Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
This morning, as we sit here in what some would consider a museum of sanctimonious relics, real life outside these walls goes on, as it always does. People are working, endeavoring to provide for themselves and for their families. People are worrying, wondering whether there will be enough resources and security to sustain their lives. People are also withdrawing, trying to preserve their physical and mental health in a world that seems increasingly inhospitable to both. And, people are wrestling, struggling to find meaning in all their work, worry, and withdrawal. As one gentleman put it to me recently, “If this is all life is, then why is it worth living?”
My response to him and to all who ask this question begins in a graveyard. In a borrowed tomb lies the lifeless corpse of a man—a man whose earthly life had known almost every sorrow imaginable. He was born to an unwed mother in a nation under foreign occupation. He was driven from his homeland to escape a murderous tyrant. He lived as a refugee in a land that had once enslaved his forbears. He repatriated to a country in political and social decline. He eked out a living for his family after the death of his father. He labored with his hands, though called to something more. He was persecuted for his faith, betrayed by a friend, arrested illegally, assaulted by police officers, condemned in a kangaroo court, humiliated before his community, and wrongfully executed. Tell me—have any of us had it worse? This was truly “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
In many ways, this man, who had undergone such uncommon suffering, was as common as common could be—save for one thing: This man was God. Why would God give himself over to a life of work, worry, withdrawal, and wrestling, just like our own? Why would he endure an existence plagued by sorrow, struggle, and suffering? The answer is quite shocking: He did so to show us a way that we could.
In 1995, Joan Osborne released a song that asked: “What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a stranger on a bus, trying to make his way home?” The claim of Christianity is that God did become one of us—but we still have to ask: why? Why did the Word become flesh? What is more, why did the Word suffer in the flesh. Many Christians today would answer that “God became human to die on the Cross for our sins.” This is true, but it is not the whole story. For, if we consign the suffering of Christ solely to the realm of substitutionary sacrifice, we miss an important part of the biblical message.
The writer of Hebrews explains that “It was fitting that God, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons and daughters to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering.”
The answer is straightforward: Jesus suffered because we suffer. Gregory of Nazianzus said: “That which is not assumed is not healed.” This means that Christ assumed our suffering in order to heal us who suffer. And he didn’t heal us by simply making our suffering better; he healed us by showing how suffering can be transformed. Human suffering isn’t meaningless; in fact, it is redemptive. Let me explain.
As the sun rose on that first Easter Day, the body of a man, broken by the brutality of an even more broken world, was miraculously raised to life again. Just as God had breathed life into Adam’s dusty nostrils on the sixth day of Creation, he now breathed new life into a Second Adam, whose glory had been laid in the dust on the sixth day of the week. A garden graveyard became a New Eden, and, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, God Himself, “in the semblance of a gardener…walked again in a garden – [this time,] not in the cool of the evening but at the dawn [of a New Creation].”
Christ’s Resurrection marks the genesis of a New Creation, the progressive restoration of God’s world to the “very good” condition it enjoyed prior to the Fall. But, it’s important to understand that New Creation isn’t God simply “turning back the clock.” It’s about God mending our broken world in such a way that the memories of “the way we were” make the New Creation even better than the original. Allow me an illustration.
Some of you may have heard of the Japanese art of kintsugi [`kınt səgi]. It’s a method whereby broken pottery is put back together again using an adhesive mixed with powdered gold. Unlike someone trying to Superglue a broken teacup without being noticed, Japanese craftsmen make no attempt to hide their repairs. Instead, they draw attention to the cracks, believing that greater beauty is to be found in mended brokenness than in flawless perfection. In fact, the items mended in this way become even more valuable than they were before.
Here’s my point. The Resurrection of Jesus demonstrates that, in God’s hands, broken vessels (like you and me) can receive new life. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the One who raised [him] from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies.” The marks we bear from the sufferings of our lives are not blemishes to be hidden, but, like the wounds in the hands of Christ, they are signs – to us and to others – of divine healing. They are badges of a new and better Creation.
Friends, I don’t know what you are going through today. I don’t know what you’re facing at work; I don’t know what’s worrying you; I don’t know where you are feeling the pains of withdrawal; and I don’t know what you’re wrestling with. This much I do know: the Resurrection of Jesus that we celebrate today is proof that human suffering is not for naught! The God who redeemed Jesus’ suffering in order to redeem us is more than able, not only to redeem your suffering, but through it to bring the Good News of redemption to others. Through our risen Lord, nothing you suffer will be a waste! The “blows of [the] chisel that hurt you so much will be what [God uses] to make you perfect,” so says C. S. Lewis. Furthermore, when others see you bearing your burdens with faith and hope, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead will be transmitted to them through you. Your life will become, for them, an Easter sermon! What a difference that will make!
AMEN.
