King of Kings — CLARITAS

On the road with Christ to Calvary

This year we're collaborating with writers across the Augustine Collective, a network of student-led Christian journals, to bring you a series of short devotional articles during this season of Lent, the 40-day period prior to Easter. Find this series also published by UChicago's CANA Journal and UC Berkeley's TAUG.

by lydia huang

In the Philippines, my friends and I visited a high-security prison. It was my first time following Scripture’s exhortation to remember those in prison and I was unsure of what to expect. The air was hot and it felt like the walls caved in on themselves. When the prisoners came out, I, as a woman, felt like every cell in my body wanted to just leave. I felt a kind of spiritual darkness enveloping the place; a kind of denseness filled the encamped air that I had never felt before. As the prison guards shuffled through the medical records of the prisoners, I got a glimpse of all of the crimes these prisoners had committed to be in this prison. I remember clenching my fists with tears in my eyes thinking so vividly, How am I supposed to minister to these people?

As the day drew to an end, we returned to the church that we stayed at. Exhausted and utterly depleted, I climbed to the top floor of the chapel, where it was dark and all alone. The crickets were chirping and the sun was already down. I took a plastic chair and set it in the middle of the church.

I sat down where it was just me and the wooden cross.

For a few moments, I looked at it.

And looked at it.

And looked at it some more.

Then, it felt like the wind was knocked out of my soul, and the flood of tears made me fall prostrate on the floor sobbing into the concrete. Like the angels that fell before God and cried “Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God almighty,” I felt my soul crying out to God – God, is this You? Is this true? You died for all of this? [1]

When you are ministering on a campus, you hear the usual cases of alcohol use or relationship troubles. Yet, on that day in the prison, I came face to face with the complete and total depravity of the human condition. While lying there unseen and unknown in that empty church, it gave a great impression on my soul that the cross—that was our Lord. He is the Creator that was and is, the I AM, the perfection of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in His fullness, and yet He came to die.

For Christians, Holy Week is a particularly interesting time. As the rest of the world goes on as normal, Christians pause to acknowledge Christ crucified. While one can go through Christmas lukewarm, one cannot go through Holy Week without acknowledging the truth of Christ; one can hide beneath carols during Christmas, but one cannot hide during the Holy Triduum. Holy Week demands you either believe or not believe. Will you be the crowd that mocks Christ, or will you be the Roman soldier that came to the terrifying realization, “Truly, this man was the Son of God”? [2]

During the Sunday of the Passion, as I’m listening to the homily about Christ’s passion, it hits me (as it has many times before): this is too real to make up. This story is too detailed and too gruesome to have been made up. Every fiber in my body does not want to believe in this; I want to wear my cross necklace as a fashion statement, not as a life or death conviction. But I cannot deny that when I look up at the cross and hear the words of St. Mark, I realize that the truth is always sobering, unexpected, and terrifying. My mom used to say, “If you ever want an image of the living God, just look at Jesus on the cross.” It is no light claim that the face of your God is bloody and bruised, beaten on a cross. That is the God of the Christians. That is the profundity of our faith—that God became man to die for men and won heaven for us.

When I am invited to share with people what I believe, I am sometimes pained by how inadequate I am at expressing who God is. People hear the term “Christian” and immediately think of religion, church, and tradition. I want to grab people by the shoulders, shake them a little bit, and say, If you knew God, if you really knew Him, if you knew the character of the God who created you, He who went through such depths to show both how utterly incompatible He is with your sin, yet how immensely He loves you anyways, how different would your life look like?

This season, and each and every single day, we have a choice about what to do with that truth. To live is Christ, to die is gain! [3]

Lydia is in a grade at a school and is majoring in something. She would much rather you know the Lord because He is infinitely worthy!

Sources

[1] Revelation 4:8 (NIV)

[2] Matthew 27:54 (NIV)

[3] Philippians 1:21 (NIV)