Turn Around

Quite often, when I’m at work and with one woman in particular, I find myself saying the phrase, “Turn around.” Some days she’s headed for a busy road and I need to gently instruct her to go the other way. Other days she’s headed for food or a drink that would probably make her sick and I have to ask her to “turn around.” She has a cognitive disability and doesn’t always make decisions that are in her best interests.

Whenever I say this phrase to her, I can’t help but think of a gospel song called “Turn Around” by Jonny Lang. “The road that you take might lead you astray, but don’t be afraid to turn around.”

Seems fitting. She needs to trust that my way is going to be better for her in the long run and she needs to have the courage to act on that trust.

This idea of turning around is essentially what Jesus meant when he said “Repent and believe” in the Gospel accounts.

Most of us have grown up equating that phrase, “repent and believe,” with “confess your sins and believe in Jesus.” While “repent and believe” doesn’t necessarily not mean “confess your sins and believe in Jesus,” to a first-century Jew, they interpreted it a little differently.

Well-known New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says this in his book, The Challenge of Jesus:

How are we to unlearn our meanings for such a phrase and to hear it through first-century ears? It helps if we can find another author using it at around the same place and time as Jesus. Consider, for example, the Jewish aristocrat and historian Josephus, who was born a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion and who was sent in AD 66 as a young army commander to sort out some rebel movements in Galilee.

His task, as he describes it in his autobiography, was to persuade the hot headed Galileans to stop their mad rush into revolt against Rome and to trust him and the other Jerusalem aristocrats to work out a better [plan]. So when he confronted the rebel leader, he says that he told him to give up his own agenda and to trust him, Josephus, instead. And the words he uses are remarkably familiar to readers of the Gospels: he told the brigand leader to “repent and believe in me.”

If we look at the phrase “repent and believe” in this light, the New Testament, and much of what is recorded from Jesus’ last several days before his trial and suffering, makes a lot more sense – the climax of which is seen in Jesus’ “triumphal entry.”

“As [Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace – but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.’” Luke 19:41:44

After all of his miracles signifying a different kind of kingdom, and after all of his counter-cultural preaching, Jesus enters Jerusalem and is struck with the reality that the Jews aren’t going to listen to him and the city will eventually be destroyed. So what does he do?

He weeps.

He had pleaded with people to forget about their swords and the preconception that the Messiah would come and forcefully restore glory and power to Israel. Instead, he preached a Kingdom that would come through peace, love, and faith in a God who would give up His own Son so that not just Israel but the entire world would receive a different kind of glory and power – the forgiveness of sins and the Spirit’s power working in us to carry out what He purposes to do here on earth in God’s inaugurated kingdom.

They needed to give up their own agenda and to trust Him, and to trust His way, but most didn’t, and Jerusalem was destroyed.

This different kind of Kingdom that started when Jesus came down to us and was resurrected is incredibly difficult to live out on a day-to-day basis. As crazy as it probably seemed to first-century Jews hearing Jesus’ message to give up their ideas of a forceful, victorious Messiah, sometimes it seems just as crazy to me to trust in God’s plan and not my own agenda.

Conventional wisdom would tell me to do certain things with my money, time, knowledge, vocation, and so on, but in Scripture, Jesus flips all of this on its head and preaches a completely different way of life – a Kingdom way of life.

This is the way of humility, service, mercy, justice, peace, and purity.

Whether it’s from hearing the song “Turn Around” or telling the woman I work with the same thing, there is always something to remind me daily that I, Chris, need to turn around. This whole “Kingdom way of life” thing doesn’t come naturally to me.

Like the woman I described at the beginning, I’m constantly doing or believing things that are almost like taking one step into a busy street. Left to my own path and my own agenda, the result would be extremely messy and destructive. 

But luckily there is an alternative, and Someone who I can put my faith and trust in and follow His way because I know that He has my best interests in mind and loves me to death.

Where are you headed in the wrong direction and need to make the decision to turn around?

-CK

Art and the Resurrection

There are a lot of things in the world that people really, really love and enjoy, but there are almost always people who dislike, or even hate, that same thing.

As popular as football is in the United States, there are still many who could care less about Super Bowls and collective bargaining agreements. And even though The Godfather is largely considered the greatest movie of all time, some people even calling it “the perfect film,” there are still plenty of people (including my wife) who were ready to turn off the TV after hour two. Even when it comes to something as precious and innocent as a baby, there are those who oogle and ogle at the sight of a newborn and those who would probably prefer trying to dismantle an atomic bomb.

But music is different.

Some people enjoy Bob Dylan, and others enjoy Britney Spears, but everyone likes some kind of music. I have never known a single human being who hasn’t owned at least a handful of albums.

I don’t have to try to convince anyone that the arts are a powerful medium for inspiring, influencing and energizing people. We’ve all experienced in some capacity the ways in which music has moved us like nothing else can.

When I was younger, I listened to a lot of hard rock. Bands like Staind, Slipknot, and Metallica. I felt like I could relate in some way to the music that I was listening to. Even though there were almost no glimpses of hope or positivity, at least someone else was going through and able to verbalize some of the same things that I was feeling at the time.

But music like that also held no power to change my attitude or to lift me out of the moments of depression I was experiencing.

In his book, Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright assesses art and culture in this way:

The second feature of many communities both in the postindustrial West and in many of the poorer parts of the world is ugliness. True, some communities manage to sustain levels of art and music, often rooted in folk culture, which brings a richness even to the most poverty-stricken areas. But the shoulder-shrugging functionalism of postwar architecture, coupled with the passivity born of decades of television, has meant that for many people the world appears to offer little but bleak urban landscapes, on the one hand, and tawdry entertainment, on the other.

And when people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope. They internalize the message of their eyes and ears, the message that whispers that they are not worth very much, that they are in effect less than fully human.

Wright’s quote is written in the context of the resurrection, the ultimate doctrine of hope in the story of the Gospel. And this is our hope - Jesus died, He arose, and we too will one day rise with Him when He returns to make all things new and to restore all beauty and all justice.

As Christ-followers, if we’re living as a part of this Story, the hope of the Gospel and of the resurrection should overflow out into our work, the way we spend our money, the way we spend our time - and into our art.

Despair, references to sex, demeaning language, and hopelessness don’t have to rule the airwaves, but not because we’re fighting a culture war in an effort to replace this present kind of art with “Christian art” that drips with cheesiness and ignores the problems in the world.

“[But] when art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision.” (Wright)

-CK