Following Jesus in Fearful Times
For most of us, these are the most fearful times we’ve ever known. We’re conflicted about watching the news. It’s like how we’re conflicted when we see an accident on the highway; we’re curious, but we don’t want to see and be unable to unsee.
The news is that way. We know that the changes are dramatic and that the situation changes from one moment to the next. So we want to know the latest. But the news is usually discouraging. So we’re not sure we actually do want to know.
As of this writing (2:20 EDT, Apr 3, 20) there are more than a quarter million confirmed US cases of Covid-19 (the disease caused by the new coronavirus), with more than six thousand deaths (more than a million cases worldwide, with almost 57,000 deaths).
We’re not yet hearing that we’ve gotten the upper hand on the pandemic. The numbers continue to climb. Our best hope is that the numbers will climb slowly enough that our healthcare system can keep up with the demand.
And we have no idea what things will look like when we do come out of it: our depleted healthcare system, our ruined economy, our shattered social norms.
The ground is shifting beneath our feet.
Fear is in the air we breathe.
How should Christ-followers respond to this kind of stress? What do we do with this toxic atmosphere of fear in our lives?
What do we know, what resource do we have, that can help us cope with this rising tide of fear?
There is much we don’t know, so our best approach is to look to two essential truths that we do know:
1. We follow a Master who knew what it is to suffer. Hundreds of years before his time, the prophet Isaiah called him “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” And just in case we got the wrong idea, Jesus told us we would suffer too. In fact, he employed a ghastly image to drive that point home: he told us that if we want to follow him, each of us must take up the particular cross assigned to us.
For most of us, our present cross is our anxiety and fear. Knowing how all this will turn out would be bad enough, but it is the waiting without knowing that makes it even worse. We are tempted to feel we must create solutions for every conceivable worst-case scenario, and we cannot imagine such a thing. And we worry all the more.
For some, that cross takes the form of crushing isolation and loneliness. What makes it worse, of course, is that our isolation is an essential strategy. What makes it still worse is that this cross is laid on people who were already lonely and isolated, our seniors who live alone.
For health care workers, their cross is the monumental demands that these times place on them. Like us, they have concerns for their own health and the well-being of their loved ones. But they have the added strain of the long hours and their personal risk of illness. The threats that are probable for the rest of us are actual for them.
But we all are followers of a man who knew how to suffer. He knew how to grieve for his own sorrows and for ours. He is, Hebrews says, a high priest who understands our weakness.
2. We follow “a God who knows his way out of the grave.” I have GK Chesterton to thank for that glorious line. The empty tomb of Jesus played a crucial role in the sermons of the early church. They knew that the Resurrection of Jesus changed everything. That singular event casts a bright shadow over everything that follows, over all our sorrows and fears.
Because Jesus rose, we know that disease will not have the last word.
Because Jesus rose, death has been fatally wounded.
Because Jesus rose, we will someday see our present sufferings, incredibly, as something light and momentary.
We don’t know how this pandemic will come to an end, and we don’t know how our lives will be changed on the other side. But we do know that Jesus suffered deeply in our place.
And we do know, praise God, that Jesus’ tomb is empty.
And that changes everything.
Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor
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