I awoke this morning to the distant sound of music that reached my ear only after washing over countless human beings between me and the speaker from which it came.  I don’t understand the words, or, really, if there are words at all.  There is a kind of rhythm to it, but it is very subtle.  It is more like a series of melodic waves coming one after another, speaking, no doubt, of the great powers to which the people look.  I am tempted to say it is “eerie,” but I suspect that is something we foreigners always say when we could just say, “very different.”  I do not lie when I say it is strangely beautiful and mesmerizing.  But it has stopped now and very soon, probably within minutes, I will hear the more discordant cacophonous sounds of the city coming to life again.

Five of us are in a mega-city in South Asia, an astonishing and astounding collection of seemingly innumerable human beings.  During the day there is a thrilling and exhausting kind of breathlessness about this place:  masses of humanity moving in constant motion in every single direction.  It occurs to me that never have I been among such numbers in all my life.  There…are…people…everywhere!  The behaviors are the same as you would see anywhere else in the world:  people walking, talking, buying, selling, laughing, arguing, eating, sleeping, staring, waiting, being waited upon, singing, worshiping, posturing, reflecting, begging, being begged.  The cosmetics of the city are also much the same as anywhere else: advertisements, political statements, religious statements, billboards, flyers, pictures of great powers, pictures of great leaders, pictures of corrupt leaders who no doubt want to stake claim to this or that part of the city, pictures of wealthy Anglos dressed in high fashion, pictures of stars, both domestic and foreign, images of American kitsch, images of un-American kitsch, pop-culture, warnings, instructions, health advisories, traffic instructions, driving instructions, food advertisements.  The smells are likewise overwhelming:  the smell of mass humanity, the smell of a thousand cooked foods from a hundred times as many street vendors, the smell of offerings to the powers, the smell of bodily functions, the smell of trash, of smoke, of burning, of refuse, the smell of construction, of welding, of shredding, of tearing, of hammering, of sawing, the smell of laundry hand-washed on stony ground, of men bathing at water sources on street corners.  And the sights, too:  skylines of unfathomable huts and shacks lining narrow, unending walkways and roads, labyrinthine passageways snaking between utterly incomprehensible mass dwellings that fluctuate between concrete rooms piled high in apartment complexes and rudimentary hovels constructed of wood and tarp and plastic and paper and trash, nice malls bedecked with Americanized advertisements for this or that clothing or perfume or sunglasses or footwear, tall office buildings, many of them largely empty, hotels, government buildings, houses of worship of every variety, symbols, signs, graffiti.

I am confronted repeatedly by my own foreignness:  my impulsive thought, “Why don’t they remove the trash from their roof?” followed by the immediate instinctive rejoinder, “Because maybe the trash makes the dwelling feel more stable or maybe it is just one more layer the rain would have to get through before reaching the inhabitants, or maybe it creates better shade or maybe that trash is their living and the roof is safest place to keep it.”  And so I have moved around this city, as I suspect our whole team has, with a kind of unending internal argument:  “Why don’t they…probably because they…”: a constant effort to understand, to comprehend, at least to accept all of this.

There was One who once stood above a great city and wept tears over it, moved by compassion for that city, saying that He could save it if only the people would consent.  I say that not to try to draw a parallel between me or us and that One, Jesus.  If anything, my coming here has reminded me of my great distance from Jesus, for Jesus’ compassion was untainted by shock, by amazement, by bewilderment…yes, even by the shameful thought, “At least I don’t live here.”  No, humanity itself, with no thought of escape, was the object of Jesus’ special affection.  Jesus knew the unfathomable depths of man’s lostness.  He was never deceived by the difference between humanity unmasked and raw and humanity well-dressed and polished.  Jesus knew that wealthy, progressive, “acceptable” humanity usually ended up carrying darker demons than the great masses who wore their lostness openly and naked under the sun.

Who, after all, are the true pagans today?  Who, after all, should be most-wept-over?

Jesus’ was a pure love, unadulterated, springing from pure and holy sources.  He did not recoil at the dirtiness and the trash.  He looked upon it rather with a sense of heart-rending but God-ordained vocation:  for the smells of suffering humanity would be His own smell, the sights of suffering humanity His own sights, the sound of suffering humanity would be His own sound.  In one great, startling, flabbergasting act on a single hill outside of a single city, Jesus would take all of the world’s lostness and paganism and refuse and pretensions and heartbreak and shame and crimes upon and into Himself, bearing it willingly, being crushed by God’s rightful sentence upon such.  He would not merely observe and weep and feel…He would act, plunging His whole spotless, sinless being into the great tapestry of human degeneracy and drowning in the mire, in the mud and the muck, in the swarming mass of human need.  And He would thereby obliterate it’s devastating effects, canceling out the curse by bearing the full brunt of it, emerging victorious in most-unlikely resurrection power, bursting forth in resplendent, uncontainable light, illuminating every dark corner, every collapsing hovel, every nook of every trash heap, outshining and out-sparkling every temple of every god with the love of the One True God, healing every wound, calming every troubled heart, wiping away every tear.

The nations need Jesus.   I need Jesus.  For in the end we who in our hubris have found ways both subtle and explicit to convince ourselves that “we” are at least not like “them” before God, that “we” are at least “advanced” and “socially evolved,” must have our arrogant and damnable pretensions shattered by the blunt and unalterable reality of the gospel:  that we are all pagans before a Holy God.  That “we all come as beggars to the cross.” (John Owen)  That we, that I, am unwashed humanity.  That we, that I, am teeming humanity, lost in backwardness and blindness.

The nations need Jesus.

I need Jesus.  With all the lostness and paganism that I still yet cling to in moments that are too frequent to be denied and too relished to be avoided…I need Jesus.

I will come to Him with all of it.  We all must come to Him with all of it.

He can bear it.

He has borne it.