Why the Resurrection Matters

It’s another terrifying story of a mother’s worst nightmare, and it makes my heart stop. “God, NO. This is enough. Please let there never be another story like this one!” I bang my fists on the counter, looking at my own children and cannot fathom how I could ever endure the loss of them. Sometimes the fear smothers me. My faithless heart screams, “God, you say you are the Comforter, but how could there ever be enough comfort for this? How will you ever comfort her?” My kids scream for more juice, and I find myself grateful for their screams, desperate for them to always be around to scream.

I’ve never been in a place where my faith has to hold up under the weight of something this heavy, but oh, how I have railed at God on behalf of those who have.

Just the night before, a dear friend of mine was in an unusual position, watching her brother play the part of Jesus in a local Passion Play. She said it was startling, overwhelming, to watch someone you know and love, someone you laugh with, be beaten, nailed to a cross. It was a reenactment of course, but a powerful one, and my friend noted, “It’s just so crazy to remember that it actually happened.”

Then we remembered that when it actually happened, Jesus’s mother was there. He was her little boy, the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, the Light of the World, now wrapped in burial clothes and sealed away in a dark tomb.

Unspeakable. The pain is unspeakable.

Makes me think of the lines from Hamilton: “There are moments that the words don’t reach. There is suffering too terrible to name. You hold your child as tight as you can and push away the unimaginable.”

A mother losing a child. Unimaginable.

I look at my son and think, “Jesus toddled around like this. Flesh and blood, like this. Maybe chubby cheeks like his and sticky hands like these.” When your son’s once sweet, grubby hands are pierced, how can a mother’s heart bear it? And the question that haunts me with every tragedy: Why would God give us someone so precious to love and then let that person die?

It’s an unoriginal question, one that countless others have screamed at the sky, something I turn over in my mind whenever I’m reminded of the cruelty and certainty of death. I’m not going to pretend to have a succinct answer. The succinct answers are always trite, always seem to skate over the devastation, always seem to quick to tie a bow on something rotten and demand we call it fruit. But nothing about death is ever easy or beautiful, is it?

Too often I find myself tangled in a mess of tears and fears, wrestling with the unanswerable questions. Eventually I settle in to one thing I know is true: that faith means trusting when I don’t understand. Faith is uncertainty, a foggy passage that is not stumble-proof or struggle-proof. Perhaps I’ll always struggle to get my mind wrapped around the perfect answer, or perhaps someday I’ll learn the answers were never the point.

We remember Mary’s loss on Good Friday, a strange name for a day of devastation. But the name is less strange with fuller perspective: Friday was not the end of the story. (Dear friend, trapped in a Friday: This is not the end of the story. God will make this Friday good, too. “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” Romans 8:28.)

1 Corinthians 15 invites us to see what would be our story if Friday was the end of Jesus’s story: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (v. 17-19).

If a sovereign, good, just God cannot conquer the most oppressive, horrific thing—death—then we are certainly people to be pitied. Pitiable people, putting our trust in One who could be killed, One who could be defeated. What hope is there for a mother whose arms ache for her son if the God she believes in could not save His son either?

But, if God could and did conquer death, everything is different. Yes, Jesus was sealed away in a dark tomb, but The Light of the World did not stay there, and this miracle matters. We cannot overlook it. Jesus lives, and because He lives, we have hope that death does not have the final say. We can trust that the mother’s arms will not ache forever. The Resurrection reminds us that God is the ultimate life-giver, proves that He can jolt dead things back to life, gives us hope that He can jumpstart and sustain our heavy, hope-starved hearts as surely as he put breath back into Jesus’s lungs.

I can trust a God who is strong enough to conquer death, a God who Himself knows what it is to lose a child, and who chose it in order to obliterate that which scares us the most. Death still grieves our hearts, but it does not capture our souls. The Resurrection ensures it.

We cannot be flippant about the Sunday part of the message. I have spent too many years attending Easter services and reading scripture without fully digesting the implications of the story. Now I am reading this with fresh perspective, fresh tears, and a heart of gratitude: “But in fact, CHRIST HAS BEEN RAISED FROM THE DEAD…For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (v. 20, 22).

You’re God, and I am not. Strengthen my faith. Amen.