He Had One Job: Jesus, Terrorism, and Holy Week

After posting my lament yesterday, my limited Facebook/Twitter moments turned out to be a bombardment of #prayforbrussels and even some #sendinggoodthoughts along with the sort of usual grief that is the ubiquity of every terrorist attack. And so I spent the rest of the day wondering, ‘why bring Jesus into it’? Sure, it’s what I do. It’s my schtick. Want to know what’s wrong with the world? We are. What can we do to fix it? Fling ourselves into the arms of Jesus. I stand by this onerous meme of mine. I have no wish to move past it.

That said, since we seem to have just gotten used to terrorism and don’t mind it, I guess, I’d just like to contrast Jesus with our current ruling elite, because when someone like me says “let’s pray”, I don’t mean a tepid #prayfor[insertlatestchaos]. Prayer is all I have and it’s not wasted time. On the other hand, the powers and principalities of the world, who have, you might say, One Job, could do a little more than #sendgoodthoughts.

So, let’s look at Jesus, for a moment, and see what kind of person he was. First of all, he was a man. He wasn’t a whispy, deep gazing, “let’s change the world together” man who made you feel super special when you looked into his eyes and so you followed him to Jerusalem to watch him die. He wasn’t considering gender reassignment surgery because he just felt that it would somehow be better to be a woman. Neither was he bombastic and full of hot air. He was a man we don’t see around much anymore, he was a bridegroom.

The bridegroom in the bible is someone who is intending to marry and nothing will hinder him, not even the dubious morals and behavior of the bride. He isn’t helpless. He doesn’t stand by catatonically while the bride and her mother run roughshod over the rest of humanity, freaking out about the dress. This bridegroom organizes the wedding himself. And because the bride always does dumb things and falls into a bad way–making alliances with all the wrong people, falling into the hands of pure evil, perpetrating a vile amount of evil herself–he can’t marry her until he has beat back her enemies and made her fall in love with him.

He has, in other words, to go to war. The gospels are not a precious account of a dashing Caucasian who just wanted to love the world. But the world didn’t want to be loved, ya know. No, the gospels are Jesus going to war, engaging in an all out battle, in which he was willing to spend his life, against the enemies of his bride. Those enemies would be Satan, naturally, as well as sin and death. When Jesus was hanging on the cross, dying, he was dealing his own death blow to the enemy of his beloved.

This puts in perspective the anger you see when you read the whole bible. Jesus is, at certain points, really really, really angry. In the OT also, there is a lot of rage, on both sides. Humanity is angry at God, and God is angry at humanity. But God’s anger isn’t irrational. It isn’t a bubbling well of chaos. His anger is against sin because sin leads to death, the death of the one he loves. And his anger was so great, so powerful, that he himself went to war against this enemy and won.

That’s what Holy Week is all about. It’s not just a time to be sad and wander around after the emaciated suffering Jesus. It is a time to watch the battle play out. To see the strategy, to exalt over the greatest victory of all time. Death itself is defeated, put down, crushed, and the bride is saved from her terrible fate.

Contrast that with our western Powers. There is a war going on, with an enemy, a real enemy, but only one side has shown up to fight. The terrorists of our day are organized, dedicated, sure of their righteousness, spreading mayhem and bloodshed in the name of a false and twisted god. And what do the men on my side of the battle do? Lecture me. Belittle me. Tell me not to worry. And in the midst of the lecturing, they don’t do their One Job, which is to protect and care for the people trundling along in their streets, trying to get on a plane or go into a supermarket.

We don’t need #goodthoughts. We need leaders who care more about their people than they do about themselves. And this is why Jesus is the only solution. Because Jesus is the only living human being who cared more for another than he did for himself. There has to be repentance. There has to be all people everywhere saying sorry to God and asking for help. Because right now, the deeply selfish culturally suicidal actions of the political elite are so entrenched that only God, the real one, can do anything about them.