The past couple weeks I’ve really been dwelling on the idea of remembering Jesus—remembering the Gospel. As I read today, this passage in the beginning of Psalm 77 stuck out to me.

You hold my eyelids open;
   I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old,
   the years long ago.
I said, "Let me remember my song in the night;
   let me meditate in my heart."
   Then my spirit made a diligent search:
”Will the Lord spurn forever,
   and never again be favorable?
Has his steadfast love forever ceased?
   Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
    Has he in anger shut up his compassion?"
                         Selah

Then I said, "I will appeal to this,
   to the years of the right hand of the Most High."

I will remember the deeds of the LORD;
   yes, I will remember your wonders of old.

Asaph describes his turmoil and mental anguish over his circumstances. Then shifts immediately. He says that he will remember God’s works and ‘wonders’ of old.

Every Christian can attest to God’s power to provide strength and comfort. Yet, we all quickly forget that he has done so for us in the past, when our present seems to fall apart. Like Asaph, we should make a careful point to remember what God has done for us in the past, in his Gospel in general and our lives in specific, to give us confidence for the future.

As Christ was being crucified, he was offered bitter wine, mixed with gall. He probably didn’t know exactly what they were offering him. Well, at least not in any human sense.

Matthew 27:33-34:

“And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall, but when he tasted it, he would not drink it.”

When I read this today, for some reason it reminded me of my niece. Like many children her age (about 10 years old), she is a picky eater. Often times she won’t even try things she doesn’t already know she likes. Even adults often times don’t like to try new things for similar, although more developed, reasons.

When you break it down, they amount to a kind of human pride. We don’t like to be at other people’s mercy. It makes us uncomfortable. The very act of trying something offered to us takes some level of humility.

This instance of Jesus, crucified on the cross, trying the sour vwine offered to him by his executioners is, I think, an amazing picture of the depth of Jesus’ humility.

He did not go bound to the cross with his chest proudly puffed up. No, he went in the profundity of humility. Though he could have deduced that even that act of ‘mercy’ would be girded with cruelty, he didn’t even deny the offer. He tried the sour wine and only after tasting it did he turn it away.

That is absolutely amazing.

Over the the past few days I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ last hours of freedom before being delivered over the officials. Specifically his humanity in that time.

He was with his disciples at the time. But, he was also with his ‘friends’, as he calls them earlier in scripture. In Matthew, he is described as becoming very sorrowful. He leaves his disciples to ‘watch and pray’ while he goes off and prays alone. While praying we see his humanity, possibly the most clearly. He prays that it would be possible for God’s plan to pass by some other means than his death.

In the exchange, though in may not be deliberately stated, it’s hard not to hear his distress.

After praying the first time, he returns and finds his disciples have fallen asleep. I can’t help but imagine what this must have felt like: absolutely terrible.

While he accepts God’s will, however painful it may be, he has also already begun to feel the sting of betrayal. Though he had told them what was going to happen, they clearly hadn’t grasped the gravity of the situation yet. Had they, they might not have fallen asleep in his hour of greatest inner turmoil and distress.

I find Jesus’ humanity in these passages to be both encouraging and haunting. Although it is rationally astounding, It’s still somewhat easy to think of Christ as a kind-of blank God-figure in human form. Coming to earth on a mission to die for his people’s sins. Then, moving on to return to his Father’s side.

But what is not so easy is to see Christ also as completely human. Truly suffering, not only physiscally at the hands of an obstinant people. But emotionally at the hands of his closest friends.

Jesus’ sacrifice truly was just that. A sacrifice. And one of the highest order, no less. For me, recognizing that Christ was truly all God and all man, are grounds which force a great deal of respect and appreciation for what he has done for me—for all mankind. The elect and otherwise.

Above anything else, I’m a Christian. More important than any other aspect of my life is that God has given me grace in Jesus Christ. My life, in spite of all its imperfections, can never be the same. For all intents and purposes, I cannot divide my faith in Christ from any other aspect of my life. If my life were water, Jesus would be the spout that delivers it to my glass.In fact, Jesus would be the glass also.

But, along with that comes a challenging tension that I have not yet understood or learned to balance. Though I’ve heard quite a lot of ideas—none really seem to be the whole answer.

See, I am also an artist and a business man (if those two can indeed coexist). My art is photography, and my business is in the wedding and portrait industry. Both of these are highly social in nature. As a photographer, both artistically and professionally, my ‘survival’ relies on making and maintaining connections with people wherever I meet them. If those connections do not exist, neither can my business or my art.

But that is also true of my faith. I am called to be a witness to the world of God’s grace in my life. When I meet someone, speak to someone, engage with someone in virtually any capacity, this fact cannot, does not, escape my mind.

How do these two live in tension with one another? How do I run a business and create art that glorifies God without driving away those with whom I hope to engage? I have yet to hear a simple answer.

  Today, as I sat with friends, I learned for the first time how to use Twitter to grow my business. It’s a remarkable tool that puts you immediately in touch with a vast number of people talking about all kinds of interesting things. Of course, you probably knew that already. I admit, I’m joining the caravan a bit late.

After learning to use the networking tool, it took no time at all for me to discover that, here too, I would face this challenge. A major element of Twitter is simply connecting with people over everyday endeavors. Where you’re going, what you’re doing, who you’re reading.

For me, those things are almost always connected to, if not wrapped up in, my faith. If I use the tool as most do, then I keep a world of potential clients, and more importantly potential believers, at arms length. Much like wearing a t-shirt that says, “Beware, I’m a Christian”. At the end of that day I’m engaging only other Christians and doing business almost exclusively with them.

But, on the flip side, if I don’t vocalize the ins-and-outs of my faith, I essentially deny the very foundation of virtually everything I do.

It’s a conundrum to say the very, very least. I haven’t yet found a satisfying answer to these questions. But I’m eager to hear the thoughts of friends who find their own ways to strike this tension on a personal and professional basis every day.

Jesus teaches that our sins are our own, and the guilt belongs to no one else. It’s hard to accept. Even after Eve ate the apple in the Garden, she told God that the serpent had tricked her into doing it. And perhaps that was a unique event in history, but it didn’t exonerate her guilt.

Matthew 15:19:

…out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.

When a man and woman who are courting each other fall into sexual sin together, it was not the situation that created the sin, it only afforded the opportunity for the sinful nature to exercise itself. The things and situations around us are not to blame for our sinful failures, those failures reside in the heart already.

Matthew-Henry puts it this way:

It is the heart that is desperately wicked, Jer 17:9, for there is no sin in word or deed, which was not first in the heart. They all come out of the man, and are fruits of that wickedness which is in the heart, and is wrought there.

A mere disciplining of our situations is a dire insufficiency in our fight against sin. To block our chances to sin does very little but paste a pleasing veneer over the surface. The only real solution is to appeal to the grace of God in Jesus Christ to actually change our hearts, so that we might desire different things completely.

I love Jesus’ parable of the Merchant and the Pearl. The parable goes that there was a merchant in search of fine pearls. When he found an extremely valuable pearl, he went and sold everything he owned so that he could purchase the pearl (Matthew 13:45-46).

It doesn’t say anything more, except that this is a way we can understand the Kingdom of Heaven.

Thinking about the different elements of this parable there are, of course, lots of things we could come to understand. But for me, what stands out is that the person in search of the pearls is a merchant. Not an enthusiast or collector, but a merchant. Someone who’s livelihood relies on his acquisition of fine pearls. No doubt, he would find many pearls all of which he would turnover in trade to go about living his life.

But, when he comes across this particular pearl, he finds it more valuable than everything his hard work has acquired for him and he sells it all so that he can have this one very special prize.

In this case, the pearl can be compared to Jesus, or the Gospel of Jesus. In all of our searching and working to find significance and worth in this life, absolutely none of it can compare to the value and worth we find in Christ. All of our idols and little deities we collect come to nothing when held against the Pearl.

And, like the merchant, the Church discovers that she cannot keep all her little treasures and capture the Pearl as well. We must surrender—in some form—all of these things we prize so that there is room in our hearts for the only real Treasure: Jesus Christ.

When the Passion of the Christ was released back in 2004 I don’t think I knew a single Christian who wasn’t moved by it. Christians flocked to the movie theater in groups and watched the movie together.

But since then, the movie has become something of a punch-line in the church. Especially among younger Christians.

This is probably in part because the secular world found it funny how Christians bought so hard into the commercial product. And Christians not liking being the butt of a joke joined the laughter. I’ll admit, that the slew of Passion related merchandise that hit the Christian bookshops was a bit sickening to me, and still is.

But I think another reason Christians have, over time, responded to Passion in jest is because there’s a certain and real discomfort associated with it. Just look at almost every other depiction of Jesus’ crucifixion in our culture. It’s extremely tame. When we are accustomed to movies like Saw, Jesus’ crucifixion, the way the church has painted it, really doesn’t seem so bad.

Growing up I remember thinking to myself, “Yeah, that sucks, but I can think of worse”. And certainly, there is worse. The degree isn’t the point. But we’ve brought the temperature so far down it’s barely even noticeable.

So when Passion was released, though not without its flaws, we were given the most realistic depiction of Jesus’ last day we’ve ever had in modern culture. Compared to the way we’ve grown up looking at Jesus’ death, Passion cut our hearts like a hot knife in soft butter. The difference is vast. And while we don’t seem to have a problem watching the gore elsewhere, when we see it like it probably really happened to our savior, I think we get pretty uncomfortable with it. (Perhaps even an indication of our guilt in enjoying the gruesome entertainment we do; if this were true, one would have to go).

In response, the movie becomes a joke and thus, impossible to hurt us. And I think this is tragic.

1. The Passion of the Christ was an excellent movie on it’s own. Regardless of what my faith says, assessing the film itself, it was done with real excellence. (Though I don’t recommend watching it as form of entertainment.)

2. A cornerstone of our faith is in remembering what Christ did and why. For Christians in the first century, Matthew simply saying the word ‘crucifixion’ was enough to invoke understanding in the hearer. We have no such connection to that word. Passion helps bridge that gap.

3. If we harden our hearts to the most basic realities of Jesus’ suffering to defend ourselves from discomfort, how can we have any confidence in our own belief and faith in those sufferings?

It may not be anywhere near Easter, but I think Christians—especially those in my generation—should reconsider their attitude toward this film. Perhaps even set a time and watch it alone and consider some of the realities of Jesus’ sufferings on our behalf.