Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all…”
-TS Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
One of the most frustrating aspects of living in our American culture is, I think, our abiding tendency to need to know. This desire would not be so very annoying if we actually wanted to truly know, that is, to understand. But since that would require investigation, engagement, involvement, and perhaps even having to experience the effects of whatever situation has caught our interest, we choose to satisfy ourselves with a sound byte or an icon instead. Why would I want to go to Ferguson and talk to people when I can read a tweet that will give me an opinion to have? Why should I drive to my senator’s office and talk to her about an upcoming vote when I can hashtag a thought that has flitted through my Facebook consciousness and consider my duty as a citizen to be discharged? And why should I wrestle with the implications of poverty and violence in my community when I can allow myself to be lulled into the intellectual quietus of glancing over a blog and supposing that those implications are now “taken care of” by the very fact that someone has written about it, and that I have read and appreciated what they wrote?
Everything in our society seems as if it is constantly being analyzed, branded, packaged, and delivered to our door: food, housing, work, entertainment, thought, identity, hopes, dreams. It seems to be our goal as a people never to have to encounter anything in life for which an instant pathway to meaning has not already been laid out for us. And we take this expectation of a progression toward our own fullest realization of happiness, whatever form that happiness may take in our minds, and fling it up against any event that threatens to unravel our curtain and let in the sunlight of a world desperately in need of its stewards. Too long we have forgotten what our calling is here, and now as the inhabitants of the most powerful and gifted nation on the face of the earth we find ourselves arguably the most impotent of its actors: slaves to information, immersed in our social networks yet distanced from all about us, completely dependent on an economic house of cards that is built on fear and greed.
That may be too harsh an estimate, but I doubt it. The odd thing is that we know all this to be true. We know we are materialistic; we know we are shallow; that we are pampered, greedy and self-centered. The truth is that it stopped bothering us sometime in the late 90s as far as I can tell. From the pursuit of world dominance and the accumulation of creature comforts we have been forced by sheer boredom to turn to sexual deviance and the idolization of the body (whether through athletic addictions or a maniacal focus on one’s outward appearance), the historically unmistakable sign of a culture veering from its upward course to certain disaster. When we finally admitted to ourselves in 1973 that we cared more about human freedom of choice than about human life, and as a corollary that we cared very little – if at all – for the reality of a Creator God who requires a reckoning for blood spilt, the die was cast for an ethical decline that could not but culminate in class warfare and the destruction of the foundational building block of society, the nuclear family.
When there has been such a great gulf fixed between the way we live our everyday lives and the principles on which our country was founded, it is small wonder that as Americans we are so loath to delve very far into the deep inner workings of any important consideration. If I know that my freedom depends upon an acknowledgement of some kind of Supreme Being and a basic code of moral law that transcends my private convictions (we will even concede the Deist model as a lowest common denominator), and I know that such a Being must surely be capable of offense when I deny his existence and take his laws down off my courtroom wall, I will not be quick to look for opportunities for him to show up in my daily experience. And the best way to hedge against that happening is to imbue every event that transpires with the best possible outlook for my way of life, by empowering the media to dictate to me what I will think about it and how I will react to it. Then the pill goes down easily, and I smile and shake my head at the suffering of others, and I need no God to cry out to about it, for I feel nothing.
This is the defense of the already defeated; it is the last whimper of one who does not wish to survive the conflict, but only not to have to endure its pain. It is not the reaction of the follower of Jesus. When Jesus heard that his friend had died, he did not accept the sound byte; he went to Bethany to see the grave. And when his followers questioned his involvement, he responded with the Light of the World as his motive. It was the response not merely of an inquisitive soul, or of a caring friend, or even of an involved citizen. It was the very God who had made the world, angry and saddened by the entrance of Death into that world, determined to make it untrue. Jesus strode into the vapid scene of placating churchmen and weeping family members with the incredible Ego sum resurrectio et vita on his lips, and he did not offer words only, but through his human tears and frailty the mighty command, “Lazarus, come forth!” echoed through the halls of eternity and shattered forever the bands of death and decay.
There is a point beyond which we may not come with words. We could sit in the very presence of Lazarus himself and hear his poignant story, and though he would minister to our hearts powerfully, he cannot indeed tell us all. There is still a higher, an even more true reality which we may only know by going out and meeting the One who is himself the Resurrection and the Life. It requires leaving houses and lands, friends and family, even our very selves. But when we have once found Him who offers the water of life, we will never thirst again; it will become in us a spring of water welling up to eternal life. Come with me and discover the breadth and length, height and depth, of the God we were made for.
JV
photo credits Larry Patten
Author: Jeremy Vogan
My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV