By Pastor Don Schatz

The Tenacity of Christ

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“Jesus said to her, “I Am the resurrection and the life.”
John 11:25. New International Version.

With today’s picture one might expect a Bible quote from Jesus’ Parable of the Sower.  “Some fell on the rock….”  It is interesting how we can see a picture of a long tree growing in a lava bed that is 7,000 years old and often think of ourselves. Or am I just talking to myself? 

I see Jesus today.  The tenacity of Christ and the life that he is.  Martin Luther said, “What is Christ, but sheer life?”  If the terrain of our lives can sometimes resemble a forbidding lava flow, and it can, we pray for the Holy Spirit to help us see Christ in it.  Because he is in it.  “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

In the Parable of the Sower, the seed that fell on the rock springs to life, but soon dies because it has no root.  Not so Christ Jesus.  The tenacity of Christ the Life sends down tendrils into unseeable, unknowable, perhaps microscopic fissures in the rock.  The tendrils grow, sinking deeper.  The fissures widen, giving way to the inevitability of life.  Christ the Life.

In the “Jurassic Park” movies, one of the characters likes to say, “Life will find a way.”  In the “script” of Scripture, Christ the Word is Christ the Life.  Christ the Life is the Way.  I am the lava field.  My heart is a flow of stone so desolate that after 7,000 years it is still void of life.  Until Christ the Life.  Until Christ the Life comes.  The word of his Gospel, the story of his tenacious love for me and all humankind, sinks tendrils of grace into the fissures of my shriveled soul and the seed breaks forth in me as Christ the Life.

So it is.  Life found a Way.  Christ the Life grows in you.  Christ the Life is making you Life with him, in him.  Christ, planted as the seed of our death and the grave, sprang forth as life.  Because Christ the Life cannot be vanquished.  Christ the Life grows in you.  Water it with the Word.  Nurture it in prayer.  Christ the Life finds a way to you.  Always.

Copyright Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado