MERRY MONDAY BY PARRIS BAILEY

“For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” 2 Cor 4:17

All through Easter weekend Frank played the soundtrack from JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR to get us ready for the drama presentation that we would do Sunday morning. First off this musical production always brings me back some 40 years ago to my salvation. When I listened to the lyrics, you see Mary and Judas on opposite sides of the spectrum.  She saw that she had been changed by Christ himself and couldn’t put it into words or action. Then Judas, like so many of us got all snarled up in the here and now, the million things that Christ “ought to have done”. I am shocked how much I see myself in him.

CS Lewis has a striking comment on this; “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not IN them, it only came THROUGH them, and what came through them was longing. These things–the beauty, the memory of our own past–are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I think we all can agree that this world and all it’s supposedly profound thought, dwells on a dead Christ buried with all the other so called prophets. Will I let the scum of this world also get on Me, or will I throw myself like Mary did and waste myself and see the far exceeding eternal weight of glory?

“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.” CS LEWIS