We Can’t Handle This Much Jesus
… I might be known to say Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, with more than a little indifference.
I don’t always expect Him to show.
And even when I do, I anticipate Him coming with His hands clean and His hair combed and never engaging in the banter another recent table guest endured about medical exams men get for their 50th birthdays and legendary effects of compression shorts.
No. When I say, Come, Lord Jesus, and expect Him to actually show up, I figure He’ll put His napkin in his lap and say please and thank you and pass the food in the right direction (clockwise, thank you).
And that might just be more offensive than not expecting Him to come at all.
Who said anything about safe?
In a famous conversation between beavers and children, C.S. Lewis illustrated the great truth that a thing could be both good and terrible. As Mr. and Mrs. Beaver told the Pevensie children about the great Lion, they grew uneasy. Finally, one asked if Aslan wasn’t safe.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
Pastor and author Matt Woodley suggests that when we pray such invocations as Come, Lord Jesus, we call on Him to show up. We let loose our own control and agree to journey with an undomesticated God. “He’s good,” Woodley says, seemingly echoing Lewis. “But he’s not tame.”
I want Him to make things work out nicely. Gently. Easily.
But Woodley kicks a leg out from under my chair, reminding me that when we invoke the presence of Jesus Christ, we open the “God-box.” And when we do that, we’d better hold on.
We always get more than we expected – more joy, more love, more danger, more adventure, more suffering and more holiness. And prayer doesn’t draw us from a world of care; as we join with Jesus, he calls us (and sometimes drags us) back into a world of care, danger and brokenness.” (The Folly of Prayer, p. 113)
…The townsfolk swallowed down hard the wonder and majesty of the wild man subdued, and then vomited it back up, to consider that welcoming Jesus into their midst might just cost them.
The wild man scared them a little. The wild Jesus scared them more. Woodley says this:
Sure, we’ve got this crazy beast of a man who cuts himself with stones and howls through the night and we’re afraid of him, but we’ve managed to keep it all balanced: the crazy, cutting guy stays in the tomb, we keep our pigs and sell the bacon and chops, and it’s all so wrong but it’s also safe and predictable. (p. 117, emphasis mine)
Jesus gave real life back to a man who’d long since lost everything, and in the process he upset an entire region. As Matt Woodley observes, “Jesus never apologized.” He never said He was sorry for this reckless thing.
And I wonder this morning, am I willing to call to Him, “Come, Lord Jesus!” with both eyes closed, both hands open, and take as much Jesus as He’s willing to give?
