Kim Gentes

Have you ever heard someone say "ignorance is bliss"? We often times think this has something to do with childhood innocence, but the desire to stay disconnected from truth as a shield for the conscience is the true goal of this statement. It reminds us of the depths to which people will go to find solace for the brain. The importance of knowing things that we can't comprehend is only outweighed by the need to misunderstand what we don't wish to know. And I mean that! I have always believed that people desire to have an obscurity between understanding and ignorance. The power, truth and responsibility that come with knowledge leave a lot of us with the fear of a cautious child who finds a loaded gun. We know it's there, but we don't really want to handle it. So we hide the truth from ourselves (if only in our self-deception) hoping its responsibility will abate with the ambiguity of our knowledge. But this "hiding" of knowledge indicates a deeper understanding of truth than mere facts. It is acknowledgement of sin.

Media and culture try to broach this subject occasionally. The concept of the "Spotless mind", as portrayed well in the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", is a measure of man's desire to hide knowledge from not just his intellect, but from his heart. The absolution of knowledge is an attempt to atone for sins. An attempt meant to reverse the curse of responsibility placed on us when we grasped for immortality by eating from that tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Wiping the mind clean removes the knowledge of good and evil, undoes the work of the conscience and atones for sin. Or so the world believes. But the stain is already there. The indelible ink of sin has tainted not just the body, mind, memory and experience of the temporal human, it has smeared death on the eternal soul of the true person.

Spotless mind can't ultimately become spotless soul.

It's such a cutting thing for me to think of Christ's work at such an atomic level. His commission and journey to acquire our redemption becomes a deeper reality. A reality that it goes beyond the body and flesh- beyond his whipping, beyond his brutal torture on the cross, beyond the mocking of the once "worshiping crowd", beyond the rejection and abandonment of his "faithful friends". His commission and journey went to the "great beyond", the place where eternity began. It is not a location. It is the covenant relationship of God as Father and Son. It is of this place that Jesus spoke, in John 17:5, when he said "And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began". Again, he reiterates this later in verse 24, when he says "Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world."

Jesus and the Father have a love unparalleled in the universe. It bound Jesus while in his earthly form to his task of pursuing freedom for us. I believe Jesus saw his pursuit of our atonement from the perspective that he was trying to draw us into the community of love that he had with the Father. In other words, this love he enjoyed and relationship that was with the father- he was looking to draw us into that circle of life. Redemption wasn't just about rescuing us from painful, eternal results of our bad decisions (though it was that). It was about pulling us into the place of Triune love and life, where we could know God as He knows himself. John 17:20-26 is so clear on this point, it is almost unreadable. You can't dodge the bullet of God's intent- he wants to make us part of his closest inner circle of love. But how could we move "in" to a place of love and relationship with God, where only the Godhead had dwelt? What power is great enough to allow for the displacement of God, for the benefit of mere man? No power other than God himself.

And this is where conjecture rises to the top for me. I believe that Jesus knew his life was needed for our redemption. I believe he knew (as it unfolded) his path and actions as he walked out his life on earth, in ongoing contact with his father. He was not at "home" here, but he was still at peace because he remained in fellowship with his father. Many things he was told ahead of time, and knew what to do, as his journey unfolded. But clearly, his deepest strength was in His father's love for him. Yet, I believe that the Father did not allow Jesus to see all that would be required to bring us into the eternal dance of love with the Triune God.

How could God keep this from himself? Clearly part of this is explained in Philippians 2:5-11, where Christ emptied himself of Godly stature and power, as he lived a needy life in human skin. Jesus was able to thrive not because he was God, but because he stayed in life-giving connection with Father God. In His human form he was limited. Further, Jesus admitted that even he was not given access to everything, and that there were some details kept from him by the Father. This becomes obvious when he prays and asks the Father "if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done".

All this matters because there was a cost for Christ that was beyond his human torture. A cost that is screamed out in the tragic hour of its payment, when Jesus cried "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The great cost of relationship is more than just cleaning us up presentable for the Father without our dirty clothes. It was the ripping of Christ from the fellowship of the Godhead, as he became sin for us. During that time, there was a sin-man (Jesus on the cross), and he could no longer be in fellowship with the sinless God. Alone, with his very identity unhinged from the Father's love, the son cries out from his heart.

The process is still a mystery. Perhaps my above speculation makes it even more a mystery, and I am completely wrong. But in the next moment, Christ was reunited in fellowship with his father. The tearing apart did the final thing needed. It placed a true sense of loss and hurt into the experience of God- a direct, real, first person experience of loss and disconnection from the Father's love. He indeed suffered as we suffer, lived as we lived, was well acquainted with our temptations and pain and yet was without sin.

Jesus rending of sin from us, was a deeper work than the removal of sin from the mind, which is the level man has always tried to apply (and that is laid out in the "spotless mind"). Jesus work is more profound, because it deals with the actual problem not with the place dirtied up by the problem (our mind). Jesus dealt with the real problem, which is:

1. our knowledge of good and evil - our lives lived in judgment as though we were God
2. our living (willing participation) in the actions and desires of what we know is sin

A truly cleaned soul, free from desiring the place of judge and God and free from the insatiable desire to live in the way of sin, has just one author- Jesus.

So while "ignorance is bliss" and "spotless mind" may give mental disconnection from our wrong actions, they do not have freedom from sin or atonement for the sin-stained soul. Full forgiveness comes not from hiding truth, but embracing it and conquering it through love. A love which Christ completely demonstrated by His work on the cross. Easter, then, is ultimately all about truth working itself out in love.

Ignorance Is Not Bliss in the Light of the Cross