A Glorious Dark, Review by Jonathan Storment

I am not very good at book reviews, what I am good at is something more related to plagiarism.  So if you enjoy this small mini-series of blogs over the next three weeks, then I encourage you to get A.J. Swoboda’s new book A Glorious Dark.

It is a great book, and I wasn’t planning on loving as much as I did.  Swoboda is a Pentecostal Pastor from Portland (try saying that 10 times fast), the book is funny, profound, vulnerable, prophetic, and hopeful, and just what I needed.

I don’t know about you, but most of the time in life I waver somewhere between hope and hopelessness.  It is easy to feel disenchanted and become cynical, or become triumphal and impatient.  Maybe that is why I appreciate A.J. Swoboda’s book so much.  Swoboda emphasizes that this movement between hope and despair is actually a legitimate part of following Jesus.  These very different emotions – emotions that relate awkwardly to themselves – are worked into the Jesus movement from the very beginning.

The earliest accounts of the resurrection and crucifixion reveal the first Christians as people filled with an emotional spectrum of fear, doubt, joy, hope, heartbreak, and confusion.  The Bible doesn’t try to edit out any of it.  It just leaves it in there, the traitors, the doubters, those too terrified to speak, all of it.  It is as if, from the beginning of the story, the Gospel is saying Joy, despair, fear, hope…all of it belongs.
This is the framing metaphor of Swoboda’s book.  What most people think of when they think of Christianity tends to focus in on one aspect of a particular Christian tradition.  But to follow Jesus involves all of it.

Here is how Swoboda says it:

Some want to suffer with Jesus; others want to be resurrected with Jesus… I want to persuade my readers that Christian faith is the whole weekend and that they must enter all three days.

For the next few weeks, as we prepare for and enter into Holy Week, I would like to do a short series that takes Swoboda’s book and applies it to why it matters for churches and pastors.  We will talk about Awkward/Holy Saturday, and Resurrection Sunday, but first before any of that happens, we must address Good Friday, the death of God.

G.K. Chesterton once said that Christianity is the only religion in the world that believes that God, for one brief moment in time, looked like an atheist.

On the Cross, Jesus screams out asking the questions that every prophet in the Bible appeared to ask.  Long before the new atheists started writing their popular critiques about God and suffering, Jesus himself asked the question, God, why…?

The past few months, I have been reading through the great Christian spiritual classics, and I have noticed that the thread that brings them all together, from Julian of Norwich, to Teresa of Avila, to Margaret Kempe, to the great writers of Anabaptist Spirituality, and the one thing that is common to almost every mature Christian for over 2000 years is the awareness that life with Jesus is going to not just involve suffering, but thrive in it.

In our suffering God draws near, and mysteriously does work in us that He doesn’t do any other way.  Something happens in our suffering, if we don’t shut ourselves off from it, which causes our soul to expand.  We can become more magnanimous, more compassionate, more like God, when we go through the difficulties of life.

Theologians have said for hundreds of years that – “to know God is to suffer God.” Because God is a God who suffers.

I love the way Dorothy Sayers talks about this:

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. –Dorothy Sayers

Of all the parts of Swoboda’s book, this is what impacted me the most.  Maybe it is because it hit so close to home.  So much of Western Christianity focuses on Resurrection Sunday, but my real struggle is in not wanting to spend much time with Friday.  I don’t think I’m alone here.  We Protestants don’t have crucifixes, we have crosses.  We don’t have Jesus hanging on the cross, we have empty slabs of wood, a symbol of Resurrection and triumph.

If you know me, or if you read this blog regularly, you know that I am a big Resurrection guy.  I just co-authored a book about Resurrection, attempting to persuade churches that we need to live missionally into Easter.  But all theology has to start with the facts, and the fact is that most of the world lives in Friday most of the time.

The divorce papers get filed, the adoption falls apart, the diagnosis comes back positive, people we love die, and the vast majority of people in our world live with some form of poverty.  Yet, when we come to church – the one place where we should be able to admit our struggles with each other – we pretend to be fine.

Our churches have created cultures where it is not okay to not be okay.  We have crosses on our steeples and around our necks but not in our local church culture.

This is how Swoboda says this:

We do Christianity the way many do pornography: glossy, shiny and unreal.  And the results of both are almost exactly the same – momentary bliss followed by a desire to experience the real thing because what we just experienced was a complete sham.

It is ironic that it is even possible for a movement that is centered around a crucified Jewish carpenter to trick itself into ignoring the nastier bits of reality.

But this is to fail to follow Jesus, or take Christianity seriously.  No religion in the world other than Christianity looks at a loss like the cross and throws a party in its honor.  No other religion would call a Friday like this good.