The Chasm – Lent 2014 – Week 6

Luke 16:30-31 And that one said, “No, Father Abraham.  But if someone from the dead may go to them, they will repent.” But he said to him, “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead.”

As we step into the week that leads to the cross, we come to the final words of this parable—this story we have been reading together during these weeks of Lent.  We come to this statement that some people are so hard-hearted, so deaf that even if someone were to rise from the dead and testify to them it still would not be enough.

Death is a prerequisite for rising from the dead.  And it is Christ’s death that lies most heavily on my mind as I think of this week, this story, and upon separation.  The cross, for me, is a powerful symbol of separation and reconciliation.

Slowly dying, it is remembered, Jesus cries out in a loud voice, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”  Hung between two criminals, Jesus felt the wide chasm between himself and the Source of All Hope.  In fact, it was not only from God that Christ felt separation but from all humanity.  His friends had abandoned him.  The world he had come to redeem in love had not only rejected him but conspired to murder him.

That chasm, it must have seemed, was greater and darker than possible.  It yawned forth, swallowing hope.  And its despair must have been just as deadly as the nails and the wounds.

But on the Sunday following, something amazing, unprecedented happened.  And in an instant, with the sound of a rock rolling upon the spring ground, the chasm was filled with such earth and light that it was as if that great separation never existed.  Nothing, the Risen One declared in His rising—not height, nor depth, nor anything—could separate us from the love of God.

Love has that power: the power to span any chasm no matter how deep it has grown. It is fierce enough that it can bear hope in the darkest of places.  It is, as the old poem says, stronger than death.  And love can overcome the separations our own hard and calcified hearts have established.

But that means we must reach forth in love, stretching our hands not just forward but also to each side—outstretched.  We have to do it humbly and stripped bare with the full knowledge of the possibility of rejection.  But God will not leave us alone in the darkness, separated by chasms or stones.

And when we can’t believe it, there is the One who rose from the dead who will tell us it is true.