The Pleading Man and the Burning City

Do you know the feeling of being afraid that the badness is too big? That it has grown so strong, nobody could ever make it stop?

There was a city like that once. It was called Sodom. It was full of cruelty, the kind that hurts the weak and laughs while it does it. The people there had forgotten how to be kind. They had forgotten they were ever loved at all.

And God saw it. He did not look away.

That very same day, the visitors who had stood at Abraham's tent door and promised Sarah a son rose and looked down the road toward Sodom. And God stayed behind to talk with his friend Abraham. He did not have to. The One who hung every star in the sky sat beside a man and told him what was heavy on his heart, the way one friend tells another.

Then Abraham did a brave and tender thing.

He began to plead. For the city. For the very people who had been so cruel.

"Lord," he said, "what if there are fifty good people there? Would you spare it for them?"

"Yes," said God. "For fifty, I would spare it all."

"And what if there are only forty-five?"

"For forty-five."

Step by step, Abraham came closer. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. His voice grew small, but he did not stop. Ten? Would you spare them all for only ten?

"For ten," said God, "I would not destroy it."

Abraham stood right in the middle, between God's anger at evil and the people who had done it, and he begged for mercy. And God, who loves to show mercy more than anyone, kept saying yes, and yes, and yes.

But oh, dear one. There were not even ten.

The badness was real. It could not be wished away. And when the fire fell on Sodom, every terrible thing said about that city turned out to be so.

Yet even then, God remembered. He remembered Abraham's pleading. He reached into the city and pulled out one small family, Abraham's nephew Lot and the ones with him. They were too slow and too frightened to run, so the angels took them by the hand. "Hurry," they said. "Don't look back." God would not let go.

There is an ache hidden inside this old, old story. Abraham could plead for the guilty, but he could not pay for them. He could ask for them to be spared, yet he could not stand in the fire himself.

One day, Someone would.

Jesus is the greater Pleading Man. He prays for the guilty too, for you, for me, for whole cities of people who forgot they were loved. But he does not only beg from the safe edge of the flames. He steps in. He lets the fire fall on himself, so the ones he loves can be lifted out by the hand and carried all the way home.

And even now, Love is still calling down the road.

"Hurry. Don't be afraid. I have you. I will not come home without you."