March 1, 2010

Hebrews 4

My exact words when I was reading this chapter for the second time was, "Wow, that took a turn." This of course led to me explaining to my friend Clara what I was talking about. It went with no real warning from 'He will give us rest' to "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword" which you'll admit is a change.

Even God rested on the Seventh Day and it is that rest He brings to us. Then suddenly we're talking about the Spirit "piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow...all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account."

It's quite a hard pair to reconcile, but it's the balance we want to strike in faith. No, that's not right. We want to be both at once. We want to rest calmly in the faith of God, secure in our Lord, and yet never forget the way His Spirit will slash through our lives and our selves, remaking them stronger and better at any (every) moment. Always we are being separated from what would keep us grounded in earthly things. Instead of mourning them, we must look towards the calm pastures and still waters of the spiritual realms their loss has opened.

I'm starting to sound fruffy, and it's a miracle I haven't succumbed to greater fruffiness already in this blog, but I'm going to try to reign it in. Sometimes fruffiness is laziness (or lateness of the hour), but sometimes it's because words don't go to the heart of the truth the way they should. They delight in puzzles and contradictions. Just like we do. It's the soul of wit. (Certainly the soul of Much Ado and the class I'm teaching on it tomorrow, but) the world doesn't know how to talk about these things properly sometimes.

How can we be at rest with a sword poised over us, swinging about in what seems a random way to reshape us? How can we be at peace when we are again and again being called to sacrifice and work and defense of the lowly?

Because it is not the peace of the world - not the quiet and downtime that I hoped to get this Spring Break and have yet to find (early days yet but still), but the kind that you can take with you on your busiest week. My burden is easy, my yoke is so light. If you need rest, come to me. It's not a Personal Assistant He's offering His followers.

You can always tell the people who have found it. My father had it for sure. My uncle put it into words once, when on his deathbed he took a squirming, fussy nephew onto his lap and immediately the two of them fell into a peaceful nap together. He had inner peace. He was busy at a difficult job (family law lawyer and later judge) all of his life and always happiest when the comic relief of the world, but he had inner peace that you felt instantly. You could feel his faith and his love and his hope pouring out of his soul, and he touched so many lives in so many states of calm or panic but always with the peace of God.

When people say I'm like him, I always hope that that's what they mean - or what they might say about me someday.