Walking with Jesus

The season of Lent is intended to be a journey for Christians. It's a journey we travel with Jesus. We know that the end of that journey is going to be difficult -- we'll walk triumphantly with Jesus into Jerusalem, but then we'll have to undergo the anguish of watching him arrested, beaten, and finally crucified.

Because of all these things, Lent is a hard journey. It involves great suffering. The suffering is Jesus' own to bear, but a part of Lent's difficulty for us is that we know we only add to that suffering when we abandon Jesus in the hour of his greatest need. And that means that we suffer, too, out of our weakness.

The end of the Lenten journey is not the cross, though, as monumental as it is. Lent's end comes on Easter morning, where the cross is overcome by an empty tomb -- a grave that could not hold Jesus but from which he arose, truly and bodily, as his power of life defeated the forces of death.

I think there are some things about Lent that make it tough for Christians today to really understand. One is the reality of redemptive suffering, which is a thought that modern people tend to recoil from. Another is the terrible intimacy of Lent, the truth that wherever we are as Christians, we are together. We live in a world that tries incessantly to individualize us. And there is a great deal that is demonic in that. Because we've been knit together into the body of Christ, though, we are forever joined to one another and to him.

My new column in the United Methodist Reporter takes a look at some of this stuff. Hope you'll check it out.