Volume 28, No. 39
October 19, 2003                 

  The Passion of Christ

   In a single night, love and loss changed his life.  Then they changed his world.

   On a cold, lonely evening in 1870, Jacob Riis sat by a New York City river, ready to kill himself.  The 21-year-old immigrant from Denmark was hungry, penniless and depressed after months of trying to find work and sleeping in what was then called a police lodging home — a crowded, filthy flophouse where people curled on the floor atop newspapers or a piece of wood.

   But just as the lad was set to drown himself, a little dog that had followed him most of the day hopped into his lap and licked his face.  “The love of the little beast thawed the icicles in my heart,” Riis would say later.  It was enough to banish the thought of ending it all.

   But when Riis was caught smuggling the dog into his lodging house, a desk sergeant made him leave the animal outside.  Then, during the night, someone stole a gold locket from Riis.  When he complained, the sergeant accused him of lying and had an officer toss him into the street where the dog was still waiting.  Seeing his new master getting pushed out the door, the dog attacked the policeman.  In a rage, the cop grabbed the animal and smashed its head against the steps.  Engulfed by pain and rage, Riis vowed a strange revenge.

   It started to take shape when he landed a job at a news agency.  By 1877, the young immigrant was a famous reporter.  More than a brilliant writer, he took gritty, emotional pictures that documented life in the slums of New York City with gut-wrenching realism that changed how people felt about the poor and oppressed. His unflinching exposure of greedy landlords and corrupt officials  horrified the city and captivated Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to become governor of New York, then President of the U.S.

   With Riis’ encouragement, Roosevelt closed the police lodging houses and ushered in an era of reforms that vastly improved housing, health and sanitation for the poor.  Riis pushed for similar improvements all across the country, showing his shocking pictures everywhere. At the close of almost every presentation, Riis would shout, “My dog did not die unavenged.”

   Jacob Riis had some powerfully explosive gifts, but they weren’t ignited until he found a passion born of pain, loss and injustice.  Love saved his life.  But righteous wrath gave it power and purpose.

   Seems to me, many of us have found the heartwarming hope offered by the love and affection of Jesus.  But few of us feel the utter anguish and injustice of what happened on the Cross.  Rather than find a holy rage or revulsion over what sin’s doing to our world, we wrap ourselves in a cynicism that says nothing can be done.  We feel no pain;  no passion or purpose.

   As Christians, we should fold our hands, but not our arms.  We need to get mad, get busy and get even with evil.  When you look around, what enrages you the most?  What roils your gut and boils your blood?  And what are you prepared to do about it?  If we have any hope of making a difference, we must find the passion of Christ who felt anger “consume”  him when the moneychangers made the Temple into a market (John 2:17).  “How dare you,”  He raged.

   That very day, He overthrew their tables, but not their evil impact.  Real change takes time, commitment and painful, personal sacrifice.  That means anger is only useful if it leads you to the place where you, too, pick up your cross. But if you’re still tempted to think nothing you do will count, consider the words of Jacob Riis who once said, “I’d look at a stonecutter hammering away at a rock, perhaps a hundred times without so much as a crack showing in it.   Yet, at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I’d know it wasn’t that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”  

   So find your passion.  Find something to change.  Pick up your hammer and hit the world’s stoney heart hard, as long as it takes.  In time, your whole life will declare, “My Saviour did not die unavenged.”

By Rick Gamble, published in Cross Current, the weekly newsletter of the Followers of Christ congregation in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.  Reprint at will in not-for-profit publications.  To subscribe, contact sgamble@bfree.on.ca