PARTICIPANTS IN HIS LIFE
2 Peter 1:3-4 His divine power has given us
everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who
called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very
great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the
divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
“Entering a tavern in the
Polish countryside, a Rabbi saw two peasants at a table, both gloriously in
their cups. Each was protesting how much he loved the other, when Ivan said to
Peter: ‘Peter, tell me what hurts me?’ Bleary-eyed, Peter looked at Ivan” ‘How
do I know what hurts you?’ Ivan’s answer was swift: “If you don’t know what
hurts me, how can you say you love me?’”
And the Divine double take, of
course, is that loving ourselves frees us to love others. There’s a passage in
the novel The Face Beside the Fire that I have been unable to get out of my
mind. Laurens Van der Post describes an insecure woman in fierce competition
with her husband. To avoid revealing her vulnerability, she foregoes
tenderness. ‘Slowly she is poisoning Albert [with a] poison…found in no
chemist’s shop….It is a poison brewed from all the words, the delicate, tender,
burning trivialities and petty endearments she’s never used.’ The love we
withhold through our power struggles in marriage and in our relationships is
liberated through our union with Jesus. It is a new way of living in which
comparisons, contrasts, rivalries, competition and power trips are gradually
left behind.
The compassionate love of Jesus at work
within us is an empowering to suffer with, endure with, struggle with, partake
of, be moved in the depths of our being for the hunger, nakedness, loneliness,
pain, squalid choices and failed dreams of our brothers and sisters in the
human family. We don’t have to join mission works in places unknown to us. The
passion of Christ is being played out in our own communities, perhaps in our
own homes, in anyone who is in agony of flesh or spirit. Jesus is there not in
some vague, eerie way but as a real presence-for what we do for the least of
our brothers and sister, we do for Him. On that Calvary next door where Christ
still hangs, I will minister to my Savior and my Lord.