The tsunami in Japan and the subsequent nuclear crisis has the attention of the great eye of the American media this week. The spectacle of the destruction caused by the ocean is combined with the unseen threat of radioactivity to form a hendiadys anxiety for channel surfers with TV dinners and always-on electricity. God’s ecumenical public relation’s team brings out its rehearsed and practiced lines to answer the scripted “where is God in the tsunami” question. Their admirable goal will be to bring comfort. Most of their audience, however, are experiencing a virtual anxiety. There is plenty of food on their shelves and in their markets and the great machine of modern consumerism will get over the hiccup of a shortage of parts for the IPad 2.

Because the nuclear crisis exposes the limits of our technological idols religions get a boost from this one. Congressional hearings will display the usual fear based, attention grabbing soundbites of our representatives demanding the priests of the technological temples confess that they really can’t offer complete security.

There will be lots of prayers to one or many gods, ancestors, positive thoughts, good energy along with a bump in cash donations to good doing organizations, religious or otherwise. As usual, bad new is good news for my segment of the economy.

Also as usual for me I watch the news with eyeballs embedded in the same head that houses the brain that I use to process this week’s text: Luke 22:13-38. This is a dramatic and controversial passage. It opens with the news that Jesus’ little band of disciples have drawn the special attention of none other than Satan himself, and he has filed papers with the Ancient of Days to have them return to their homes and to regard wistfully their three years with Jesus as some noble but failed spiritual/political experiment. Jesus likewise has filed his own appeal that this not happen. That the disciples not only hang tough as Jesus gets devoured by the powers in Jerusalem but that they come out of it looking like him. The word coming down from on high is an apparent split decision. They will fall away, but they’ll come back. Peter, likely the oldest, is given the special task of supporting his younger brothers.

Peter of course is full of untested enthusiasm and says he can go the distance. Jesus simply says, “no you won’t.”

Jesus then says some things that have given preachers and Bible commentators plenty to write about. God looked out for you when you had nothing. Now is the time to sell you cloak and buy a sword!

This of course is strange. Jesus has throughout his time been distancing himself from the expected role of nationalistic violent insurgent against Roman tyranny all along the way. Will he when the chips are down finally get practical about real power? We, who know the rest of the story know he won’t which means that he’s speaking metaphorically here. He’s preparing his disciples to understand that times will get very dark indeed, life threateningly so. This will not longer be a dinner symposium where we bat around thoughts about religion and politics. The time has come for action, and there will be blood. Jesus then quotes probably the most mysterious passage of the Hebrew Scriptures, Isaiah 53 and applies it to himself. I’m sure they had NO idea what he was talking about. The devil, the age of decay, and our own self-destructive issues were going to be resolved and it would cost the Son of Man everything.

A third element of my crowded cranium this week was the tempest in a tea pot over Rob Bell’s new book. This little fight has been the gift that keeps on giving for Rob Bell, for the publisher, and for the opposition. Rob gets to look cool and generous while the opposition gets to look hard lined and reactive while Harper gets what they want, sales. I already wrote about my thoughts on that little feud but it comes into play here too.

Miroslav Volf advices those of us who live in affluence and comfort to ponder the low-risk, all-reward shape of our own chosen spiritualities. Unlike most everyplace on the planet for most of human civilization, we’ve got the money, security and comfort to play with just about anything we want imagining that any messes we create along the way will be cleaned up by God, government or our therapists. I think both the tsunami and Jesus beg to differ.

For most of human history first person observers of events like the tsunami, or war, very quickly and instinctively identify the catastrophe as God or the gods being angry. People are small and unable to withstand these forces making us victims, not agents of our destinies. Does the modern choir of preachers from every creed and sect in their attempt to disavow us of this idea do so based on any revelation or simply to keep the tsunami in Japan? Earthquakes and tsunamis can be avoided by geography, but everywhere is available to God. “OK, a tsunami in Japan I can manage (because it really hasn’t touched me), but please tell me that God will keep me safe and give me what I want from life.” The slip of our moralistic, therapeutic deism is showing again.

The cross of Jesus Christ stays that no less than the Son of God and Son of Man has to go to extreme lengths to fix up the mess we have made of all that is under heaven. The opposition is not just the tectonic plates doing their thing, or “bad choices” we make, but a malevolent, violent, evil force the likes of which we have little power to resist. There is also the age of decay that robs us of everything around us on top of our own foolishness.

Jesus pleads the case of the disciples but that won’t afford them the cabinet positions they imagined as they entered into Jerusalem with Jesus riding on a donkey, they too will get crosses, as will we.

The tsunami should remind us that our expectations created by a comfy, affluent bubble in human history should not invade our assumptions about our real standing in the cosmos. Jesus’ presence with his disciples and the commitment he exhibits in the sacrificial self-restraint of the story that follows should also ignite our imaginations regarding the gifts that are to come as well. The drama of creation is both darker and more hopeful than our small minds can imagine.

We follow the disciples following Jesus through this story. We’ve cast Jesus as the sugar daddy for dreams that are too small to be worthy of the the Son of Man. Those dreams will be shattered. Along the way we will fail, and fail miserably. The shattering of those dreams is absolutely essential to understand that new, better dreams which will be received as pure gifts will come, but not cheaply.

Tsunami and radiation are not the hendiadys of the human story, it is cross and resurrection.