Dear Friends:
It was breathtaking in June to descend off of the freeway and plunge like a diving submarine into the royal purple sea of jacaranda trees that cover my downtown neighborhood. They are messy trees, carpeting sidewalks and lawns with petals and spraying sticky sap that glazes our vehicles like cheap doughnuts.
Now in early September, the crepe myrtle trees are blooming–human-like, gray, sinewy limbs lifting crimson flowers like a sacrifice of praise up to the deep blue heavens of late summer. Once again our cars are misted with a syrup that makes driving into the afternoon sun a blinding adventure.
Colorful beauty like this is especially welcome in Southern California where we only have two seasons — dry and kind-of-dry — and the land is drab brown and granite gray much of the year.
In my childhood, I would sit for hours at the piano, musing my way through the hymnbook. The venerable hymn, “There Is A Green Hill Far Away,” caught my attention. I imagined a softly-rounded knoll in a park with a lush green lawn and shady trees where Jesus laid down his life for us nailed on a cross silhouetted against the sunset.
Mrs. Cecil Alexander, who wrote the lyric, lived in the Irish countryside near Derry. She passed a small grassy mound outside of the town wall on her shopping trips. It put her in mind of Calvary as described in Hebrews 13:12. She wrote the poem one night while sitting up with her sick daughter. Her lyric is a simple but compelling telling of the Gospel:
There is a green hill far away,
Outside a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified,
Who died to save us all.
.
We may not know, we cannot tell,
What pains He had to bear;
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.
.
He died that we might be forgiv’n,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to Heav’n,
Saved by His precious blood.
.
There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin;
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven and let us in.
.
Refrain
.
O dearly, dearly has He loved,
And we must love Him, too,
And trust in His redeeming blood,
And try His works to do.
— Cecil F. Alexander, 1847
The traditional tunes for this hymn, however, are un-melodic Victorian contrivances. They don’t go with the words at all, in my opinion. So, I would try to make up music that would carry the glory and the grace of the Creator who loved us so much that he would pick such a beautiful place to give up his life for us. Of course, I had neither the talent nor the maturity to carry that off and it was a good thing too.
The actual site of Calvary, long since built over, fought over, and buried, was a scarred and messy place — a barren, shadeless hilltop, outside of the city wall. It was the site of an old rock quarry, named for its resemblance to a human skull and littered with the blood-soaked detritus of Roman executions.
Perhaps the summit was graced with a thin coverlet of spring green that Friday when Jesus was crucified, but that would have lasted no longer than the next hot spell. What happened that day was beautiful and terrible. It was fitting that the crucifixion of the Son of God occur in a place as dreary, ordinary and stained as our human lives separated from their Creator by sin.
We humans, far from our original garden home and lacking our Creator’s power, are prone to seek beauty in replicative order and protection from terror in controllable organization. Thus we turn our battlefields into shrines, write our shameful failures into books and plays and ascribe glory to self-preservation.
Our irrepressible Creator puts the lie to our pretense by making creation mysterious and beauty messy. Jesus’ blood spilled out on a nondescript desert hilltop seeded hope and brought mercy to full flower. Mrs. Alexander, burdened by errands and the care of her sick child, was stirred to thoughts of her Savior by a green mound on the way to town. My car door handle is sticky to the touch bringing me to raise my eyes to see the crepe myrtles blooming in crimson praise.
It is the unique gift of Christ to bring light out of darkness and new life out of empty spaces. He gives the grieving “a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair” (Isa 61:3, NIV).
What is the Lord speaking to you through the mess that you are in? How is Jesus, who spent most of his life working and waiting in a carpenter shop, shaping your life through the ordinary stretches of your days?
“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).
Under the mercy of Christ,
Kent
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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.
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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.
Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.