FROM: Banbury, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
ABOUT ME: Living the highs and lows of life in the adventurous pursuit of God Himself and of who I'm meant to be as the Bride of Christ.
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Sunday, March 23, 2008,4:10 p.m.
JANE AND JESUS
I'm sure my close friends already know this about me, but I am going to come right out and say that I am a hopeless romantic. I love romance. Real romance, not what Hollywood and our sex-crazed, lust-filled culture calls romance. The old-fashioned kind of romance is where it's at for me. Like Jane Austen novels. I love classic literature anyway, all different kinds, but somehow Jane Austen (and the like) just does it for me.
For example, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the main male character sacrifices a great deal of money and probably self-respect to ensure that the main female character's sister - who has run off and is living in sin with a young man - is respectably married. Now, back in the early 19th century, if one sister had "fallen" and chosen to live in sin, it reflected badly on the upbringing of all the sisters, and no respectable man could ever marry any of them. Mr. Darcy was so in love with Elizabeth Bennett that he did everything in his power to ensure that he still had the opportunity of being with her.
I got thinking about that story and about Jesus, today on Easter Sunday. I have a possibly erroneous tendency to think of the cross as a kind of "group rate" sort of redemption, but the truth is that Jesus was thinking of each one individually of us as He chose the way of the cross. It cost Him a great sacrifice and much self-respect, and the truth of the matter is that it was the only way He could be with us. The difference between Jesus and Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice is simply this: it wasn't my sister that sinned and I was suffering for it, it was me myself that was living in sin.
What a different story it would have been had Jane Austen chosen to write that Mr. Darcy did everything in his power to ensure that he could marry Lydia, the fallen sister, instead of Elizabeth, the one who was affected through none of her own faults. It would be much closer to the truth of my story with Jesus. It reminds me of a story about a couple names Hosea and Gomer....
What a rescue. What a sacrifice. What incredible love that knowing everything we have done and would do, Jesus chose the cross. The only way. A passionate, romantic, desperate way to have us close to Him. But in all that, not unreasonable. Not unthinking. Purely rational, but still purely sacrificial.
Ah, Jane, your stories are good, but there is still one that is better....
For example, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the main male character sacrifices a great deal of money and probably self-respect to ensure that the main female character's sister - who has run off and is living in sin with a young man - is respectably married. Now, back in the early 19th century, if one sister had "fallen" and chosen to live in sin, it reflected badly on the upbringing of all the sisters, and no respectable man could ever marry any of them. Mr. Darcy was so in love with Elizabeth Bennett that he did everything in his power to ensure that he still had the opportunity of being with her.
I got thinking about that story and about Jesus, today on Easter Sunday. I have a possibly erroneous tendency to think of the cross as a kind of "group rate" sort of redemption, but the truth is that Jesus was thinking of each one individually of us as He chose the way of the cross. It cost Him a great sacrifice and much self-respect, and the truth of the matter is that it was the only way He could be with us. The difference between Jesus and Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice is simply this: it wasn't my sister that sinned and I was suffering for it, it was me myself that was living in sin.
What a different story it would have been had Jane Austen chosen to write that Mr. Darcy did everything in his power to ensure that he could marry Lydia, the fallen sister, instead of Elizabeth, the one who was affected through none of her own faults. It would be much closer to the truth of my story with Jesus. It reminds me of a story about a couple names Hosea and Gomer....
What a rescue. What a sacrifice. What incredible love that knowing everything we have done and would do, Jesus chose the cross. The only way. A passionate, romantic, desperate way to have us close to Him. But in all that, not unreasonable. Not unthinking. Purely rational, but still purely sacrificial.
Ah, Jane, your stories are good, but there is still one that is better....
