As I write this I am surrounded by Fall’s glorious splendor. Autumn has always been my favorite season of the year. The Summer has normally provided its delightfully full season of cookouts, vacations, water play, camping, gardening, and sunshine. Now it seems time to begin to settle down from the increased activity of play and sunburn and turn our attentions and energies to a more “productive” agenda. Now our schedules are consumed by a flurry of activity as school resumes and new seasons begin for the many activities in our lives that coincide with our inescapable internal clocks which were set in those primary years of academia.
After September’s fits and starts, October brings a settling of the schedule. New routines have been set and the memories of Summer grow a bit more distant. Thoughts of warm, long days of sunshine begin to turn to cooler temperatures and shorter days as those first brisk breezes begin to blow through the open window screens. Though our schedules are busier, there are still occasional pauses of quiet contemplation as we gaze across the once green landscape and being to discover the faint hints of extraordinary color. Reds, yellows, and oranges begin to flicker here and there as a hint of things to come. Soon those once verdant scenes will be ablaze with brilliant and astonishing color before giving way to the starkness of Winter. During this marvelous, yet fleeting, transition the senses seem to come alive as fiery colors and cool, gentle breezes awaken our sensory organs. There is even a “smell” to Fall that, while not as pungent as Spring, is clearly as distinctive. We are halted in our new found busyness to take it all in as Creation dies a glorious and beautiful death.
We rarely consider death as beautiful in this life. Occasionally a death may be glorious if one died while accomplishing some extraordinary feat – as in the effort to preserve the life of someone else, especially someone weaker or in need. But death rarely carries the connotations that the vivid glory of Fall’s seasonal change seems to infer. But God did communicate something very special in his design of Fall. While our culture runs from death’s inevitability and hides from its reality, our Savior was as determined to pursue it as we are determined to avoid it. There is no coincidence that the central act of the Christian faith, and really all of history, is a death – His death upon the cross!
There is clearly a horrendous aspect to Christ’s death. The immense cost and painful experience cannot be considered pleasant or beautiful when calculating its torturous reality. There is nothing appealing about blood and agonizing pain. And clearly there is a necessary “revolting” and “confounding” aspect to the nature of the death of the “Prince of Life.” However, there is also a remarkable attraction. Not the kind of attraction that our “ambulance-chasing” fascinations are given to. But the kind of attraction that our worship-ascribing and knee-bending hearts are given to. The kind of attraction that can capture awestruck wonder and eternal delight.
Most have gained enough of an understanding of the cross to grant appreciation and affection for what Christ has done, but those revelations notwithstanding, there are vast and profound depths of mystery found in the death of the cross that invoke a captivating awe. The perspective that this awe is filled with is composed of countless knowledge-defying questions, such as…
What reservoir of wisdom has orchestrated this event?
What height of glory has chosen to display it?
What selfless manner of humility has stooped to endure it?
What degree of holiness has required it?
What sufficiency of sacrifice has fulfilled it?
Behold what manner of love has compelled it?
There are some questions that have garnered noble efforts to the degree of thousands of pages written and hundreds of thousands of words spoken toward attempting to answer them, but the efforts still fall short of filling the total measure required to sufficiently respond. The cross invokes those sorts of questions. It is in these types of questions that beauty is found because while we cannot adequately answer them, we know that the answers that are presently hidden from us are altogether and infinitely wonderful. This is when the knowledge of the nature of mystery is enough to delight the deepest recesses of our hearts. We are compelled that the answers are found in a Saving God who is as infinitely wonderful as the display of the mystery of His Saving Act. This is the mystery of the Gospel! Herein lies the beauty of the cross; the beauty of death; and to some lesser, yet strategic degree, the beauty of Fall.
Enjoy the glorious death of Fall and be reminded of the glorious death of the Savior who (just as Fall promises a seemingly distant Spring) has promised a new life some day that will never die again!
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Scott…You are an eloquent scribe. Wendy
Comment by Wendy Dykeman October 30, 2009 @ 10:12 am