terrible tenderness

Quaker missionary, educator, speaker and writer Thomas R. Kelly describes a seeming paradox of terrible tenderness in his book A Testament of Devotion (p. 81). He describes the experience in relation to God's experience of the fallen sparrow. (God's concern of in contrast to the world's worth of a creature of His creation, etc.)

Kelly poses the question to the reader: "Have you experienced this concern for the sparrow's fall?"

He continues that this is not just Jesus' experience. As if to say, we have some responsibility here too.

And my inference is that we (God's people) have always had this responsibility to take an active interest in understanding the value and being concerned about creation and creatures in contrast to worldly value.

Back to terrible tenderness:

According to Kelly,

There is a sense in which, in this terrible tenderness, we become one with God and bear in our quivering souls the sins and the burdens, the benightedness and the tragedy of the creatures of the whole world, and suffer in their suffering, and die in their death.

So, who's up for that?

I visited a church recently where the pastor seemed to make lots out of a prophecy in Haggai or Zechariah that something they were "foretelling" would come to pass in the life of Jesus.

I used to take a lot of comfort in those types of interpretations because the message seemed to be: "See: We are right!"

Now, I think that there wasn't so much foretelling going on as forthtelling--this is how things are, this is how the nature of God and his relationship to his people is.

And in the light of forthtelling, there is immense comfort. This is how it is. This is how God rolls.

But there is also an unanswered question in there. "Do I have the courage to be a part of this suffering in the suffering of others and dying in their deaths?". Kelly's terrible tenderness.

But it decidedly doesn't any longer have much of anything, if at all, to do with: "See: We are right!"