I described Jesus as a lot of things in my last post. (If you haven't read that one yet, I recommend reading it first.) He is reliable, real, concrete, constant, ultimate. But there is one thing that I forgot to say about Him, which is one of his most important and revolutionary characteristics. He is salvific. He saves. (Note: According to dictionary.com, "salvificity" is actually not a word. But it sounds like it should be. And if it isn't, then fine, I just made a new word. A new word to describe The New Word, Jesus.) Anyway, if there's anything that people look for everywhere, it's salvation. It's healing. We're messed up kids. And we know it. CS Lewis writes beautifully about this in the first chapter of what I consider to be one of the top three books of all time, Mere Christianity. We know that there is a way that we should be, and we also know that we aren't like that. And we want to be, in the deepest part of ourselves, but the basest part of ourselves doesn't want that. We just want to settle for something less than salvation. Some temporary consolation, some fleeting happiness. And in our settling for these temporary consolations and fleeting happinesses we become convinced in our minds that here we may actually find salvation. And talk about blind faith. We find ourselves thinking that if only I find the right job and make X amount of dollars a year and make the right friends and make it with the right person and buy the right house on the right lake with the right huge boat, then everything in my life will be perfect. Mind you there's nothing necessarily wrong with desiring these things and pursuing them and even getting them. But let us never be so blind as to think that such things will save us, i.e., restore to us the happiness that we know we were born to have but don't. There is only one that can do that: Jesus. He is a unique figure in all history. The Roman and Greek gods toyed with man and manipulated him. Other places in history and including these other mythological gods, the deities demanded sacrifices of man to atone for his wrongdoing against the gods. There is nothing inappropriate about that, except in cases of human sacrifice and other atrocities. Religion is often blamed for the human blood that is spilled and destruction that is wrought in an effort to atone oneself to the gods. Christ is unique because he freely and willingly made himself the victim of that atrocity. The gods before him demanded sacrifice, but never offered mercy, never offered healing. This God comforted Israel with promises of it (we see them throughout the Old Testament - Gen. 3:15, Isaiah 52 and 53, just to name a couple of examples). Those who suffer at the hands of "religion" have an ultimate champion in Jesus Christ - the most religious man in history, and the most unjust victim of religion in history. If there be any worthy object of religion, it is Him. He made the radical claim that he could take our brokenness and make us whole, that he could restore to us the happiness that we all know we were born to have but know deep down we don't. And he proved himself right, by defeating the ultimate sign of our brokenness: death. And he proved it over the last 2000 years in the lives of the saints. That's what Easter is all about. Christ's restoration of his sisters and brothers, the daughters and sons of the Father, to the joy that we were meant for. To know Jesus of Nazareth and to love as he loves is to be a saint. And to be a saint is to have that joy.

I feel like writing something about faith. Not for any particular reason, other than I suppose because it's Lent and it's a good time to be thinking about these things. I'm working on "just doing it" when it comes to writing, so I figure I'll just write whatever comes to me now and if something else comes to me later I'll throw that out here too. Faith. A lot of people think that faith is "blind." There's truth to that, but only partially. It is true that we have to believe that God is the chief architect of our lives and that he knows what is best for us. But I do not subscribe to the notion that faith has to be based on zero knowledge, zero "sight" whatsoever. Faith doesn't blind us. Faith opens eyes. We saw that in last week's Gospel, as a matter of fact. This guy was born blind and Jesus spit on some dirt and smeared it on the guy's eyes, and the man saw. Jesus. With his own two eyes. That's what Jesus does to each person who has faith in him. I fancy myself a fairly rational person. I like to do what makes sense. So the idea that faith is something divorced from knowledge, from data, from reason, is something that I can't accept. But I sometimes get the sense that the term "blind faith" is used to imply that reasonable people can't have faith. I believe faith is imminently reasonable. I would not be a person of faith if I didn't think it made sense. Some people think that it's silly to have this faith, in God, in Jesus. But the thing that I always come back to is that everyone has faith in something. There's no person in the world who has not invested in something in the hopes of something good happening to them or for them in this life or the next. The question is not whether a person has faith, the question is what the person's faith is in. What is its object? From the answer to that question, other questions follow. Is the object of our faith reliable, or is it flimsy? Is it something real or is it an illusion? Is it something concrete, or is it shrouded in vagueness? Is it something constant, or does it come and go? Is it ultimate, or is there something greater beyond it? A person can answer that the object of their faith is reliable, real, concrete, constant, and ultimate, if the object of their faith is Jesus of Nazareth. He's reliable because he spoke true things and because he accomplished something no other human being has accomplished: He rose from the dead. He's real, he's not a storybook character. He's concrete, he's not just a name or an idea. He's constant. He is not going to be there only in good times but not in bad ones. He himself has suffered torment and betrayal, and temptation. He gets it. And he is ultimate. There is nothing greater in the universe than Jesus. He is the one who gives us life and it is for him that we live -- if what we desire is happiness. The greatest happiness in life is to know Jesus of Nazareth, and to love as he loves. Whatever befalls us in life, Jesus the Christ will be as real and as present as ever, even in those moments when we feel as though he is not. If I find any kind of "blind faith" admirable, it is this kind: not blindness of mind or reason, but blindness of feeling. I heard this analogy once: When we walk out of a darkened movie theater into the light of day, we often experience temporary blindness. That temporary blindness is because our eyes are having to adjust to the intensely heightened amount of light coming in. I think the presence of Jesus (and the Father and the Holy Spirit) is a lot like that sometimes. When we feel as though Christ is not at all present, He most nearly and intensely is.

You think I'm joking. But it's right there in today's reading, I Samuel 16:6f:

As Jesse and his sons came to the sacrifice, Samuel looked at Eliab and thought, “Surely the LORD’s anointed is here before him.” But the LORD said to Samuel: “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature, because I have rejected him. Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the LORD looks into the heart.”

Quite an interesting reading in light of the upcoming elections in my home state and others. For my purposes I certainly don't plan on publicly endorsing anyone. But it's quite a conviction of our tendency when it comes to choosing our leaders. We tend to judge from "appearance" and "lofty stature." We certainly have a good pool of candidates in that respect. You can't run for president or for any other elected office in this day and age of saturated media coverage without being able to both look and sound good. Because that's what radio bandwidth and the TV screens capture. That's the data that we have. But it's the heart that makes a person fit to lead, not the appearance or the sound of a person. Where it gets the most tricky is being able to discern real courage from the mere appearance thereof. It is easy to appear courageous, committed, principled. Gigantic, historic movements have swelled up behind leaders who were great at giving a good speech, and so won great power, and then used that great power to do unspeakable evil. They were good at appearing to be courageous, committed, and principled. But really being all that is something quite different. That's why looking at the heart and looking at the appearance are not the same. The Lord's own prophet was himself duped along these lines. Are we wiser than he? If today's recount from the Good Book teaches us anything, it's that an inquiring and thoughtful mind is an important tool in discerning who leads us. Here's hoping we each have one on Tuesday. (Note: The right vote was David -- King David.)

From today's reading, Hosea 6:1--

“Come, let us return to the LORD, it is he who has rent, but he will heal us; he has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence."

Is it accurate to say that God punishes us for the sins we commit? In a way, yes. The author of Hosea doesn't have any bones about that. We don't like the idea of punishment in today's world. We think of it as an evil, something that is unnecessary and excessive. But we are God's children. And any parent worth their salt can tell you that children need to be punished. "Go to your room." It's not because they're stupid. It's just because that's how they learn. It's certainly how I learned.

That's where punishment comes in. Punishment is how fallen creatures like ourselves learn to avoid evil. Children who are never punished become adults who never learned. In my job as a journalist, I sometimes cover criminal justice issues, how the state tries to deal with problems of crime. I can say from having covered these issues that when children grow up never having been taught by their parents, everyone pays, especially those children who become offenders. And the government must look for remedies--ways to teach these grown-ups who never learned to stop being children--with varying degrees of success. It all begins at home. The best way to deal with a criminal is to raise him up as a child not to become one in the first place. That's when you realize, it is a mercy from the parents when they punish their children. A lot of unnecessary pain is avoided that way. So it is with the Almighty, and us. Until we become saints in heaven, we will always be as children to Him. Until that time, we must be taught. We sin, we suffer consequences. It's like gravity. We don't look where we're going, we trip, we fall. That's how it works. When we fall, we learn to look where we're going. God could leave us to our own devices. But he knows that if he does that, we will just grow up to become criminals. In his mercy, he teaches us to look where we're going.