In life's struggle, it is perhaps too easy to belittle God's ability to supply our needs. When you look on your life you may feel shortchanged. Your needs, as you see them, have not been met. God has, in a phrase, left you out in the cold. You hear corpulent preachers glibly quote David, I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread. We resent it. It feels like an accusation. You have begged. You have begged from others and you have begged from God. Instead of quarters in your cup all you get are disapproving stares at your rumpled, dirty clothes.

Don't you feel guilty and accused for claiming to see things that one such as David did not see in all his years? To make things worse, you didn't have to live very long to witness the sorry spectacle of the righteous being forsaken. Television carries the images of the starved, shrunken and distorted bodies of babies into our living rooms. This not only occurs in distant countries, it happens in your own church. It happens across the street. It happens next door. It happens in your town. To someone you know.

We have felt forsaken. We have sometimes desperately begged for bread. We feel accused and condemned. We feel as Jesus might have felt when in great pain He cried, "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken Me?"

Perhaps God did forsake Jesus. Or at least withheld himself until Jesus died. Some have said that the Father was with Jesus on that cross. Well, if he was, his Son was totally unaware of it. Same thing. If you don't know God is with you in your pain, you don't feel his comfort. You don't feel his rescue. You don't see that he even gives a damn.

Perhaps because he knew he would be alienated from his Father when he "became sin," that in Gethsemane, he begged to be excused. And in that horrible, final hour He, like we, asked

"Why?"

Jesus died because of sin.

You will, too. And so will I. I'm not referring to the moment we pass from this life, although that is included. I refer instead to those moments of failure, those moments (and sometimes months) of depression, those fleeting thoughts when we realize our hypocrisy. And fleeting they are because we do not like to think long about our hypocrisy, our failures, our losses brought on by our own choices. The thousand deaths we experience because of our sin.

Jesus did not long remain dead.

He remained dead long enough to be embalmed and buried. He remained dead long enough to seal the tomb. He remained dead long enough for everyone to grieve, long enough to get used to the idea that he was dead. How useless the guards of his tomb must have felt their duties were. It is easy to imagine them joking about ghosts and ghouls.

And then it happened. The stone was mysteriously rolled away. The tomb was empty. Jesus had risen! He rose in majesty. He rose in fullness.

"And from His fullness have we all received!" We speak here of spiritual fullness. The kind that comes from God. Fullness that has lasting, eternal value. Fullness that establishes character and strength. The kind of fullness that stops hypocrisy, which stops a "sense" of failure and loss dead in its tracks.

Sometimes we have to experience death a little while before it comes. We must become familiar and resigned to the consequences of our unfortunate choices before they come. We must become self-aware of our sin, not in some liturgical process, but in deep personal agony - - the kind pictured on the cross -- before resurrection occurs. Sometimes we need to be quiet and repentant with the consequences of our decisions, before the character necessary to deal with them comes.

What can we say about grace? We are at loss for words. Even the Gospel writer seems to stumble over understatement. "Grace added upon grace," he writes. What in the world can this mean? Can it be said better? Is there a manner in which the rains of grace come as sweet water to our parched throats or in the agony of our screams when we feel abandoned by God?

-- PDM

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