snapshots from the hard road

In the first half of the gospel, many people come to Jesus with what appears comparatively easy faith. They touch him and are healed; it seems as simple as that. But for this man, in this situation, faith is hard. Not for nothing are his words regularly quoted as an ideal prayer for someone caught in the middle between faith and doubt, living in the shadowy world of half-belief where one is never sure whether one can see properly or not…(N.T. Wright, Mark for Everyone)

His voice trembled on the phone, filled with anguish, flushed with angst. This was no newbie, but an seasoned believer suddenly facing a sheer wall as the path curved precariously, unexpectedly. The ultrasound showed potential deformities in his unborn grandchild leaving foreboding options in every direction. So unfair. So hard. Why this...why now…

Another man sits on his couch. Diagnosis. Colon cancer. Major surgery scheduled the next day — but even with the surgery he’s given only a 30% chance of surviving — but no more than three years. And those are the good odds. He is not new to life or to faith; he has been around and seen much. He comments that a good friend of his died just last year after a hard battle with pancreatic cancer. He has visited this place with others, but now it’s different, it’s intensely personal. “This life is such a hard place...such an incredibly hard place,” he says as we bow together.

Another man, another mature believer, sits on a bench as if waiting for a bus to take him away from the “funk” he feels he’s in. A year and a half and more of seemingly endless medical procedures have drained the life out of him. He knows God is sovereign, he believes in and has seen God’s healing hand. But here he sits. Every day that passes only moves him closer to the next examination, the next procedure. “It’s such a long, hard road...I just get weary with walking it.”

And these are three interactions just from this past week — all sharing that common thread that Wright comments upon so aptly. This isn’t a summer holiday we’re in; and this sure isn’t a pleasure cruise, as John Eldredge observes in Waking the Dead. It’s more like a landing craft headed towards a hostile beach.

Why do we think differently? Are we still affected by the lingering aftertaste of a gospel that promises easier, richer, healthier times? Has it always been this hard, it’s just that now that our senses are more engaged as believers we feel it more? Or does the road really get harder, steeper, more lonely as we move along?

Perhaps it’s all of the above. But as Jesus stood in that valley with his own cross vividly before him, he seems struck by the hardness of the ground, angered by how difficult faith seems to be rising even among his own, sensing how short his time to be present to instill it. The demon-possessed boy presents a seemingly hopeless case — a looming shadow of a darker day near on the horizon that would confront them all with the hard places of Gethsemane and Gabbatha and Golgotha.

But prayer does prevail. Faith wins.

...In the story overall, Mark has told us that things are now going to be much harder, but that Jesus, and with him God’s whole saving project, is going to get there in the end. It will take all his resources of spiritual and physical endurance, but he will indeed climb the rock and complete the walk, right to the summit. He will take up his own cross, be faithful to the end, and bring in the kingdom. The question, though, for us must be: are we going with him? Are we left muddled, unable to do even what we used to be able to?  (N.T. Wright, ibid.)