Lenten Meditation #2:

If Possible…

(Philippians 3:10)

For Lent, I’ve been reading When Nietzsche Wept, a novel by Irvin Yalom. It doesn’t stir much morning fire. The story is set in 1882 Vienna when a medical doctor of renown seeks to cure Nietzsche of his sickness of despair. Friedrich Nietzsche, on the verge of becoming a philosopher of renown himself, insist that “despair is the price one pays for self-awareness.” “Look deeply into life,” Professor Nietzsche professes, “and you will always find despair.” For Nietzsche, to claim faith in God, is to chicken out. One must muster the will to face the abyss without God.

There’s something admirable about Nietzsche’s honest and heroic atheism. It causes me to seek such honesty with my own faith in our God of the Gospel—the God of Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Good Friday, Easter Morning, and Pentecost. That brought me back to my Lenten Meditation (Phil 3:10):

That I may know Christ

                  and the power of his resurrection,

      and the fellowship of his sufferings;

becoming like him in his death,

      that if possible I may attain

      the resurrection from the dead.

There’s nothing escapist about such faith. It’s honest and courageous. There’s hope in it—the kind of hope that cures our despair. But this hope is not an idea; nor, is it simply wishful thinking. It does not spring from sentential poems. It’s honest and real. It’s a hope tied to the reality of Immanuel—God with us. God with us in our sufferings, and God with us in our death. And God with us, if possible, in our resurrection from the dead.

“If possible…” Shouldn’t the Apostle come up with something better than “if possible”? Maybe the Apostle’s “if possible” reminds us that it’s not our doing. In death, our doing is over. The next move is wholly God’s doing. We, of ourselves—by the power of our own will, cannot bring about “the resurrection from the dead.” It lays in God’s hands alone. We have faith that it will be so; because, the tomb is empty and the stone has been rolled away, and Christ is on the loose.