What does Christ's Resurrection offer? How can I find joy?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: March 30 - April 5
Jesus Christ offers me peace and joy.
Before we can fully savor the victory of Easter, we must learn to let hard things have their own gravity, their own time and space. After all, before it was empty, the tomb was full.
The concrete reality of Jesus’s suffering matters because most of us will spend time—days, months, years, a lifetime—staring at our own unjust pain, our own unwarranted suffering, or our own empty and echoing moments of doubt. There will be periods where our best laid plans seem to come to naught or when our noblest efforts turn to ashes in our hands.
In those moments, we need to know that Jesus lived as a fully mortal man—subject to hunger, pain, longing, betrayal, and sadness. Then, we need to realize that the bleak sunset of Friday and the emptiness of Saturday were just as real as the victory of Easter Sunday. The reality of all that preceded the resurrection teaches us that when we feel abandoned, or betrayed, or alone, or forgotten, we are not the first to walk that road. By recognizing this reality, we can learn that the gospel of Jesus Christ is not an empty fairy tale filled with flimsy promises, but rather, the gospel is the guarantee from someone who also suffered terribly that light will vanquish darkness, that love will overcome enmity, and that hope will conquer despair.
—Tyler Johnson, “Dressing the Wounds of Jesus”
Because of His Atonement, Jesus Christ has the power to help me overcome sin, death, trials, and weaknesses.
Finally, as we celebrate Easter soon, I am brought to the scripture that stands for me as perhaps the most direct and beautiful argument for the centrality of empathy in both the character of divinity and in the pantheon of Christian virtues. I am deeply touched to know that when Jesus presents himself in his resurrected glory to the people gathered at the temple surrounded by physical devastation wrought in protracted and absolute darkness, he immediately focused their attention on the centrality and beauty of his vulnerability and his history of suffering. As a doctor who has examined hundreds or thousands of patients, I cannot easily move past the visceral impact and almost macabre specificity of Jesus’s invitation and the crowd’s response:
Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that we may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole Earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world. And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety.
What other course of action but this could have more indelibly impressed upon the hearts and minds of Jesus’s followers this message: God’s willing suffering is what makes Him God. He has come to a people whose world has just been riven by earthquakes and consumed by fire. They have endured impenetrable darkness so thick that it could be tasted, smelled, and rolled between their fingers. Thousands have died, and the cries of the wounded and dying lingered in that opacity while the living wondered if light would ever be restored. But then, the Being who finally returns light to the sky and who descends with healing in his wings does this one thing before the healing, before calling disciples, even before instituting the sacrament: he shows them that even in his resurrected glory, he has maintained the bodily reminders of the steep price of suffering he paid to gain his empathy—because that empathy is what makes him most fully God, and is the path he invites us to follow.
—Tyler Johnson, “Vulnerability, Finitude, and Community”
Jesus Christ paid the ultimate price for my salvation.
