• At a Washington prayer breakfast last May, conservative Roman Catholic, Princeton law professor, and public intellectual Robert P. George captured the cultural shift of the last ten years: “…For us… it is now Good Friday. The memory of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem has faded. Yes, he had been greeted — and not long ago — by throngs of people waving palm branches and shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David!” He rode into the Jerusalem of Europe and the Jerusalem of the Americas and was proclaimed Lord and King. But all that is now in the past. Friday has come. The love affair with Jesus and his Gospel and his Church is over. Elite sectors of the cultures of Europe and North America no longer welcome his message. “Away with him,” they shout. “Give us Barabbas!”
• He also reflected on how that shift will come home to us. “One may in consequence of one’s public witness be discriminated against and denied educational opportunities and the prestigious credentials they may offer; one may lose valuable opportunities for employment and professional advancement; one may be excluded from worldly recognition and honors of various sorts; one’s witness may even cost one treasured friendships. It may produce familial discord and even alienation from family members. Yes, there are costs of discipleship — heavy costs.”
• Part of me is glad for this. The conflict is out in the open. Nominal Christians will recede back into the culture. This Thanksgiving, when you are honest regarding to whom you give thanks, or this Advent, when you say “Merry Christmas” to a clerk, you are declaring yourself. Even those small expressions now have gravity. As English novelist Michael Arditti said last year, “… coming out as a Christian today is so much harder than coming out as gay.”
• The hour can’t help but have an apocalyptic weight to it, and yet the message of looming apocalypse is as old as the New Testament. So Romans 13:11, “…you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
• So also 1 Corinthians 7:29, “This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.”
• These are good words for us, filled with the power of urgency and direction. We will need clarity and focus to be faithful in these years, to stay on task, to remember that the cost is worth it, even while we quietly pray, “amen, come Lord Jesus.”
– Pastor Eric