Re-enchantment

Given over: the life beyond control.

One of the things that many of us have found difficult in recent days is the sudden lack of control over our lives and our future we are used to having.   I do wonder though whether that was always wishful thinking, a story we told ourselves to make the world feel more manageable.  The reality was that at any point our circumstances could change through illness, accidents, economic changes, relational breakdown, ‘fate’, etc.  

Nobody likes living on the edge of a cliff all the time so we spin ourselves the illusion of being in control and safe and that keeps us sane.   It’s one of the most human things we do and makes life liveable.   Except at times like this, where collectively that story is suddenly seen to be the flimsy narrative it always was.

The bible seeks to make us aware of the limitations of this  story we tell ourselves and call us to step through it into the immensity of the world that seems so overwhelming.  When we take this ‘step of faith’ and experience the vulnerability that comes with it we find God in that beyond.  We find ourselves part of a much bigger story than the ones we tell ourselves, and in doing so we are given a much smaller role.   Paradoxically we find our lives infused with a value and meaning infinitely greater than anything we could have given ourselves.


In the early hours of the first Good Friday Jesus voluntarily gave up control.  At the end of the scene in the garden of Gethsemane there is a clear switch in tone in the four gospel stories.  Up to this point Jesus has been driving all the action: healing, teaching, arguing, challenging, caring, working miracles etc.  He who is the subject of the action, the one who does things, suddenly becomes the object of the story, the one to whom things are done.   Jesus is mostly silent now until his death on the cross, and he who was always in control is now ‘given over’ to sinful men.  This phrase ‘given over’ is used in all four gospels to illustrate the sacrificial nature of the offering of his life, as an act of choice.


A central part of the story we tell ourselves, particularly in Protestant northern Europe, is that we are made in the image of God by being productive, creative, active, fruitful.  This is a deep cultural value that remains long after the Calvinist heritage has gone in our societies.  It is why we find illness, ageing, unemployment, marital breakdown, even career blockages so difficult.   In these situations we feel no longer in control or productive and we fear becoming the object of others people’s actions or circumstances.  

 Not only are we threatened externally but we feel threatened in our sense of self, of value.  We think we are no longer as valuable anymore, subconsciously we feel we are no longer in the image of God the creator.   However on Good Friday Jesus shows us another image of God that is equally important.   God as object, the one to whom things are done, the one who suffers, the one who is in the hands of others, the one who is no longer in control.   A God who dies for us.   

On this Covid-19 Good Friday, this is something that is more important than ever.   What Jesus achieved in his last 48 hours as the one to whom things were done, the object, the one who gave up his life for us is more important than what he did in the previous three years of active ministry in which he was the subject driving the action.    He made it possible for us to face the reality of who we are and our lostness in this overwhelming world by opening up the way for us to step through it into the embrace of God.

It’s difficult enough to live in these constrained circumstances, let us beware of making them doubly difficult by buying into the myth that our value lies in being useful and being able to control our lives.  Let’s use this time of enforced stilling to confront some of the inadequacies of the stories we tell ourselves, to step out into the bigness of the world that seems so threatening and to find in it the embrace of that larger story that accepts us for who we are with all our limitations and tells us that ‘We are loved'.