As my prayer list bleeds off the page with painful circumstances, life-threatening illnesses, and daily annoyances, I am drawn to Eugene Peterson’s reflection on Luke 23.
“The death of Jesus is the centerpiece for learning how to deal with the fundamental violation of life, this sacrilege visited on creation that makes up so much of what happens in us and around us. We began to deal with the, “What’s wrong with the world?” At the place where the gospel deals with it: the death and burial of Jesus.
The death of Jesus confirms our experience that there is, in fact, something terribly wrong and that this wrong isn’t simply a logical working out of cause and effect, of the way things are. Jesus, born of a virgin, died on the cross — there is no logical connection between those two facts.
Jesus’ suffering, recorded in his laments, tears, and death, provides the authoritative gospel text for finding our place in history — this history that seems to be so much at variance with what is given and promised in the creation itself, in the life abundant all around us.” Eugene Peterson, Conversations.
