Reflecting on Haiti
Posted By Chris Berry on March 3, 2010
By this we know love: that he laid down his life for us.
Jesus had his leg amputated in Haiti, and I am more in love with him than ever. Thatʼs basically what I learned on our medical mission trip after an earthquake leveled Port au Prince and killed 200,000 people.
I was sitting with our team of doctors and nurses in a school bus in sweltering heat, eating lunch. We were on a mission to the villages around our medical clinic to find people who werenʼt able to make it to us. The reason we stayed on that oven of a bus was because our translator cautioned us against eating outside in front of the starving people. We didnʼt have enough food for everyone and maybe there would be some kind of a riot or something?
Callous. I mean looking back at that moment we all were just so pathetically callous. All except the one guy who wasnʼt eating. The rest of us were joking about the taste of our military meals-ready-to-eat and having fun cooking them with that weird chemical heating pad they all have. Just imagine the scene: a bunch of rich Christian doctors and nurses on a rescue mission to the desperately poor and supposedly voodoo loving people of Haiti, chowing down and laughing it up on a hot school bus while surrounded by a crowd of hungry Haitian villagers after an earthquake had taken the last vestiges of hope from their lives.
“Whatʼs wrong, Kurt? Donʼt like MREs?” we joked. –“No.” “What are you fasting or something?” –“No.”
Then a few minutes later Kurt gently brought up the glaringly obvious irony of a team of American medical professionals choosing to eat their lunch on a hot bus in order to avoid the discomfort of filling their well-padded bellies face-to-face with a bunch of skinny Haitian kids.
Thatʼs when I was reminded I was the one who needed a savior. Later as we walked around the villages and I stewed over my massive moral failure, I thought about the Gospel story again, and how Jesus emptied himself of his divine rights and privileges and entered our world as a man, a poor man well acquainted with grief, who was betrayed and beaten and mocked and spit on and then nailed to a piece of wood in shame. And I thought about how he did all of that in order to bear the sins of our bus- load of callous American doctors, and how he did all of that for me, a guy who at some points in my life pronounced God a fake and Jesus a joke.
Richard Dawkins thinks itʼs next to insanity to believe in such an intricate and complex God-story. Of course when you approach it like Richard does, as a computer would, it has to be incomprehensible. But when you see it bursting forth like I did that day, with Jesus Christ as the fountainhead of true love in contrast to my trickle of sin-tainted altruism, itʼs like slamming into the self-authenticating Ultimate Reality. Renee Descartes thought the only thing he could know for sure was that he thought. But I think the only thing I can know for sure is that God is love and his name is Jesus Christ.
So what I mean when I say that Jesus had his leg amputated in Haiti is that when he entered our world and lived and died in it, he experienced the full brunt of the evil it has to offer. So part of the Gospel story that Christians get so excited about is that Jesus fully identifies with us. Jesus had his leg amputated in Haiti, and he was sexually abused by a pedophiliac in Texas, and he got cut into pieces by a machete in Rwanda. This is the thing that Christopher Hitchens doesnʼt understand when he sees poor people celebrating about Jesus after some tragedy destroys their already pathetic existence, and he questions why this supposedly loving Jesus didn’t stop the disaster in the first place. Itʼs not that the poor are blind to that irony, but that the almost palpable presence of Jesus in their tragedy over-rides what is so troubling to Christopher. If you really believe that the King of the Universe stooped down into your pathetic world and went through everything you are going through (and worse), it raises your confidence in his character as you become arrested by the manifestation of love in his willing identification with you. Hope dawns, if dimly. The story of Jesus is just so good and his love is so powerful it resonates with the heart in strange and beautiful ways, until the downtrodden soul can proclaim in agreement with the Roman soldier who watched the crucifixion, “Surely this is the Son of God.” Thatʼs what I meant when I said I slammed into Ultimate Reality.
But we canʼt ignore Christopherʼs criticism forever. There is a time after the sweet comfort of Jesusʼ presence gives way to contemplation, and we are bound to wonder why our loving God lets all of those horrible events happen. The answer is ugly, but necessary to hear – humanity deserves it. Pat Roberston was rightly ridiculed for claiming God was punishing the Haitians. But the problem isnʼt with Patʼs indictment of the Haitians, itʼs with his stunning blindness to his own nationʼs sin. So the real question Christopher Hitchens should be asking is how in the world a just God could tolerate humanity for even a moment. There should be earthquakes every day, everywhere.
Thatʼs basically what was going on in my head on a personal level when I said I realized that I needed a savior. The question, Mr. Hitchens, isnʼt why did this happen to the Haitians, but why didnʼt it happen to me? It should have happened, and it still might, but after being bathed in the love of Christ it doesnʼt really matter anymore since death has lost its sting, love has come, and hope for new life has dawned in the Resurrection.
That is the glorious and life re-defining truth that we like to call the good news, which if itʼs true has got to be the understatement of the last two millennia. I guess the good news is what I was getting in sync with when I was contemplating the love of Christ versus my pathetic and self-serving altruism. I was experiencing the real driver of the Universe, the true force to rule all forces: Christ-Love, which stands over against the modern claustrophobic version of reality that reduces everything to meaningless patterns and natural laws. Oh how Iʼm glad I donʼt believe in that coffin of a worldview. Weʼre not just talking about some mere intelligent designer behind this Universe, but a God-King who so recklessly loves that he is willing to die for us even though we deserve eternal punishment. That is something to make your heart sing, like how it made the Haitians sing praise to Jesus as their legs were getting cut off (yeah, I saw that). Love never fails, after all; and God is love, and his name is Jesus Christ. I saw that more truly than ever when I was in Haiti, and Iʼll joyfully and boldly continue to follow him and proclaim his excellencies.