Week 43 Sunday
Week 43 Sunday
Dangers to the New Society
Matthew 21:12; Mark 14:11; Luke 22:24-27; 1 Timothy 6:10
The greatest dangers to this new emerging society, the kingdom of God, came from two directions: money and power. The new society was threatened when Judas gave way to the love of money, and again when Ananias gave way to the same impulse. It was also threatened from within when the disciples began to quarrel over the places of power, and it was more than threatened from without when the authority of the kingdom of God, as represented in Jesus, came into conflict with the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman secular power. The authorities saw their power challenged and threatened, and they struck back with a cross.
Money and power crucified Christ. It is strange that sex apparently had nothing to do with it, though we usually think of sex as the greatest center of moral danger. “Hunt for the woman in the case” would be to go astray in hunting for causes in the crucifixion of Jesus. Money and power held the field of causes. They did then, and they do today.
It is said that Jesus “sat down opposite the treasury, and watched . . .” (Mark 12:41). It is a serious and awful moment when Jesus surveys the money side of our religion and our civilization. He sees how we make money, how we keep it, how we spend it, and the hypocrisies and strife that have grown up around it all. We feel that he is searching that side of our civilization as never before. He is probing to the roots and is laying bare the fact of the utterly unchristian basis of the money side of our civilization. His awful eye of judgment is upon that central moral fact. We will not be able to get complete victory in human living individually and collectively until we get it at the place of money.
O Christ, we pray you to become the Conscience of our conscience at this point, for here we need light to show us the way out, and we need power that will deliver us from the love of money. Amen.
Week 43 Monday
Victory at the Place of Money
Mark 12:15; Acts 2:6; 4:36-37; 1 Corinthians 6:12; Philippians 4:11-12
We saw that money and power are the two greatest sources of temptation in modern life. How can we get victory at the place of money?
There are the individual and the social aspects, and we must apply self-surrender to both. Money must be individually surrendered. That is, we will say something like: “I know I need money in a world of this kind, but I don’t need more than I need. I will draw a line at the place where my needs end, for at that place other people’s needs begin, and to go beyond that line is to steal from them, and I cannot do that and be Christian. In prayer and counsel with others, I will find that line and put the surplus at the disposal of other people’s needs.”
We master money by making it minister to our needs and to the needs of others. If money makes us more mentally, morally, physically, and spiritually fit for the purposes of the kingdom of God, it is legitimate and right, a servant of the kingdom.
In the social aspect, we should inwardly renounce, and get as many other people as possible to do the same, a system of money based on competition, which turns society into “a scramble of pursuers and pursued.” We should renounce this order based on the unchristian principle of selfish competition and give ourselves to producing an order based on the Christian principle of cooperation.
We shall not be able to effect this fully at once. Society is not prepared for it. We must blunder on and suffer more until we are beaten to our knees by the chastening rod of God, and then all will try God’s way. But in the meantime, we have renounced the old order and are working for a new one. On that basis, we can live victoriously, both individually and collectively, because we are acting as though the victory were already here. It is, as far as we are concerned.
O Christ, help me this day to renounce money as master and to realize it as servant by your power. Amen.
Week 43 Tuesday
Victory at the Place of Power
Matthew 20:26-28; John 9:14; Philippians 2:5-9
We must now see how power, which usually corrupts people, may serve people. Power is the expression or projection of personality. When the personality is converted, power must be converted along with it. But the matter of power has its individual and its social aspects. So it must be doubly converted.
Jesus “sat on the Mount of Olives, opposite the temple” (Mark 13:3) and surveyed it and judged it. The power represented in that temple had turned from service to exploitation. Given to serve the people, it now made the people serve it. It must therefore be cleansed, and if it did not respond, it must come down. Jesus is surveying the power side of our civilization today. His searching eye rests on the exploitations taking place through power. And we feel his burning condemnations.
Again, we must get the victory by surrender. Jesus said:
Jesus called them over and said, “You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all. (Mark 10:42-44 CEB)
I must, therefore, renounce all power over others that is not gained by service. All power based on money, prestige, class, race, or sex must go, and I must retain only that gained by actual self-giving service. This is personal.
In regard to the social, we must do the same. We must inwardly renounce all power in the social and political order that does not serve people in their total needs, and we must influence as many others as possible to do the same. Society is not ready to make that the criterion and test of power. Here too we must blunder on and suffer more before we are beaten to our knees under God’s chastening rod. Meanwhile we renounce all exploiting power and are willing to suffer through that renunciation. We are living victoriously as far as it depends on us, for we have anticipated the victory.
O God, help me not to bend the knee to insolent might; may I know no sovereignty but yours. Amen.
Week 43 Wednesday
The Cross Becomes Inevitable
Matthew 10:28; Luke 14:26; Acts 20:22; Galatians 6:14
Out of these social contacts a cross arises. If we are in sympathetic contact with people and situations around us, we react in suffering to what is happening. The effect of the gospel is to deepen and widen one’s sympathies. This means that your sympathies have been so widened that life will touch you on a wider front. So the process of your Christianization is the deepening of your capacity for suffering. Each new friendship you form, each new convert you win, each new injustice in the social order you come in contact with, each new sin in others to which you expose yourself, each new task you take on yourself will become a possible suffering point. Through the gospel there is a sensitizing of the soul and a universalizing of the sympathies of that sensitized soul. The cross thus becomes inevitable.
In the case of Jesus, his sympathies were universal in range and infinite in depth. He was the Son of man, so that the cross that came as a result of that fact was universal and infinite. It had cosmic significance. He touched all life in love, and out of that love contact all his being reacted in suffering. The cross is the focal point of that suffering. But that suffering was there before and is still there and will be there until evil is banished. The actors in that terrible drama unwittingly bore witness to this universal cross when they put up the inscription upon the cross in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. That was unusual. Did they dimly sense the fact that here was suffering breaking out into all languages? Or was it that they expressed his guilt in all these languages? It doesn’t matter, for it was the same; his guilt was his love, the guilt of loving universally and therefore suffering universally.
As you become personally and socially Christianized, a cross awaits you. It is inevitable.
O Christ, we see your cross is not an isolated thing; it continues in us. May I this day be in the succession of your cross-bearers. Amen.
Week 43 Thursday
The Cross in Action
Matthew 25:34-40; Romans 9:1-3; Galatians 4:19
We said yesterday that our Christianized sympathies become our Chris-tianized crosses. Cecil Tyndale-Biscoe devotedly loves the boys at the Kashmir school, and he strives to make men out of them. One day he had a pit dug in the schoolyard, and then to the astonishment of his boys, he stepped into it and said: “Now cover me up and bury me. I cannot bear to live as long as you do these things. I would rather die. You must bury me, or you must bury your sins.” The boys decided to bury their sins.
You will thus go out into life as a Christian, not to face evil so dramatically as that perhaps, but your contact with evil will turn into a cross for you. Someone has said that he wanted to build a house with no windows and no doors, save the slits of a cross as the only opening, so that he could look out upon the world through a cross alone. Beautiful. But we must not only look out on life through a cross; we must touch life through a cross. Our very contacts must become vicarious.
We must deliberately take on ourselves what really doesn’t belong to us, save as Christ makes us belong to everybody, and therefore, everyone’s sorrows belong to us. When anyone is called by an ethnic slur, we wince; when people are seen as outcaste, we are lonely and degraded in them; when one is hungry, we suffer the pangs; when children are exploited by industry, they become our own children; when an African American suffers disabilities on account of color, we become whiter with pain; when war takes hold of youth and binds them to its nefarious purposes, how can we be free unless we are bound with them—perhaps in prison as a result of our protest? Our love crimsons into sacrifice as it meets the world’s sin. In a world of this kind, a crossless Christian is a Christless Christian.
O Christ, make me willing to open my heart to its deepest depths to the world’s anguish and woe, and may my heart become a place of healing. Amen.
Week 43 Friday
Life Looked at through a Cross
1 Corinthians 2:1, 12; Galatians 2:20; Colossians 1:20
I had to leave my Himalayan retreat at this place in my writing, and face tragedy within our family circle at the Lucknow ashram. The wife of our doctor, a nurse—cultured, devoted, beautiful, just married six months—now faces death from a painful incurable disease, and has only a week or so to live. She will not be able to get back to her home in Holland to die there among her loved ones. Cut off at the end of five months of devoted service in India! My God, why?
No one can look in the face of this kind of a tragedy without raising ultimate questions about the universe. Is there meaning and purpose in the universe? If there is a God, does God care? I have no answer—except as I look at life through the cross. There I see a God who comes into the very struggle and suffers all I suffer, and more.
“Pray that I may get back safely,” said an officer to the chaplain as he was about to start out on a dangerous duty to cut wires at night in No Man’s Land.* “No,” replied the chaplain, “I will not do that. But I will go with you.” The cross means just that. God goes with us and lets everything that falls on us fall upon God’s own heart. I can love a God like that.
When I stand beside the bedside of “Sister Winnie”—at the bedside of her who would have stood at the bedside of thousands in tender ministry had she lived—I see light only in a cross. My universe holds steady. “The cross saves me from pessimism and saves the truth at the heart of pessimism,” said a Christian Indian professor. The truth in pessimism is this: this is a world of pain and sorrow and tragedy. The cross saves us from pessimism by using that pain and sorrow and tragedy for redemptive purposes. Through it all it shows the very love of God, seeking, redeeming, healing, saving. The cross is light—the only light.
O Christ, we come thanking you that we can see life through your wound prints, and that through them we can see light—the very light of life. Amen.
* During World War I: A barren void between the trenches filled with land mines and barbed wire, defended by machine guns and riflemen from both sides, making any attempt to cross it terrifying for soldiers.
Week 43 Saturday
The Four Who Bore Crosses
Mark 14:41-42; 1 Peter 2:19-24; 3:14, 17-18
That day, there were four who bore crosses. They represent four attitudes. The first was the impenitent thief: a cross of unrelieved gloom. He blamed Christ for not saving himself and them. He died blaming everybody but himself, and therefore bore a cross that had no light in it. Some bear that kind of a cross to the very end. No repentance, no reconciliation, no release.
The other thief looked through and beyond the shame of it all and saw that Jesus really was a king, and asked to be remembered when he came in his kingdom. That was the cross that had light in it. It had thrown him in contact with Jesus. That cross lifted up his head, and he saw the gates of forgiveness open to him, for his heart was penitent. That was the cross that opened in gloom and ended in gladness.
The third cross was laid upon the shoulders of Simon, the Cyrenian. They laid on him an undeserved cross: “They put the cross on his back and made him carry it behind Jesus” (Luke 23:26 CEB). Life does that with us: it lays hold on us and puts on our unwilling shoulders a cross. It changed the whole course of life for him and his family, for his two sons, Alexander and Rufus, became well-known Christians. Simon did not bear his cross, he used it. When life lays its cross on us, we can make that cross throw us in company with Christ, and that contact will forever change us. It is not suffering that ennobles, it is the way it is borne. Simon bore it well, and it made him.
The last cross was that of Jesus, a chosen cross. The rest were involuntary; this was chosen. He put himself in such deep contact with humanity that the cross became inevitable. He chose it. That is the highest attitude of all. Since life is bound to give you a cross, it is better to anticipate it, to accept it, and through it to lift others. The chosen cross is Christ’s and the Christians’ cross.
O Christ, help me to take that chosen cross and to make it redemptive for myself and others. Amen.