Many signs and wonders were done among the people by the hands of the apostles. They all used to assemble in Solomon’s Portico. ¹³ No one else dared to join them, but the people esteemed them highly. ¹⁴ More believers, men and women, were constantly being added to their ranks. ¹⁵ People brought those who were sick into the streets and placed them on cots and mats so that when Peter passed by, his shadow might fall on some of them. ¹⁶ A large number of people also came from the neighboring towns around Jerusalem, bringing with them the sick and those tormented by unclean spirits, and all of them were cured. (Acts 5:12-16)

We’ve all read those chapters in Acts. We all know how vibrant the early church was, how amazing, how miraculous. Recapturing the Church of Acts has been the explicitly stated goal of many a start-up congregation over the centuries. And the why is easy to see.

They were performing miracles. They were healing the sick. Casting out demons. They gathered, and people flocked to them. Believers were being added constantly to their ranks.

I’ve read this chapter countless times, marveled each and every time over Peter’s very shadow being part of healing. This time, I just want to dwell with that thought for a minute, and I hope you’ll dwell with me.

There are, as usual, several parts to these miracles. First, people have to believe enough, have faith enough to come. In this case, I have to think that often it was not only the sick person with faith, but the friends and family members. They believed so much in the apostles’ ability to continue the healing work of Christ, that they brought their loved ones to them. Not enough room at the Portico? That wasn’t going to stop them–they’d line the streets. Crowds too big to actually get Peter’s attention? His shadow would suffice.

His shadow. Think about that.

Generally when we think of shadows and darkness and the blocking of light, we think of evil. Something, after all, in the way of the light. But this is a unique kind of shadow. This is a literal blocking of sunlight, sure. Peter, standing between the sick person and the sun.

Peter, standing between the sick person and the Son. But standing there, not as a block or a filter, but as a mirror. Reflecting that Light even as he blocked the sunlight. Walking in that authority. Sharing it with all who dared to believe.

Do we dare? Do we dare to believe enough to seek the shadows of the faithful, knowing that their mere presence can impart His blessing upon us? Do we dare to believe anyone can really act that much in Christ’s stead? Do we believe we can be so full of Christ that His will shine that brightly through us? Do our shadows, when coupled with the faith of our fellow believers, result in healing?

The Church of Acts didn’t vanish, my friends. It’s still alive and vibrant. It’s still here, we are still its members. And do you know how to tell if you or anyone else still has that kind of authority? You show up. You do the work. You do it every day. You walk like Peter walked, like Paul walked, like Jesus himself walked. You look for the people who need His touch.

You shine the light. You cast the shadow. You put yourself there, an intercessor between God and whoever needs His touch. You do it always, every day.

And then you watch the people keep coming. Because if we’re truly walking in His light, people will come. They’ll be drawn to it. If they aren’t…then maybe we’re living in shadows instead of casting them.

Today is Holy Thursday, Maundy Thursday. The day when Christ celebrated the Passover with His disciples–the Last Supper. Tonight He instituted what may be the most sacred of the sacraments–Holy Communion, the Eucharist. He took bread, took wine, and declared them His body and blood, the things by which we are saved.

This year I read an absolutely amazing book about the Last Supper and how it didn’t really end until Christ died on the cross, called The Fourth Cup by Scott Hahn. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in that Passover meal and the new covenant and communion. But it began by touching on something we all have to know and remember that comes to us from the days of Moses.

The Passover was not “remembered” every year. It was REpresented. It was lived anew. The words said, the rituals, the tradition was not just meant to teach or instruct, it was telling each person at each meal, “You were there too. We were all there. This is what God did for YOU and for ME and for US as a people.” You can see that in the words of Moses himself, not only when he first hands down the law, but when he is giving it again to the people about to enter the promised land.

Those people were not the same people who had left Egypt–that’s very clear. Every single member over twenty years old of that original generation had to die in the next forty years, so a fresh people, a people who had not doubted, had not worshipped the golden calf, could be the ones to take the land. But when Moses is giving his final address, he wording is so very pointed. When you were there, he says time and again. When God did this for you. You saw the plagues.

They didn’t–not literally. But as he speaks those words, he’s teaching them that our God is not bound by time. That our God is king of all creation, all ages. Our Lord did His work for them just as surely as for their parents and grandparents. It needs to be more than a memory–it needs to be the reality, ever present in their hearts and minds. They need to be there. They need to know it’s more than words, that by taking part in that ceremony, they are in fact living it with their ancestors. It isn’t just a representation, it’s a RE-presentation. It’s happening again for them…or rather, it’s drawing them back to that original happening. The event isn’t repeating, the participants are instead defying space and time and partaking of the original. This is the odd reality that Moses speaks to the new generation, and it was the understanding carried forth from that day all the way to the day of Jesus and beyond.

This is the same lesson we need to learn when it comes to Christ’s Passover. When we eat the bread and drink the cup of the new covenant, we aren’t just doing it in memory–we’re doing it knowing that the same truth that saved the people alive in His day, watching Him on the cross, saves us too. Because His work is not bound by time or space, and each occasion of the Eucharist is, like the Passover was for the Jews, a REpresenting. It isn’t happening again, but it is pulling us back into that first time it happened. We are partaking of the original, the one and only, the complete and perfect sacrifice.

That is the miracle of our God. The miracle we rely on when we place our faith in a Man who lived two thousand years ago but somehow saved us. The miracle we embrace when we said He did the work of salvation “once and for all”–that doesn’t mean one finite action that began and ended, like our idiom might indicate. It means once, forever, for all of us. It means it’s continually working, because we are continually partaking, because it’s an action outside of the confines of time.

This is the cup of Christ. The work of the cross. The cup of salvation poured out as His blood. The cup we are invited to drink from, not so that we remember but so that we become part of it. We become the people escaping Egypt; we become the people entering the Promised Land; we become the disciples watching from beneath the cross; we become the women at the empty tomb.

We become His.

“Hosanna!”

It’s an interjection that we shout as praise in the Christian church. “Hosanna in the highest! Hosanna to the son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Hosanna.

I’ve sung songs with that proclamation since I was a child (I still remember thinking, at the ripe age of 6, that they were singing “Roseanna,” and being very flattered and confused, LOL.) And like so many things that I’ve done since I was a child, I had only vague ideas of what it meant. Something about Christ as my Savior … right? That He was sent by God.

True. But not complete.

The word Hosanna has been preserved in Greek, Latin, and brought directly into English without much change. There was no attempt to directly translate it. Because the word stands on its own as a shout. “Hosanna!” We speak it as a praise, yes. But it’s not only a praise. It’s a soul-deep cry, from the hearts that most need Him.

It will be no surprise to learn that hosanna is taken from Hebrew originally, and it’s a shortening of hoshi’ah-nna, which means “Save, we pray!”

This weekend we’ll remember when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey–a humble mount instead of the gallant steed of a king. The day when the crowds whipped off their outer garments and put them in the road for him to ride over. The day they cut palm branches and waved them before him. This image, to modern society, may scream “Groupies!” in a way, right? We picture crazed fans ripping off their clothes and waving things in the air.

But when we cry out “Hosanna!” we’re not calling His name, per se. We’re not asking Him to entertain us. We’re not acknowledging Him as an earthly king.

When we cry out “Hosanna!” we’re acknowledging, rather, our own desperation. We’re calling to Him because He has the power to change it. We’re calling Him Savior … but not like a paramedic with a crash cart or a Coast Guardsman with a life vest. It’s much deeper than that. He can save our bodies, yes. But more.

He saves our souls. He saves us on levels we don’t even know to hope for.

Two thousand years ago, when those crowds called out “Save us!” they were crying it like their ancestors had. They were asking for a very physical, temporal redemption.

But Jesus didn’t give them what they asked for–He gave them what they needed.

When you cry out, “Hosanna!” this weekend, what will it mean to you? In your heart? Is it just a pretty sounding word? Is it a praise? That may be what we mean when we sing it.

But Jesus knows more than what our words say–He knows what we need. He knows that, even if we’re focused on our physical needs, it’s our spiritual ones that most need addressed. He knows that, though we think we need a good leader in the world, it’s good leaders in the Church that are most important.

He knows that, though we may cry out our praises in the pews, that doesn’t stop us from turning around and nailing Him to the cross with our sins a few days later.

But He’s forgiven that too. Because just like we don’t know what to ask for, we also don’t know how we hurt Him every time we choose ourselves above Him, every time we choose the easy way instead of the good way, every time we focus on earthly comforts instead of heavenly security. He knows us in our fleshly frailties. He knows us because He walked in our skin. He felt the pangs of hunger. He had to sort out what to wear, and to whom he could entrust the care of his precious mother when He knew He wasn’t long for this world.

He knows, friends. He knows us in our every weakness. He knows us in our strength. He knows us in our purity and in our sin. He knows us, and He loves us, and He answered, “Yes. Here I am. I heard you. I will save you.”

Maybe sometimes, when we’re really in the thick of a storm, it feels like we’re just crying in the dark. But we’re not.

We’re calling out to the Light of the world. And He has already answered that cry.

We serve a God who makes something out of nothing.

He did it in creation, taking the blank canvas of space and turning it into an ever-expanding network of galaxies, planets, suns, wormholes, black holes, supernovas, matter, energy, light, and life. In that moment that science has come to term the Big Bang, He spoke–and all that empty potential turned into everything.

He did it in the stories we know so well from the Old Testament. He took men who were nothing and multiplied them, multiplied their belongings, multiplied their faith until they became fathers of nations and the family from which would come the salvation of us all. And then He tells us to watch out, because He’s going to do something new.

I am about to do something new.
    Now it comes to fruition;
    can you not perceive it?
I will make a path through the wilderness
    and rivers in the desert.
(Isaiah 43:19)

He did it in the most spectacular fashion when He put His words in the mouth of an angel who declared, “Hail Mary, full of grace–the Lord is with you!” and told a humble, virgin Jewish girl that He was going to put the Word into her womb, for the salvation of us all. When He made life spring up in what ought to have been a barren place, where seed had never been planted, a vine that would yield the most abundant life ever to tread the earth. Word made flesh. The ultimate something from a creation full of nothing.

He did it in the disciples, the apostles, the first believers. He took the lives they’d lived before and made them see that that had been nothing, had been vapors, had been emptiness compared to the fullness He offered through Christ. He took away the chaff, burned away the dross, and left those fathers of our faith with something pure and undefiled and completely flying in the face of conventional wisdom.

I count everything as loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all other things, and I regard them as so much rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him. (Philippians 3:8)

He takes us, we who start out as nothing but a collection of cells, and breathes life into us. He turns us from random biology into the image of God. He instills us, all of us, with dignity and purpose.

But oh, how skilled we humans are at taking that paradise and turning into a desert! We lie, we steal, we cheat, we covet. We commit, all of us, sins that brand us as criminal in the eyes of the just Judge. We are nothing–nothing.

Praise God that isn’t the end of our story! Like the desert in Isaiah, like the wilderness that Christ willingly entered, we are, in our disgrace, potential in the hands of God. We are where He makes something new. We are the dry, acrid sands from which will spring the well of life–Christ.

We are nothing, made something in Him. And then…then we are everything. Because we are Christ. Joint-heirs. Princes and princesses of the Kingdom, endowed with all that He is, if we but claim it and operate in it and seek His about ours. Not because of anything we can claim, but because of who claims us as His own.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Don’t you love those occasions when you’re reading multiple things at the same time and they all coalesce? That’s what happened to me this week, as I was reading the Gospel of Mark and meditating on the Lord’s prayer.

Let’s start with Mark 13:30. Jesus is telling His disciples about the End of the Ages, concluding with “Amen, I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” Now, given that we view this section in light of the Revelation of John and THE end of the world, we tend to read it and scratch our heads and say, “He must have meant something different with ‘generation’ than we do.”

But read on. Verses 32-37 say this:

³² “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ³³ Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. ³⁴ It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. ³⁵ Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, ³⁶ or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. ³⁷ And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

Then read on a little more, into chapter 14. After the Passover meal, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John to the garden to pray. You know the story. What happens?

Jesus is praying, “Father, if it’s possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not my will but yours be done.”

And what are the disciples doing? Sleeping.

I just blogged a couple weeks ago about the miracles that sometimes happen while we’re sleeping, and of course this passage was one I was thinking of. But let’s look at it from a different angle this time, in light of that warning from a mere chapter earlier.

“Keep awake,” Jesus had said in chapter 13, talking about the “end” and the coming of God’s kingdom.

“Keep awake,” Jesus tells them a couple days later in the garden, as He’s praying about his own death.

“Your kingdom come, your will be done,” He taught us to pray.

“Your will be done,” He prays that night in the garden.

Because He knew that this was the coming of God’s kingdom. This was the end of the old world, the old covenant, the old way. And surely that generation did not pass away before they saw it come—the New Kingdom. The New Testament. The New Covenant.

The new creation.

My friends, we’ve probably all heard it said that we’re living in the last days—it’s been said since Jesus’ days, and for good reason. Because He ushered in those last days when He offered Himself up for us on the cross.

But there’s another way of looking at it too. We’re not living in and looking to the end of the world—we’re living in the new one.

Do you know why Christians have worshipped on Sunday since the first days of the Church? Because Jesus fulfilled the Sabbath, fulfilled the old creation when He was killed on Friday and rested on Saturday. Then He did something amazing on the first day of the week—He rose from the dead. He created something new, a new world, a new generation, a new life. A life that has no end. Ancient texts sometimes refer to Sundays as “the Sabbath’s Sabbath.” The Eighth Day. Early Christians didn’t just view it as “the first day” anymore, they viewed it as the day that the old world was completely recreated. And since this new world, this new Kingdom—the Kingdom of God—will have no end, they couldn’t commemorate it on the last day, so they did so on the first.

On the Sabbath, they remembered the old with sobriety and solemnity. On the Eighth Day, they worshipped their risen Savior with joy and jubilation, praising Him for making us ALL a new creation.

I pray the Lord’s Prayer every day, several times. And as I mediate upon the phrase, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” I couldn’t help but view those words in this context this week. When we pray that prayer, we’re praying that the Lord will help us continue that work that Christ already did—continue the work of the cross. Continue the Kingdom He already brought to fruition, continue it through the price He paid with His blood.

Because the will of God is not achieved by twiddling our thumbs. It’s achieved by vigilant prayer—prayer to the point of sweating blood. It’s achieved by sacrifice. It’s achieved by loving others more than we love ourselves, by loving God most of all. And when we love like that, we act like that.

We act like Christ. We give our all for this Kingdom. Knowing that the will of God will make this new creation good.

I’ve been a C.S. Lewis fan for decades. I, like most kids, started out reading The Chronicles of Narnia, and when I reread the books to my own kids a couple years ago, I realized how much of my faith life was formed by those books–especially by The Last Battle. In some ways, the final book in the series is odd and different from the others…but it’s the one whose theology messages stuck with me through thirty years of growth and discovery.

Several times in that book, one or another of the characters points out that Aslan “is not a tame lion.” Keeping in mind that Aslan is the Christ figure, really let that sink in. Jesus is not tame. Jesus is not civilized. Jesus is not cultured. Jesus is not predictable.

My husband recently read On Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterston, an author that Lewis read and admired, and we could see Chesterton’s influence in those beloved passages from The Last Battle. Chesterton points out that Jesus is not a safe God to follow–He’s dangerous. He isn’t full of pretty philosophy–He’s full of violent contradictions.

The Man who overturns tables in the temple and then draws a child onto His lap. The One who instructs His followers to strap a sword to their side, but tells them to turn the other cheek. The Eternal One who chose to take on flesh and let himself be killed. Killed. Think about that for a second–an eternal being, suffering a very human death.

As my husband chatted through the Chesterton book with his friends in their book club, they dwelled a good bit on the kind of faith this sort of untamed God demands of us. The answer is pretty obvious, is a way: an untamed faith.

But what does that mean?

It means that we don’t just accept these seeming contradictions in Jesus, we embrace them. It means we don’t just say that He’s the God of the impossible, we prepare ourselves to live the impossible. It means we don’t just come expecting that the Spirit will move, we come KNOWING that Jesus is there with us.

It means embracing the hard-to-believe. It means clinging to the illogical. It means walking out the incredible.

So many teachings of Christ, many of which we learn to recite without really pondering the depths, are hard. They don’t make sense. The “bread of life” discourse in John 6 is a perfect example. Jesus told the crowds they would have to eat his flesh and drink his blood–and they FREAKED OUT. Said, “You’re speaking symbolically, right? RIGHT?” But He was very clear. So clear that most of His followers left Him.

It was too hard. Too illogical.

In the early church, heretic after heretic had to be rooted out and dismissed, because they were trying to make Jesus fit their human understanding. He couldn’t have been both fully God and fully man–it makes no sense! He must have not really been physical…or, if physical, not really God…

Nope. That doesn’t fly either.

Faith in Christ–true faith, the kind He will recognize–is crazy. It’s wild. It’s nonsensical. Illogical. It’s dangerous. It’s fantastical. It is completely untamed and untamable.

And that’s the point. Lions are not tame. The one that lies down with the lamb–it’s a wild, dangerous beast. The God who fashioned the universe cannot be put into our human boxes of understanding. He will break free, burst through, tear those walls to pieces.

There are those who do not believe miracles happen after the age of the disciples–but when, then, did God become tame? How is that not changing His nature, to claim it?

Most Christians I know say miracles do happen, of course…but many times we name small things, everyday things. I always shook my head at that, but you know what?

A miracle that happens every day is even more amazing than a once-in-history kind, isn’t it? What’s more amazing–that God parted the Red Sea once, or that He dwelled with the Israelites in fire and cloud and provided daily manna for forty years? That Jesus died once and rose from the dead, or that He promised to be present in the bread and wine every time we partake of it?

He is a wild, unpredictable, huge, dependable, consistent God. All those things, even when they contradict. He is a God that calls us to believe what we don’t know how to believe. To walk when we cannot see. To cling to the hand we cannot touch. And to do it, knowing He will always be there with us.

What can we do but cry out like the father in the Gospels, “Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief!”