Easter

What You Have to Go Through

Michael Schutz — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 02:32:00 +0000

What You Have to Go Through Michael Schutz Sat, 02/29/2020 - 18:32

As much as we would like to think the opposite, life will not be easy. One huge temptation for Christians is to seek to avoid suffering. But sometimes, there are things you have to go through.

Yesterday I shared some words from a pastor who wrote a poetic reflection on what Lent is. The last thought was this:

Lent is
Not a very happy time,
But it is what
You have to go through
To get to Easter.

Part of life is experiencing not very happy times. It’s simply a reality. But we’ve turned happiness into something more than emotion that we feel sometimes. We‘ve turned happiness into something more like a fundamental human right, and even a virtue. Pop culture has elevated even into a virtue like truth. (Pharell sings a very catchy, but very untrue, line when he says “clap along if you feel that happiness is the truth”. No offence, Pharell, but no one should be clapping along to that line.)

So now, happiness is seen as the highest goal in life. How many times have you heard lines like, “I just want her to be happy”, or “As long as he’s happy, I’m happy”, or even, “God just wants you to be happy”. Anything that infringes on a person’s happiness is seen not just as unfortunate, but as evil.

But happiness isn’t a fundamental human right; it’s an emotion. There are many things in life that do bring happiness, yes, but just because something brings happiness doesn’t make that thing good. We certainly don’t want to pursue unhappiness. But we can’t make happiness the measure of a good life, or even of goodness itself.

As the poet says above, Lent isn’t a very happy time. Christians reflect on their own mortality, on their sin, on the suffering of Jesus for them. These aren’t happy things, but that last thing especially is a good thing. The suffering wasn’t good, but that jesus did it for you is good for you, because it means your salvation. The happiness of Easter can’t happen without the suffering and death of Jesus. It’s what He had to go through.

And so we have to go through things that are unhappy. Some will seek to avoid suffering at all cost, even making a lack of suffering the measure of God’s love for them. So they’ll say things like, “you’re a favoured child of God”, which is true. But what they’ll mean by favoured is really that life will be full of things that make you happy: getting that promotion at work, getting bumped up to first class when flying, being healed of any and all diseases. (I’m not just making these examples up.) So what they really mean is, if you’re “favoured” by God, then life will be easy. There’s a phrase that describes this kind of thinking: a theology of glory.

A theology of glory sounds good on the surface, but it has some real problems (because not being based in the Bible’s teachings, at all). What can this theology say when suffering inevitably comes? What happens when you lose your job, or you miss your flight, or someone you love gets cancer and dies? What does that mean? If happiness is the sign that God favours you, what does it mean in the unhappy times? A theology of glory has no...happy...answer to that, because it doesn’t want to acknowledge the logical answer: that if the sign of God’s favour in your life is a life of ease, then hardship must mean you are not favoured of God, that you don’t have enough faith, that there must be some sin in your life that’s preventing you from experiencing these “blessings”. A theology of glory seeks not only to avoid suffering, and to make a lack of suffering the sign of God’s favour, but it blames you when suffering comes into your life.

And here’s the thing: suffering will come into your life. If never a matter of if, but of when. And a theology of glory, being bad theology, won’t get you through those times. But there’s another way.

Living life under a “theology of the cross” is the answer. A theology of the cross acknowledges that there will be suffering in life. It acknowledges that Jesus had to suffer and die for the sins of the world. It acknowledges, with Scripture, that the sign of God’s love for you is Jesus, crucified and risen, for you. Period. The way to salvation goes through the cross. There’s no other way.

That doesn’t mean that Christians seek out suffering, that they’re masochists. Not at all. It simply means they acknowledge the reality of the world: it’s broken by sin. They acknowledge the reality of their own lives: they’re sinful. They acknowledge the reality of the teaching of the Bible: Jesus says, “in this world you will have trouble...” (John 16:33).

But it also acknowledges Jesus’ promise: “...but take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Lent is something you have to go through to get to Easter. Suffering is something we have to go through. But it’s neither the goal nor the end of the story. It’s something you have to go through; on the other side of the darkness, there is light and life.

Add new comment

The Perfect Word

Michael Schutz — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 05:12:08 +0000

The Perfect Word Michael Schutz Mon, 04/22/2019 - 22:12

There is one word that we need to know about our salvation: τετέλεσται. It’s a Greek word that means “it is finished”. But there’s way more to it than just “something happened”.

Original photo.

I’m more than a bit of a grammar nerd. I’m fascinated by the way language is constructed, by the way words convey meaning and the ways they relate to each other. I’m such a grammar nerd that I have a whole argument laid out in my head (soon to be committed to this site) about why prepositions are the most important category of words. As I’ve begun to learn the original Biblical languages over the past number of years, I’m fascinated by them, too.

One of the most fascinating things to me is the concept of inflection. That’s when the form of a word changes to indicate things like the number, person, and tense. English uses very little inflection, but languages like Greek and Hebrew use it quite a bit. That’s why one word in a language like Greek can need multiple words in an English translation of that word. It’s also why it can be harder to learn other languages for native English speakers, because it’s a different way of thinking and using words. And, it’s a different way of constructing sentences; because of inflection, the order of words in a sentence are much more flexible than in a language like English. (I often tell my Bible study groups that if you keep the word order when translating from Greek to English, it can often come out in Yoda-like speech, which is actually kind of fun.)

Another intriguing grammar concept is tense, which is what describes the time of an action. We typically think of present, past, and future tenses, but there’s more nuance than that. One of these more nuanced tenses in Greek is the perfect, which is action in a past time but which has some relationship to the present. So it’s not just that something happened; it’s that that thing happened, and its result is still in effect now. The closest English tense is the present perfect. (There are additional perfect tenses in English and Greek, but for now, let's focus on this one.)

So, add the perfect tense to the concept of inflection, and you get what I consider to be a perfect word in the Greek New Testament: τετέλεσται. It’s one of a few Greek words that you might actually see “out there” in Christian circles, but really only around one day a year. That day is Good Friday, and the word (pronounced “teh-TELL-ess-tie” and transliterated into English letters as tetelestai) is the perfect passive (the use of the passive in Scripture needs its own post) tense of the word meaning "to accomplish, to finish, to complete". It's generally translated, “It is finished”. It’s one of the last words Jesus said from the cross, and you can find it in John 19:30 (and 19:28).

But to really capture the meaning of the phrase “it is finished”, you need to know that it’s a perfect tense phrase, not a simple past tense phrase. With that English translation it’s almost impossible to tell which one it is. Sure, the “is” gives a bit of a clue (and it’s the same clue that becomes a little more clear in a peculiar phrase like “Christ is risen!”). But one look at that one Greek word leaves no doubt because of the inflection; it’s perfect tense.

If it weren’t so wordy, a much more powerful English translation of tetelestai would be something like, “it has been and still remains finished”. It can take seven or more English words to really capture what one perfect-tense inflected word in Greek will accomplish.

Of course, anyone interested in the grammar of a phrase like "it is finished" (and, if you’ve read this far, thank you for sharing my interest) will ask about the referent: what does the “it” refer to? (Yes, super-duper grammar nerds, I know I'm not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, but that's formal grammar. This is a blog, so prepositions are the types of words we're going to end sentences with. At least, from time to time. (Doh! Sentence fragment! Doh! Another one!))

Where were we? Oh yes, the referent: What has been and still remains finished?

Ahh, now we enter into another fascinating domain: exegesis, the “leading out” of the meaning of the text. This post is already too long for what we’re constantly being told is the minuscule attention spans of the Internet generation (I don’t buy it, and if you’re reading this, you’ve obviously chosen the red pill and you can see how deep the rabbit hole goes), so, if you'll trust me on this for now, I’ll go straight to the conclusion of a lot of exegetical work: taken together with the whole of the teaching of the Bible, the “it” that has been and remains finished is “that which Jesus came to do, in fulfillment of Scripture”: to be the perfect Lamb of God, who by His sacrificial death takes away the sin of the world.

All this is to say that in Christian theology there is perhaps no more perfect word than tetelestai (sure, I’d love to make an argument for the best Greek word being σπλαγχνίζομαι, but that’s again a subject for another post). In one word is captured this entire idea: “your salvation through Jesus Christ—in fulfillment of the prophecies and promises of Scripture—has been and remains still finished; there is nothing you need to, nor can, do to accomplish it for yourself. It’s already been and remains completed.”

Perfect tense, perfect word.

Happy Easter!

τετέλεσται!

Add new comment

The Time Between Now and Then

Michael Schutz — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 03:44:41 +0000

The Time Between Now and Then Michael Schutz Tue, 03/13/2018 - 20:44

You likely won't see much by way of new posts between now and Easter, since it's such a busy time for me as a pastor. So here is a picture of some old clocks to keep you ticking between now and then.

The season of Lent is an extra-busy one for a pastor in a Lutheran church. We have more worship gatherings than normal (feel free to come worship with us at Concordia!), and we've got some new efforts being developed along with starting to look ahead to the fall for our school and preschool.

So, while I know the importance of regular posting, especially when just starting out in a new writing project, the reality is that I won't be getting a lot published between now and Easter. I've got so many posts begun, or at least topics sketched out, but I won't be able to do much about getting them ready to publish in the next couple of weeks. If I do get anything published, it will be simple, short posts. Which is probably not a bad thing anyway; I've been known to be long-winded at times.

Ok, most times.

What can I say? I'm a Painter, not a Pointer. (Yes, it's true. I'm an INTJ and a Painter. Go figure.)

And, just as a teaser, I've got an idea that I'll also be putting into motion after Easter, one that I hope will add some value to this site without a ton of extra effort on either your part or mine.

And, just as a promo, I did launch Ask Away, where you can ask questions that I'll plan to answer as part of the site. (And the first question that came in is a "let's jump into the deep end" one, which I appreciate very much. I've always believed that the best way to get into a pool is doing exactly that.) So I invite you to add to my list of topics to write about by sending questions over the next few weeks.

Thanks for starting this journey with me. I'm excited to see where we'll travel together.