…by Easter Tuesday, we often find ourselves back in the shadows.
The cancer is still there. That financial struggle is not resolved. The depression returns. That relationship is still broken. We might ask, “If Christ is risen, why does the world still feel so broken?” This is not a lack of faith; it’s the honest lament of believers who are learning to walk in the tension of the now and the not yet.
This sacred tension calls us to rejoice and weep on Easter Tuesday.
Rejoice that Jesus is risen. We have a living hope. We are promised an eternal inheritance, which is being kept for us by the one who purchased it with his own life. But embrace the grief too. Sadness is the healing emotion of the soul. Sorrow is a gift from God that allows our souls to breathe and cope in a world that aches, longing for restoration.
~Brian Croft from “Embracing a Sacred Tension”
For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
evil may not dwell with you.
5 The boastful shall not stand before your eyes;
you hate all evildoers.
6 You destroy those who speak lies;
the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.
Psalm 5: 4-6
To invite Jesus to cleanse the temple of our hearts
is not to ask for guilt and shame.
It is to ask for healing.
The same Lord who overturned tables did so
not to destroy and humiliate,
but to reclaim and restore.
He interrupts only that which obstructs.
He removes only that which hinders life and worship.
His cleansing is never punitive; it is always redemptive.
~Scott Sauls from “What Would Jesus Overturn in Your Life?”
To live coram Deo is to live one’s entire life
in the presence of God,
under the authority of God,
to the glory of God.
To live in the presence of God is to understand
that whatever we are doing and wherever we are doing it,
we are acting under the gaze of God.
There is no place so remote that we can escape His penetrating gaze.
To live all of life coram Deo is to live a life of integrity.
It is a life of wholeness that finds
its unity and coherency
in the majesty of God.
Our lives are to be living sacrifices,
oblations offered in a spirit of adoration and gratitude.
A fragmented life is a life of disintegration.
It is marked by inconsistency, disharmony, confusion,
conflict, contradiction, and chaos.
Coram Deo … before the face of God.
…a life that is open before God.
…a life in which all that is done is done as to the Lord.
…a life lived by principle, not expediency; by humility before God,
not defiance.
~R.C. Sproul from “What Does “coram Deo” mean?”
On this Easter Tuesday, we cannot escape His gaze…
all of us, all colors, shapes and size, even the leadership of our nation.
We are created in His image, imago dei, so He looks at us
as His reflections in the mirror of this troubled world.
What we do, how we speak and write, how we treat others –
reflects the face of God.
Jesus is the embodied temple who brought His sacrifice to the people,
rather than people coming to the temple with their sacrifices.
I cringe to think how hard we try to hide from His gaze.
Yet some don’t make a pretense of hiding – they make it quite public:
our elected leader chooses Easter to publish a vile message filled with profanity, name-calling and threats, then gives a fragmented and disintegrated Easter speech, to celebrating families with children, with
inconsistency, dishonesty, disharmony, confusion, conflict, contradiction, and chaos.
We drown together in the mud of our mutual guilt and lack of humility. All that we do to others, we do to God Himself.
We must be on our knees asking for cleansing,
for the temples of our hearts to be overturned,
our corruption scattered, our sorrows lifted.
Jesus comes to cleanse, repair, reclaim and restore –
His mission to save us from ourselves.
Kind of takes one’s breath away.
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