lostness, lastness, death and resurrection, in the parables of the left-handed Jesus

[from "The Parables of Kingdom, Grace, Judgment"
by Robert Capon]

..... From the point of view of those
who object to the left-handedness of the Gospel,
you see, Jesus' mistake was not His rising
in an insufficiently clear way and then sailing
off into the clouds.
That, if anything, was only a tactical error.
His great strategic miscalculation was dying
in the first place:
after such a grievous capitulation to lastness
and lostness, no self-respecting winner
could even think of doing business with Him.

It is not, of course, that we are to run out
and actively seek a miserable life like Lazarus's.
Contrary to the misreading of the spiritual advice
of earlier centuries (for example
the go-hunt-for trouble interpretation of Donne's
"Be covetous of crosses, let none fall"),
we are not to go searching for loathsome
diseases and rotten breaks.

Life in this vale of tears will provide
an ungenteel sufficiency of such things ....
The truth, rather, is that the crosses
that will inexorably come -
and the death that will
inevitably result from them -
are, if accepted, all we need.

For Jesus came to raise the dead.
He did not come to reward the rewardable,
nor improve the improvable,
nor correct the correctible;
he came simply to be
the resurrection and the life of those
who will take their stand on a death
he can use, instead of on a life he cannot.