I was incredibly moved recently when I read about Chris Henry, the late Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver. If any of you are familiar with Chris Henry or football in general you might remember his story, as it was headline news for a few days last year.
Chris Henry was, by any measure of moral standards, a horrible person. Maybe it’s insensitive or politically incorrect for me to call a deceased person “horrible” but in this case, it may be the only fitting label. Though Henry was a talented and exciting star on the field, both at West Virginia and in Cincinnati, he led a troubled life off the football field.
In December 2005, he was arrested for drug possession. A mere month later in January 2006, he was arrested for aggravated assault with a firearm. Three months later in April 2006, he was arrested for sexually assaulting a teenage girl. He vowed to clean up his act, but this was unsurprisingly short-lived. In June 2007 he was arrested for drunk driving and five months later he was arrested again for assaulting a valet attendant. Three months later, he was arrested for violating the probation from his first arrest. In March 2008, he was arrested yet again for punching an eighteen-year-old kid and throwing a beer bottle through the window of his car.
The end of his life was as ugly as what came before it. On December 16th, 2009, after a domestic dispute with his fiancée, Henry fell out of the back of her moving truck, sustained trauma to his head, and died in the hospital early the next morning.
Despite all this ugliness, however, Henry is now remembered as a hero. After he died, his mother decided to donate his corneas, lungs, kidneys, heart, liver, and pancreas for transplant, saving the lives of four people. This touching story of last-minute redemption inspired many people and inspired me.
The more I think about this story, the more I realize what a great analogy it is for salvation. There’s something incredibly familiar about a wretched person (a dead one, nonetheless) being used by a parent for greatness.
We are all like Chris Henry. We might not have literally been arrested or convicted of any serious crime, but Jesus made it abundantly clear in the Sermon on the Mount that all sins are equally offensive and painful to God. Though we might be upstanding citizens in the eyes of the world, we are no better than Chris Henry in God’s eyes. Not only are we like Chris Henry in our equal offensiveness to God, we are like him, more simply, because we are dead. Romans 7:24 says “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?”It was not Chris Henry who decided to donate his organs to give others life, but his mother.
Similarly, it was not our own decision to lift ourselves out of the grave, but our Father’s doing. Romans 5:8 says “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” A dead man cannot will himself out of the grave; he can only answer the move that God has made first. Psalm 104:3 says, God “redeems our life from the pit.”
Just as Chris Henry’s mother used her troubled child’s life that culminated in death to bring life, our Father uses his troubled childrens’ lives (that would other wise lead to death, see Romans 6:16) to bring about life, and life eternal, for many.
