A childhood friend dies of cancer in his 40s, leaving behind a wife and three children. A minor shoots and kills an 18-year-old in a local library. A newborn of friends remains in the hospital, daily fighting for his life and unable to come home. A fellow pastor laments the weight of leaders in his church serving as first responders to teen gang violence in his small rural town due to insufficient police resources. A longtime friend and Indigenous Bible translator in West Africa grieves his nephews being kidnapped and shot at by jihadists. All of this happened over the course of a couple of weeks.
You have your stories as well. Despair constantly calls for us. Hopelessness is the easiest and most logical posture. The weight of surviving, much less flourishing, in a world where no realm is untouched by the rot and stench of the Fall is overwhelming. What are we to do?
Two responses are the most common to this reality of the human experience. We can either be crushed by the weight of sin and brokenness in the world or hope away despair by isolating and ignoring for fear of being crushed. Neither approach leads to flourishing.
Scripture points us toward a different path.
This path does not run from brokenness but calls it by name. As Christians, we know what was in Genesis 1–2. Our theology provides a depth to lament unavailable outside the Christian worldview. We know what was lost in human sin and rebellion. We know what could have been. Our hearts long for it. To be a Christian is to name the devastating effects of the Fall. We do not call good what God calls evil. Death is evil. Distortion of every sphere of creation is a constant reminder of the reality of our ancestors’ sin and rebellion and our willingness to follow in their footsteps. To ignore this truth is to place a cloak over the biblical story.
Yet we do not lament as those without hope. We traverse the brokenness of our lives and world with the knowledge of the cross and empty tomb 2,000 years ago. Christ was crushed so that we may not be. It is the evidence that God does not turn a blind eye to injustice, ours or others’. The Resurrection is the declaration that death did not hold Jesus because it could not hold Jesus. It is the reversal of the effects of the Fall—the promise of what could be and one day will be with God’s creation.
The resurrection of Christ is the surety of our own future resurrection. This is the argument Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 15. The resurrection of Jesus is the assurance that whatever chapter of despair we may find ourselves in today, it is not the final word.
Paul ends this beautiful chapter with these words: “Stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (v. 58).
What would I tell my kids Paul is saying? Do not fear tears. They are the evidence of knowing the world is not as it should be and the hope of what it shall one day be. Jesus’ resurrection promises this.
Cory Wilson (PhD) is president of Emmaus Theological Seminary and associate professor of global Christianity and intercultural studies.
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