What Is Christ Prepared To Do?

Jim McGuiggan


The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his lift will lose it. (John 12:23-25)

Alison Cunningham was her name, and she was the devoted nurse of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose short life was one long illness. Edmund Gosse, his friend, described Stevenson's life as a "painful and hurrying pilgrimage." Cunningham was selflessly devoted to serving Stevenson, and Stevenson never forgot her. He adored her and praised her lavishly for her good influence on him. In a letter to her, he said, "Do not suppose that I shall ever forget those long, bitter nights, when I coughed, and coughed, and was unhappy, and you were so patient and loving with a sick child. Indeed, Cummy, I wish that I might become a man worth talking of, if it were only that you should not have thrown away your pains." (Lord Guthrie's Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 15.)

Cunningham invested her life in the writer, and because of that kind of investment, Stevenson, after fitful starts and stops in life, described himself as coming around "like a well handled ship" with God as the helmsman.

What Alison Cunningham did for Stevenson, Christ has done and continues to do for a whole world, in every generation. But this Christ does it, not for a weak and pliant and grateful child -- he does it for a rebellious planet peopled by hosts of humans who either cannot, do not, or will not gladly submit to his care or join him in his purposes.

"I came," he said, "not to rob but to rescue, not to cheat but to give, not to kill but to offer fullness of life." But can he do it? Well, perhaps not can he do it, but will he continue to want to do it when people like us can be so hard, so selfish, so indifferent, so self-serving and wimpy? Can he really be aware of what he has taken on?  Will he not one day -- looking at many of us in our love of ease and comfort -- will he not throw up his hands and say, "I've given them my best and they're no different. They're still protecting themselves, still gorging themselves while others starve. No more! I've done enough, the job's too great even for a god!"? Will he not say that?  Yes, yes, we know where all the verses are that say otherwise, but don't you sometimes look inside and then around and wonder at our colossal arrogance? Our amazing self-satisfaction? Do you never feel that our pathetic and trivial little lives must surely test his resolve? Does it never stagger you that we can put out our hands and take the gift of himself with an assured politeness, as though someone just passed us the salt? Why would he put up with it?

A humiliated and discouraged Elliot Ness is alone on a bridge, gloomily looking into the water, smarting from his wounds. Jimmy Malone, an honest policeman who walks the beat because he won't say yes to bribery and corruption, checks him out, and so they meet. Later, Ness approaches him about beginning a small band of Treasury men who would clean up Chicago and deal with Capone.

After some verbal exchanges about the matter, Malone dismisses Ness's offer. The frustrated but desperate Ness presses him hard: "If you want to stay on the beat, you do that. If you'd like to come with me, I need your help. I'm asking for your help."

The policeman, clearly filled with inner tensions that are pulling him one way and the other, reflecting on the cry for help, says more to himself than to Ness, "That's the thing you fear, isn't it?" And then after more thought, he says to Ness, "I think it's more important to me to stay alive... thank you, no."

But he can't live with his refusal, and realizing the dangers and he need for unfailing commitment, he calls on Ness to say, "You said you wanted to get Capone... do you really want to get him? What are you prepared to do?" This phrase he repeats again and again during the course of the war they begin against the widespread corruption and murder.

And it's that phrase that's on his lips when, after being gunned down by Capone's killer, he lies dying on the floor of his apartment, choking with the blood in his throat. He passes crucial information to Ness and then grabs him by the coat, drags himself up until he's right in his face, and snarls with his last breath, "What ... what... are you prepared to do?" He himself has given all he has to give and wants to know if Ness is prepared to do the same. (From The Untouchables.)

And some of us -- thinking of all that Christ has already done and desperately disappointed at our response -- some of us are heartsick at our paltry lives, so full of crabbiness, smugness, trivia, and self-service. And some of us wonder if he won't wash his hands of us, wash his hands of this whole sorry mess of a world. For we have no understanding of a love like his, and we haven't a cat-haired notion why he would bother with the best of us. Feeling all this and knowing that we won't clean ourselves up because we can't; realizing, as we reflect on the years gone by, that our redemption will not be a quick cure because we're awfully sick, we come anxiously asking the Christ, "What are you prepared to do?"

And he, knowing our fears and knowing our sins and self-doubts, assures us that he will do what it takes to get the job done, and he lies down on a cross and dies. He hasn't undertaken the task thinking it was a breeze. No, not him. He knew that the Incarnation was only the beginning and that the Cross was not the end, but he makes it clear: "I'll do what it takes!"

Then we, because there's nowhere else to go, because there's nowhere else we want to go, don't we sigh deep within us, "O Lord, I wish that I might become a person worth talking of, if it were only that you should not have thrown away your pains."

And he -- from the cross and thinking of the whole world and not just us -- with his own wounds and his long, long patience, looks us in the eye and asks, "What are you prepared to do?"

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Excerpted from his book, "Where The Spirit Of The Lord Is..." (c) 1999, Howard Publishing Company.  http://www.worthybooks.com/Item.asp?ISBN=1582290113&ID=0&AID=11