part 3
i have never been saved. not in the normal, physical sense, like i was drowning or got lost in a snow storm and some david hasslehoff-esque paramedic emerged from nowhere with his red trunks and orange flotation device, just in the nick of time to snatch me from the jaws of death. that [and i am pretty thankful it hasn't] has never happened to me.
and i think that is probably the case for most of the people i know. i cannot think of a single friend who was rescued in some dramatic way, by some hero or heroine. or even been a part of a dramatic rescue scene. my friends, mark and lauren, recently heard a huge commotion in their back yard and when they went out there were like eight guys trying to get some pit bull off of some other dog by smashing it in the head with a brick. i guess there was blood and screaming and some guy even emerged from his house with a gun.
it was pretty dramatic to be sure, but there didn’t seem to be any real hero in the story. everyone was pretty upset and there was a lot of yelling [and cussing! not lauren or mark i dont think], but i think you would be hard pressed to say it was a “heroic” situation.
you just dont see heroes all that often. that is the point i am trying to make. and yet we are so fascinated by them. we are drawn to them for some reason. i wonder why.
my hunch is that this is something that is pretty common to all people, to all cultures. i mean the greeks and romans had their heroes: zeus, achilles, mars and mercury. we have our own versions of course: superman, batman, the green lantern, david hasslehoff [i am thinking knight rider here, not baywatch, that guy is everywhere].
what is it about heroes though that is so captivating?
i think it is that heroes tend ot be above the situation. no matter how harrowing or dire the circumstances, heroes are above it. they are detached, not physically, or even emotionally, they are just somehow affected less to the point that they can intervene, i mean this is what is heroic; they are unaffected to the point that they can do something about it. superman wasn’t so heroic when weakened by kryptonite now was he?
now i wouldnt want to put my father in the same class as superman. in fact, my father is pretty well known for drama and over reaction. if you are ever in our house when he stubs his toe or hits his funny bone he will let out literally the loudest scream you have ever heard. you will think someone cut off his arm or leg or something. i am not kidding. it is very disturbing and to be honest a little annoying. to hear him sneeze you want to check the tissue and make sure no brains came out. babies start to cry 4 or 5 houses away.
but my dad has his moments. one time we were in russia, moscow to be exact. he had this great idea that we should take a train to china. they call it the trans-siberian express. “express” is a bit of an exaggeration seeing as it took us nine days, 24 hours a day, hardly stopping except to pick up some food in some remote part of siberia or outer mongolia. all in all it was an amazing trip and one of the best experiences of my life, but it had a nervous beginning.
you pick up the trans-siberian express in any of a number of locations but the terminus are in moscow and beijing. we had been living in budapest that year so we scooted on up to moscow to hop on. this was back in the early 90s, so the soviet union was still pretty much intact. i can remember armed soldiers coming through our train on the border of hungary and ukraine, searching each berth. i seem to remember them outside with big german shepherds and long mirrors and flashlights looking under the train for dissidents [apparently] trying to get back into the motherland. [probably this didnt happen. i watch too many movies.]
they took down the light fixture in our tiny room, because that is obviously where two pimply kids from wyoming would be hiding the microfiche tapes with all the high level soviet secrets. they looked through our luggage and made menacing faces and spoke in what i can only describe as a condescending russian. they smelled like vodka i thought. it was all very james bond, except the part where i was scared out of my wits. i think i had just read solzhenitsyn’s Guglag about the russian prison camps. bad idea.
there are two trains that run back and forth between beijing and moscow every 9 days. one is operated by the russains and the other by the chinese government. they switch places each trip. we happened to be booked on the chinese train, making it’s way back to beijing, leaving from moscow.
one other important detail about russia at that time. when you buy your ticket for the trains, they give you just enough days on your visa to get in and get out. this meant that we had about 10 days total. enough to get us to beijing, but not enough to do much else. they keep you on a pretty strict schedule.
did you know that there are two train stations in moscow? neither did we. and of course we picked the wrong one. after our mad dash to find the right station, we arrived at our platform about 15 minutes before our train was scheduled to leave.
i have never seen anything like it.
i bet there were four to five thousands people [maybe not quite that many, but it seemed like it], mostly chinese, running around on that platform. most of them had large boxes in hand trying to find a place, anyplace to put them. it was insane. the train was huge, maybe 40-40 cars and people were everywhere trying to get on. every car was now stacked with bozes and parcels to the ceiling. the aisle running alongside the sleeping cabins were packed leaving only a narrow strip of hallway to try to get through.
i think we all started to panic a bit, wondering how we were going to navigate this mass of people and find our way on. i remember my pulse quickening as the conductor blew his whistle, screamed something in mandarin.
it was eery. the next thing i remember is the 6 of us, alone on the platform, tickets in hand, backpacks on our shoulders. in two seconds the platform was deserted. one little lasy, holding a pink plastic bag, scurried across in front of us like a tumbleweed down the main street in some spaghetti western ghost town.
my heart really started to be now.
my dad shoved our tickets into our hands. my younger brother tim and i had a separate berth in the rear because we were the two oldest boys and you could only book four people to a room. i was 19 and tad was 17 or so.
we took off running in that direction, while mom and dad and the two youngest quickly moved towards the front of the long train.
it is not easy running with a backpack and i can remember being quite our of breathe and more than a little shaken when we arrived at the steps to our car. tad was not far behind.
we handed out tickets to the man on the steps.
“no,” he said in broken english.
“what?” i responded, my heart really starting to race now. “what?” i repeated.
“these are the wrong tickets. you cannot go.” and from the posture he was in i knew he was not going to let us on that train. almost simultaneously a long whistle came from the lead engine.
you have to believe me when i say that i am not one prone to panic. i am the oldest of four boys, we lived in the jungles on papua new guinea as kids; we had traveled the world since we were young. my brother and i had gotten robbed in france, almost drove our VW bus off a cliff in italy. we survived a tribal war over a rugby match. not much shook us.
but i was scared.
the prospect of being left on that platform in the next 2 minutes, in the middle of soviet russia, all alone, with my parents and brothers on a train to china left me terrified.
it is in moments of utter terror and fear that our instincts take over. i do not remember thinking anything. the next thing i knew i was flying down that patform to the only one i know could help me: my dad. somehow he not gotten on the train yet and i remember our eyes meeting as i sprinted towards him.
“dad, they won’t let us on the train! they won’t let us on the train!”
i know i said my father is sometimes overdramatic and reactive [he once punched a guy on a public bus in mexico city for no apparent reason. turns out he thought the guy was part of a pickpocketing cartel, but that is another story], but in that moment he knew exactly what to do.
maybe it wasnt this way but i remember him, calmly and coolly, telling my mother and two younger brothers to get off the train. if we were going to go to russian prison camp, we were going to go as a family.
the thing i remember most though is just this sense that my father had it under control; he seemed above the situation. it was dire, we were in a tough spot to be sure, but i just knew that in that moment it was going to be ok. he seemed unaffected by what was going on.
he was being heroic.
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there is this idea in the Bible of holiness. this is pretty churchy word and one that undoubtedly we have heard thrown around quite a bit, but i think the meaning of it has been lost over time.
the word actually carries with it the notion of separation, distance, apart-ness. i think that you can draw two conclusions when it comes to that kind of understanding of the holiness of God: first of all we could conclude that God is holy because he is separate from all the brokenness and trouble and distress of the world; he is disinterested [or maybe more interested in staying clean and pure] and therefore stays at a distance from it all. kind of like that person that doesnt want to get their new shirt dirty, so they spend all their time sitting on the sidelines or in their house. yeah they stay clean, but they dont really get to do much either.
i think the other conclusion is much more interesting and even consistent with what we read about God in the Bible. the other idea of holiness has more to do with being unaffected. i think that God is holy because He is separate in the sense of being distant from sin, but rather He is holy because He is unaffected by sin.
a hero cannot be heroic if he or she is a long ways off. and a hero cannot be heroic if he or she cannot rise above the circumstances.
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right after Jesus got baptized, the Bible tells us that he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. jesus was fasting for 40 days so he was pretty worn out by the time satan showed up.
satan tempts jesus first with food, trying to get him to turn some stones into bread. the guy is pretty hungry. seems tempting, especially if you could actually do it. but jesus resists. good guys 1, prince of darkness 0.
in the next test satan takes jesus up to the top of the temple and basically challenged jesus’ identity. “if you are the son of God, throw yourself down.” and the the devil goes on to misquote some scripture about how God will save him and not let his foot get crushed on the rocks. apparently jesus has a pretty good idea of who he is, so he doesnt fall for that little trick or trying to play on his insecurity. 2-love.
now if you are like me, you have some skepticism related to this whole scene. i mean, can jesus, who is God, really be tempted? he is God after all. and ok, sometimes i am tempted to eat too much and sometimes i feel insecure about who i am and that drives me to make some bad decisions, but what about all the other stuff i get tempted with? sex? and money? and power and control? i mean it seems to me like jesus is getting off pretty easy here.
i’ve seen more harrowing episodes of Fear Factor.
i have thought about that for years, that jesus cant really relate to my temptation. i mean it’s not like they had the internet back then.
then for some reason i started to understand the third temptation a little differently, think about it a little more broadly. matthew, in his gospel, describes it this way,
“the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.”
what struck me is that he showed him the glory of all the kingdoms of the world. i read over that for years until one day it just popped into my head, well what is the glory of a kingdom of this world? what is the pinnacle? what is the best that they have to offer? and in my mind the answer is power. and by extension all that comes with power: money, sex, fame, control, adoration. you name it.
the word for “kingdom” that matthew chose here does not refer to an actual literal kingdom. what it refers to the right to ave authority and rule over a kingdom. satan was offering him power.
maybe it is just me, but i think i gloss over the magnitude of what jesus went through there, of what he refused, of what he gave up. he gave up the right to rule [ironically, just after he had been baptized and announced he was here to set up the kingdom of God].
i get irritated when i have to give up control of the remote or when people don’t do what i want them to do. i give in constantly to the temptation of power and control.
of course the downside of temptation is that you lose something in the transaction: give in to anger and you lose reputation; give in to lust and you lose innocence, maybe more; give in to worry and you lose peace, give in to too much chocolate and you lose that beach body.
the point is this: jesus didn’t give in. he stayed above it, not in the sense that he was distant, just in the sense that he stayed unaffected. heroes cannot be affected by the circumstances; they have to rise above otherwise they become ordinary, stuck, like the reset of us.
the writer of hebrews put it this way: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are–yet was without sin.”
we have a hero, a rescuer, and he is not far from us.