I do not deserve Christ’s Love: A Good Friday Reflection

I have come to the heinous conclusion that I do not deserve Christ’s love.

I, like you, want to rush to, “But God loves you so much!” which does not directly confront the honest truth that I am unworthy of a number of things, but most glaringly, Jesus’ death.

My worthiness has nothing to do with it. I have been assigned love, love since before I was born. Love that exceeds love has been prefigured into my life story so that when I come to this point of realizing how “un-”, “not” “a-”, “dis-”, or “de-“ I actually am, that I fall into a truth deeper than my most spiritual former self would be able to fathom. And I continue falling.

I fall into a chasm of grace. I hate falling. It is so uncertain and most certainly ends in injury of some sort. In this, I learn the painful truths about the limits of my body.

But I mostly hate chasms. They are terrifying.

I have recently identified a frightening chasm in my own life. I have learned that a great chasm exists between my wanting to be right and my wanting to be righteous.

Chasms are frightening and loose, intensely all-encompassing.

They swallow whole. They linger in a darkness too thick to see. The vastness of this thing renders it dark. It is so big it is unseeable.

Darkness is not a sign despair – it is a sign of limitlessness. It holds too much potential that it renders it unseen.

This to me, is scary.

Jesus’ love is chasmic.

I mean, think about it: who embraces death, that which causes me to doubt them, to question my confidence in them? God does.

Who embraces death, the very thing that steals the breath out of life? God does.

Who moves towards and lives into death, that which humanity begrudgingly and indignantly moves forward into and hates intensely? God does.

Death is furious, untamable. Unless God takes it into God’s self.

What if the chasm of death is swallowed whole into the chasmic-ness of life?

What if it takes a life and actions and inactions that don’t make sense in order to make sense of the world, to make this life right again?

It leads me to the one thing I began with: I don’t deserve it.

This holy math that Jesus teaches us, I don’t understand it and I certainly don’t deserve to be told “correct!” to a problem set, a set of problems, that I have no idea how to even approach.

How can my answer be “correct!” when I have no answer?

I have Christ. Christ is the only one I can offer up not as a response to these set of problems, but as a plea for mercy.

“Christ” being my answer automatically renders me, “correct!”

But how can this be so? I am not “correct!” At best, I am a “huh?”

So maybe I am living into my ignorance of the chasm in which I am not renting space in, but hold permanent residence within.

I am starting to understand that I do not understand.

I do not make sense. My path does not make sense. How I think about God or think that I even know God does not make sense.

But somehow a Man claiming to be God’s Son changes all my questions into expressions of certainty, even though, or perhaps especially since I am not certain.

I am not certain, but somehow I am.

I am confused, but somehow my existence is supposed to be confusing.

I was never going to do or do right on my own. I simply cannot.

I need God, I need others.

I need chasms, chasms I am deathly afraid of but chasms that redeem me, chasms that confuse me and chasms that certify me.

I do not deserve Christ’s love. But somehow God’s grace, Christ’s life and the Spirit of the Living God spoke together, deliberated and determined that I deserve a chasmic existence.

May we all never stop falling.