Day 196 Freedom and Fear

For most of us the greatest obstacle to freedom is fear--the fear that we are not secure and safe in God's love or this world. People who count things like the number of times "Fear not" appears in the Bible tell us that it appears 365 times. One for every day of the week. God is serious about this!

God knows something about being human and the danger of fear. Fear breeds violence. A fearful people are a violent people - always.  Violence turned inward is depression. Violence turned outward is oppression. Violence that is denied and unrecognized unhinges us from reality. Our denials leave us dangerously detached from our own lives and the lives of those who live at the margins, who easily become the scapegoats of what we deny. As we come near the cross, our hearts become agitated with our own complicity in the violence we are about to witness. We become afraid.   

There are many ways to avoid seeing the cross for what it is. Oddly enough, our theology, which is often accepted as sacred and therefore unexamined, can be the most effective way of denying what we see. When we look at Jesus on the cross we are not seeing the work an angry Father visiting his wrath on the Son for our sins--though is a popular interpretation of the atonement story. 

But from the start there has always been a more fundamental way of seeing the cross, a simpler and more profound way, which grasps the truly diabolical nature of violence. At the cross, in fact, we witness the work of an angry humanity visiting its wrath on an innocent God. We are looking into a mirror and seeing the bitter fruit of our own denied fear.

No wonder God says, "Fear not." God knows that a fearful humanity not only does violence to itself, but ultimately to God.  In Christ, God absorbs this violence into Godself without retribution, and this supreme act of divine love holds the key to human redemption. In this act of love, we are released to relax into freedom from fear.