Drawn forward

 As you go, proclaim the good news, “’The kingdom of heaven has come near.’” (Matthew 10:7)

Thoughts and images flash into consciousness, one after another, often passing away as quickly as they appear. But some return and linger, seeming to bear a message we need to hear.

One moment, one image keeps drawing me back to a small, side chapel in a Spanish cathedral where I gazed at a black Jesus hanging on a knotted, wooden cross. His body twisted, tortured and lifeless, his humanity stripped away, the suffering and sadness the world inflicts and endures hangs there, emblemized in this one man.

Seeing it again, alive in my mind, a flood of images races through me even on these bright, summer days while walking Bailey, my daughter’s dog: Places I’ve been. Things I’ve said and done that cause me shame. People I have known whom I have blessed or disappointed. Places and moments of human suffering I will never forget.

And amid this flood of graces and joys I hardly deserve, and moments I’d erase if I could, there hangs this Jesus, suffering the worst the world can give, yet still loving, forgiving and blessing, even his torturers.

If there is anything truly divine in human history, truly transcendent, it is this moment ... and this tortured man whose love didn’t break, fail or dissolve into hatred when hatred poured its fury on his flesh.

This image, this Love draws me not into the past but ahead, into the future of what we each might become as we savor the moment of Love’s great victory over all that is not love, knowing this Love is for us, drawing us close to heal and transform us into its image for the sake of a broken world.

The kingdom of heaven is the wonder of Love transforming time. It is the transcendent Love in Jesus pulling us beyond what we are, beyond what has been, into the future of what Love will do.

Most of us are drawn into God’s future kicking and screaming, resisting Love’s holy gravity because of fear, ego, envy, pride, old angers and the conviction that loving is foolish and naïve, instead of the only thing that can save us from ourselves and each other.

But Love is patient and never ends, tugging at our hearts, restless in our souls, drawing us near to feel its transcendent power. It just keeps coming.

David L. Miller