Conviction

Reading about a certain friend of mine today made me realize how complacent I am in my happy circle of friends. Not that a happy circle is bad in itself, but there is clearly something fishy if that's all there is to it. I was a nice acquaintance to him, but could I have done more? Surely. Why was I ok with wasting away chances to put joy into his life, to renew his person? Why was I ok with putting my joy before his? I am so apathetic that it hurts.

I must remove passivity from my world; I must remove passivity from *their* world. The gospel is not idle; the Word of God is not inactive. No, the gospel is alive; the Word of God is living and active! There is something wrong with me if I am so blissfully content with the fact that others do not know the same joy, that they are heading to dire straits. I need to let them know that they can do away with dispassion of sin; that they can fill it with passion of the gospel.

"O my brothers, I dedicate and direct you to a new nobility: you shall become procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future -- verily, not to a nobility that you might buy like shopkeepers and with shopkeepers' gold: for whatever has its price has little value. Not whence you came shall henceforth constitute your honor, but whither you are going! Your will and your foot which has a will to go over and beyond yourselves -- that shall constitute your new honor."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"When Jesus rose again, God's whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of new potential and possibility. Indeed, precisely because part of that new possibility is for human beings themselves to be revived and renewed, the resurrection of Jesus doesn't leave us as passive, helpless spectators. We find ourselves lifted up, set on our feet, given new breath in our lungs, and commissioned to go and make new creation happen in the world.

That is, indeed, the interpretation of the resurrection which fits most closely the view of Jesus's life and work which I have presented. If it is the case that Israel's vocation was to be the people through whom the one God would rescue his beloved creation; if it is the case that Jesus believed himself, as God's Messiah, to be bearing Israel's vocation in himself; and if it is really true that in going to his death he took upon himself, and in some sense exhausted, the full weight of the world's evil -- then clearly there is indeed a task waiting to be done. The music he wrote must now be performed. The early disciples saw this, and got on with it. When Jesus emerged from the tomb, justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty rose with him. Something has happened in and through Jesus as a result of which the world is a different place, a place where heaven and earth have been joined forever. God's future has arrived in the present. Instead of mere echoes, we hear the voice itself: a voice which speaks of rescue from evil and death, and hence of new creation."

- N.T. Wright, Simply Christian