of Thrones when one man dies in place of the many. This is how God always planned to bring evil to an end, not by crushing his enemies, but by transmuting the evil of his enemies onto himself to die and rise again — out of the stormy waters of judgment to unite himself to his bride forever. All the things that leave a wake behind you in your life have been drowned in the storm of judgment at the cross of Calvary. And like the waters subsiding under Noah’s ark, your old self has been drowned at the bottom of the ocean and you have been lifted out. So, take heart today in the Redder Wedding of the gospel and in the arms of a God who let his blood mingle with our sins in order that we might be brought up onto the dry land of salvation. 

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[Jesus] said to Simon, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.”

Simon answered, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”

When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.

When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” 

Luke 5:4-8

One of the most significant story arcs the Bible takes is a movement from an old way of being into a new way of living and relating to God. Jesus says so in many and various ways, one of which is when he says that if you try to fit the new way into the old “you,” both are destroyed (Mark 2:18-22). In other words, if you try to insert grace into the old system of the law, you’ll end up with all the worst parts of religion and none of the benefits of the church. 

The old way is marked by the work of our hands and the emptiness that our work brings, especially with regard to spiritual fruit. This can be traced all the way back to our first parents choosing to eat from the tree knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Life under this tree (which not surprisingly reads a lot like law) can be summarized as: things get bad, to murderously worse, to exile, and then to 400 years of total silence from God. 

When the spiritual compass is put into the hands of human beings, we never arrive at a destination, because we don’t know True North. This is true in this little story: fishermen, who, if they know how to do anything it’s to fish. But here, they flop. Nothing to show for an entire night’s worth of labor. 

But then along comes, Jesus, who has a propensity to interrupt, surprise, and bring about a new way that does not look like the old. Here he takes this little group to the exact same place where they failed, and by his word they bring in a haul of fish that has exceeded anything these nets and boats have ever brought on board. The new way is fundamentally marked by the work of God in Jesus.

Our failures and breakdowns become the location where he brings abundance. His means of doing so are contrary to our intuition. It isn’t that God just shows up and provides. In the big story, the movement from old to new is decisively marked by death. The old has to come to an end if the new is to take shape. And it will be Jesus himself, who takes on the job description of fulfilling the old covenant before he sinks under the wrath of God like a tiny boat weighed down by too many fish. 

This is God’s means of overabundance. Jesus, like the nets in this story, is broken for our sins. He does this so that we can finally know him. And despite our proclivity to say, “Go away from me Lord, I’m a sinful man,” he says to us “I’m never leaving you. I’ll always bring the abundance at the end of your rope. Because this is the story I’ve had in mind all along. Now let’s go flip the world upside down with the only message that fills empty things.”

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Seminary’s main teaching strategy is to send you into the library to scour dusty books written by dead people, to evaluate and synthesize their ideas based on what the Bible says and why, and to bring all of this to bear on everyday life in all of its beauty and brokenness. The benefit of this process is that the ideas are not new and novel, but time-tested. In other words, they are “cold-takes” that have been through the ringer of real life. 

Which brings me to my five probably unoriginal “cold-takes” five years later:

1. Chronological snobbery will always be popular

C.S. Lewis coined the term chronological snobbery and it basically means the uncritical acceptance of the thinking climate common to our own age. In addition to being a great turn of phrase, chronological snobbery is helpful for seeing why all of us are pretty bad at having conversations about most things that are meaningful. It’s also why we desperately need a type of wisdom to come down out of heaven to us, rather than us thinking we only know how to progress based on our own intelligence.

For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age?
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
1 Corinthians 1:19-20  

2. Grace is the change agent of life 

Religion creates a culture of suspicion everywhere it’s found. It’s easy to spot, because it always wears some form of “you have to do this in order to belong here.” Those who view themselves as ‘in’ have a tendency to master the transgressions in the lives of those who are ‘out.’ Unsurprisingly, this isn’t just found in churches, but everywhere where a code of behavior is required for membership, whether written or unwritten. 

Grace, on the other hand, is God’s change agent for life itself. It’s his one-way love to people who don’t deserve it. God’s clearest articulation of undiluted grace 2,000 years ago flipped the world upside down. The same message of one-way love reformed the church 500 years ago, and it continues to transform lives today – making people curious, not judgmental. 

3. Proclaiming is more effective than how-to hacking

Despite all our efforts, our quick fixes and DIY life hacks have failed to rescue us from our very real predicament. We are more anxious and depressed on the whole and less able to even hold a conversation with those we disagree with on important topics. Historically, preaching in the Christian church has not been about telling people how to behave. It’s almost the exact opposite of that – preaching is the proclamation of work that has been done by God. It’s about good news and it is for the afflicted, the downtrodden, the sick, and the broken. It heals precisely because it is not telling the drowning person to swim harder, but an announcement of rescue from God himself.

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
Mark 1:14-15

4. The gospel is the answer

Tim Keller died of pancreatic cancer exactly one week before we walked at the commencement ceremony. He was a professor at the school and an example to many of us in ministry in more ways than can be counted. The drum he beat until his dying breath was that the gospel really does change everything and is the answer to our deepest problems. More Tim Kellers would be great but more people going all in on the gospel for all of life would be even better.    

5. Jesus loves you, this I know

Your job doesn’t love you, your achievements can’t save you, and that next thing you think will make you feel better will leave you just as empty and wanting as you are right now. But this is why the gospel matters so much. Indeed, the thing the Apostle Paul resolved to build his entire life upon, was the love that is greater than death in the finished work of Jesus on the cross. Jesus really does love you, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.  

1 Corinthians 2:2-5
For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.

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This is likely one among many reasons the Joker is widely argued to be the best villain of all time. He has a timeless appeal as the master of chaos. It’s his unpredictability that makes him so terrifying, perhaps seen clearest in Heath Ledger’s Joker asking his victims the rhetorical question: “Do you wanna know how I got these scars?” before proceeding to tell a traumatic story usually resulting in the death of the hearer. 

Those scenes were living rent-free in my mind this week while reading the first chapter of 2 Corinthians as the apostle Paul lets us into the backstory of his own scars. Most of his scars can’t be seen with the naked eye, for they don’t live on his body but on his soul. 

Referred to as “afflictions,” “troubles,” and “pressing pressures,” Paul’s scars are the direct result of the physical and emotional suffering he experiences in his efforts to share news of comfort to all people, couched in misery and distress. 

Our miseries and troubles are wide and varying. We wake up at three in the morning thinking about that thing we shouldn’t have said to our coworker the day before. Our brother’s cancer cells aren’t responding to chemo, despite everything else in his body dying. We get blue in the face retelling the stories of ways we’ve been wronged. Or maybe we join the growing number of individuals who are saying to their financial advisor for the first time, “I don’t feel confident in my ability to make ends meet this month.” 

It’s to weary people, like us, who are well acquainted with a sense of insecurity, that Paul is writing about his own experiences in the pressure cooker of life itself: 

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death.  

If you think about it, it’s a bit of a strange thing to zero in on, isn’t it? Making others aware of your own uphill struggles. You can quickly get dismissed as a Debbie Downer when you drone on about your hardships, so why is Paul doing so here? 

Fortunately for us, he give us his why in the next sentence: these hard things happened so that we would learn to not rely on ourselves but on the God who raises the dead. Contrary to the 21st-century obsession with escaping suffering at any cost, we’re told suffering becomes a doorway to coming to the end of ourselves. Or to say it differently, the door to God’s office is found at the end of our rope. 

Learning to rely on the God who raises the dead is a worthwhile teaching to be taken to heart and directly applied to all current pressing pressures we’re experiencing. But the Scriptures are always taking us a step further by showing us the why and how behind the what. In other words, we’re never just given an imperative or an example in a vacuum, it’s always connected to a greater story that’s meant to draw us into Jesus and his cross. See, for example, Ephesians 4:32 where we’re told to forgive others precisely because God in Christ forgave us. 

And here in 2 Corinthians Paul himself becomes a picture of Jesus whose scars and troubles are for our comfort. He says “If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation.” Before he becomes an example to us about coming to the end of our rope, he preaches a picture of salvation for us through his own suffering. 

The clearest message we have from God is his public death on a cross that in one sentence is the very voice of God saying to you “Here is my distress for your comfort and salvation.” This is the story of the Bible. It’s a story that labels all humanity as equal parts victim and villain. All are afflicted, and all are in bed with the evil of sin which leads to every form of heartbreak, pressure, and affliction. 

The resurrected Jesus has been and continues to hunt down sin-sick antagonists like us to tell us how he got his scars. When you hear of it, the death of self-reliance occurs – be it for the first time or the millionth time. His distress is for our comfort, teaching us to no longer rely on ourselves. By his wounds we are healed. 

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Then you have The Last of Us, HBO’s latest weekly blockbuster – a television show that is in fact based on the story of a video game. Since the first episode aired, more than a million viewers continue to tag on to the multimillion-person watch party every Sunday night, tuning in to see if this fungal apocalypse can live up to all the hype. And so far it has because people like my wife and me continue to look forward to our chance to tune back into an infected world where fungal zombies aren’t the only impossible problem to overcome.  

We might think we’re driven to stories like these out of a “what would I do?” sense of interest, but it seems the show is asking bigger, more compelling questions of us. The end of the world in this show really isn’t about the end of the world. Instead, it’s a pressure cooker, revealing what really matters. And surprisingly, it’s not survival but love that takes center stage. Let me explain. 

Viewers encounter the scariest scene in the opening montage of the show. I haven’t played the game, so I don’t know what’s coming later in the season, but I know it won’t be more terrifying than the terrain we already covered. It can’t be. We watched the worst thing imaginable already take place when the main character Joel loses his daughter in his arms. Society as we know it is collapsing in front of our eyes, but the thing that viscerally devastated viewers most and brought us to tears was seeing a father lose his child. 

I had not known fear until my daughter was born in 2021. I thought I knew what it was to be afraid, but then, throughout the first 12 months of being a dad, my limbic system said “hold my beer.” Catching whatever sickness she brings into our home every other week is nothing compared to the overwhelming, unshakeable sense of vulnerability. I am of the anxious parenting type that had to roll over in the middle of the night (more than once) to hear for breathing or see signs of life. As if my being awake could stop the demon of SIDS or the unending list of threats to the life of an infant. 

This is why I find the Joel/Ellie dynamic so compelling in the show. Joel hasn’t really come back to life since his biological daughter died right in front of his eyes, there has been no resurrection – no reason for new life – his heart is hiding behind a shell of self-protection, making decisions solely on the need to keep himself from experiencing more pain. But now, a force is at work in him he has not known for decades. Love, in fact, is beginning to shake him out of his zombie-like existence, as he is called to lead, and in many ways parent, a teenage girl again – to keep Ellie safe in a world that would do her harm. 

He can’t convince himself that he doesn’t care. He tries to tell Ellie that she is nothing more than cargo in Episode 4, titled Please Hold My Hand, but viewers need not wait more than five minutes to catch him in his lie. That night they are camping in the woods and after describing his plan to sleep through the night and then drive for 24 hours straight, Ellie soon asks if they are safe where they are before they fall asleep. Joel assures her that no one is going to find them in the woods. The words bring comfort to Ellie but Joel knows the threats are out there and his plan to sleep through the night is interrupted by instinct. He stays up all night, gun in hand, protecting his new daughter.

This seconds-long scene is easily skippable, but it’s one that continues to live rent-free in my mind. A sleepless father, emptying himself to keep his child safe while the world comes to an end. In more ways than one, it resembles the Bible’s own story of the end of the world – but not in the way we might first expect. 

The book of Revelation, which has endured more fantastical misinterpretations than most any other book in the Bible, is an “apocalypse” which literally means reveal. That is, the book is interested in showing us the perspective behind the curtain of heaven. What’s behind the curtain? Turns out the end of the world, like what we see in The Last of Us, is not about survival, but about a Father who loves his kid. This love sounds like the roar of a lion but looks like a lamb who was slain (Rev 5:6). Indeed, Revelation teaches that the end of the world happened 2,000 years ago when God himself lost a child. The Son of God, slain like a lamb, was strung up on a tree to save an infected world of self-protecting Joels like me from our anxious ways.

The world has come to an end, and the new is breaking forth. Fearful fathers can take a deep breath and look at the only father who is never afraid because he suffered for us once and for all. He stayed awake at night for us, slaying that which truly threatens to do us harm. This is the love that has come near to shake us out of our zombie-like existence by way of a love that never sleeps. 

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You Mad, Bro?

God says to Cain: 

“Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

That doesn’t seem too hard, right? I can simply extend my arm and push this crouching-sin-problem down, and all will be well in the world. But this struggle between Cain and his own sin is over before it begins. His anger has tapped into the corruption of his soul, already evolving into a plan. Without a word back to God, he invites his brother out to the field where he attacks him, and in less than a sentence, takes his own brother’s life.

God responds.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

Two Brothers, Two Covenants

This is not a story about anger management, but a story of two covenants – two brothers embodying two ways of living and relating to God. The first covenant is one of works, demonstrated by Cain working the ground and offering a sacrifice that he literally worked for with his hands. He shows us our inability to assert ourselves over the unseen enemy of our own sin — whose power is often underestimated, operating not only in our behaviors but also at the deeper level of our intentions. Cain’s job description appears simple enough, but in his effort to push down and resist sin, the enemy of his soul had already acted, leaving him worse off than the Knight from Monty Python. 

A life lived trusting in our own works will always end in dejection and disappointment, especially when others are shown favor. Success will go to our heads, further deceiving our “Tis merely a flesh wound” tendencies, and failure will destroy our hearts. 

The second covenant is one of faith, shown in Abel’s offering of a lamb which he neither worked for nor earned. Faith trusts in the work of God’s hands not our own. Like a sunflower orienting itself to its source of life all day long, faith looks to the Life Giver outside of the “self.” The New Testament looks back on this passage and colors in the whitespace, revealing that God accepts Abel’s offering because it was given by faith.

The Bible goes a step further in helping us make sense of this passage by unpacking the ways that Cain and Abel point ahead typologically to both clarify and contrast the gospel. The blood of Abel speaks to God from the ground, condemning the murderous intentions and actions of his brother. Hebrews 12 calls us back to this account explaining that the blood of Jesus speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. Where Abel’s blood shouted to God for the condemnation of the transgressor, the blood of Jesus speaks words of absolution, pardon, and release – condemnation paid in full.

Grace to the Restless Wanderer

Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

Cain illustrates physically, what all of us are spiritually: restless wanderers attempting to be accepted by God by mastering our sin-sick souls in endless pursuit of being better than others. It never works and our punishment is more than we can bear. But the good news of the gospel is not that God says “be less like Cain and more like Abel,” but that God cares for and moves toward restless wanderers. The consequences of Cain’s actions are more than he can bear, but God interrupts the punishment by placing a mark on Cain to protect his physical life for years ahead.

Grace is extended, unexpectedly, to the offender. This grace in Genesis 4 is a single sun ray hidden behind a curtain. Jesus removes this curtain completely letting the light burst into the darkness we’ve willingly let snuff out the former light. The warranted punishment is disrupted by God’s protective mark, pointing ahead to the undeserved “mark” of Jesus’ name put on the foreheads of the redeemed as described allegorically in the book of Revelation. This mark is a seal, proved by the deposit of God’s Spirit who protects transgressors like us from eternal death.

All are physically born into this fallen world, like Cain, under a covenant of works. Everything we do and everything we have ever done gets written down in a book. This book speaks to God about our just punishment and it is more than we can bear. But God disrupts our story of works with an invitation to be born again – an utter transformation out of the first book into the second, which is not a book of deeds, but of nothing more than names. Don’t return to the book of what you have done; instead, rest in the God who writes names down and moves toward restless wanderers to protect and deliver them from harm. He takes our downcast fears of never arriving and buries them in his own grave. He turns our sadness into joy.

Jesus walked into the field fully aware that his brothers were going to take his life. He did this of his own volition so that his blood would speak the better word of peace to you. The story of Cain and Abel bids you to lay your deadly doings down, down at Jesus feet. Stand in him and him alone, gloriously complete.

The post Blood that Speaks appeared first on Red Tree.

One inflammatory opinion gets tossed to the other side of the table and before a reasonable response is given time to form, another grenade is lobbed from the adjacent corner. The contrasting viewpoints suck the air out of the room, but the reason for the title of the skit is soon revealed when a savvy child steps over to the radio and blasts Adele causing the group to break out in harmony together, bonded by a song about heartbreak and relational debris. Perhaps, it takes a child’s eyes to see how only weakness is powerful enough to tear down the walls that divide us. 

What is it about gathering around a table with people who have different views than us that creates such inner instability? Why do we feel a need to put on armor or dig a trench when an opinion is raised we disagree with or find offensive? Maybe we’re afraid of being wrong, exposed, or found out. Maybe that article we read or video we watched that convinced us about the right opinion to hold isn’t even sturdy enough to handle the scrutiny of our delirious uncle. 

Nick Cave, the author of the title track for the famous mob-show on Netflix, “Peaky Blinders,” has a newsletter he started which answers questions from fans, but perhaps is moreso his effort of making sense of the world in light of the grief the comes from being human. Cave is familiar with grief as one has undergone the indescribable pain of losing not one but two children. In a more recent response to the question of whether or not someone should speak up or hold their tongue, he writes about good faith conversations:

“A good faith conversation begins with curiosity. It looks for common ground while making room for disagreement. It should be primarily about exchange of thoughts and information rather than instruction, and it affords us, among other things, the great privilege of being wrong; we feel supported in our unknowing and, in the sincere spirit of inquiry, free to move around the sometimes treacherous waters of ideas. A good faith conversation strengthens our better ideas and challenges, and hopefully corrects, our low-quality or unsound ideas.”

We are prone to unsound ideas because we can never see the whole picture on any topic. By recognizing we all start from the same foggy position of not having everything figured out about anything (see 1 Corinthians 13:12), we can begin to build something with the people we talk with, and bypass the common conversational cancers of seeking to win, inform, or instruct. 

Conversations aren’t math problems. The purpose of a discussion is not to bring our previously discovered right answers to the table and then prove our work in front of others. When we make this mistake, and we all do, we buy into a lie as old as time that we can garner admiration (and even love) by how correct we are – but in reality, we only feed a dynamic of superiority that always breeds disconnection and distance. 

At the end of the day, what we want is to be wanted at the table with no one to impress and nothing to prove. There is an obscure story in the Old Testament that shows us how. In 2 Samuel 9, King David is looking for descendents of Saul, the former king, who had previously made assassinating King David his full time job. Viewers of any big name dramas involving a throne would expect ill will in David’s hunt for a rival challenger to the crown.

Only one descendent is found. His name is really hard to pronounce (Mephibosheth), and he’s a crippled man who is unable to make a living for himself. He is summoned to the palace, and as he is placed before the king, he trembles in fear as one found to be on the wrong side of history. 

But instead of receiving the guillotine, he is shown supernatural kindness. The king restores to him the fortune that would have been his, had his grandfather Saul not perished, and he even receives a nameplated seat at the king’s table for the rest of his life! 

What does this have to do with Thanksgiving turbulence, Adele, and good faith conversations? Everything. In the New Testament, King David is shown to be a small picture of what King Jesus is like ahead of time. This means our place in the story is not the one who wears the crown but is instead the crippled man who is an enemy of the throne. We are uncertain of our lot in life and afraid of the King whose allegiance we betray. But the former enemy of the king, whose physical incapabilities resemble our human incapability of knowing all things and justifying ourselves, is brought into the dining room of royalty to eat with and enjoy the company of the king for the remainder of his days. 

God’s kindness is extended to the treasonous. He prepares a table before the presence of his enemies and makes them family. He bleeds and even dies for traitors so that their invitation to the table is irrevocable and everlasting. 

Jesus was nailed to a tree naked and exposed, absorbing our great fears of being the same. The need to self protect has been dismantled and replaced by the unshakeable safety that there is now nothing to prove, things are settled. Heaven’s heart broke when God himself was crucified, but it became a song that unites enemies of every stripe. We can even take a deep breath and be proven wrong at the dinner table, then go throw more stuffing on our plates. Happy Thanksgiving!

The post Afraid At The Table appeared first on Red Tree.