by K. J. Ramsey
Christ has brought his kingdom near, and he will extend its fullness when he returns. The timing of his return is beyond our understanding,10 but we wait now with a patience powered by the Spirit’s presence and an eagerness to experience Christ’s life even in the midst of death.
Rather than pining after some distant day when we will make it to heaven, we base our hope on the reality that Jesus is creating a new earth where those who are united to him will live, play, sing, and love with redeemed physical bodies in a redeemed physical world as a redeemed people united in worship and radiant in diversity.
Our hope is not in being beamed up to heaven upon death with suddenly perfected bodies. Our hope is informed and colored by John’s vision in Revelation 21: the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven. Hope in suffering is never for a disembodied day when we can finally escape the bodies, relationships, and circumstances that have caused us so much pain. Biblical hope is expressed not in certainty but in curiosity, hearts that acknowledge and accept Jesus is already King, lives that look for the restoration of his rule right here, people propelled by a willingness to see Jesus turn every inch of creation from cursed to cured. The relationships that were broken will be made right; our relationship to our bodies, each other, the earth, and God will be fully and finally restored.
The kingdom is already and not yet; living in its tension rather than panicking for release is the only way to be pulled into the trajectory of hope.
Hope becomes tangible when we consider that through Christ’s ascension, God’s space and ours are no longer distant. As New Testament scholar and theologian N. T. Wright asserts, heaven and earth are not two separate places within the same continuum of time and space. Rather, Wright says, “they are two different dimensions of God’s good creation.”11 Because of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, because we have been united to him by the Spirit, even while we wait for Jesus to return, we will experience God’s space and life intersecting ours. And one day, Jesus will return wearing the scars of his suffering along with his royal robes, and when he does, he will unite heaven and earth forever.
In Jesus Christ suffering becomes the place where God came to find us. The chasm between the Father’s love and our heartbreaking circumstances has been crossed because “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”12 Jesus, God-made-flesh, has stepped into the middle of the chasm, forever changing the expanse into a channel. In suffering, the space between heaven and earth can become thin, paradoxically placing us closer to the King’s presence, power, and life. Pain can be a portal.
It is through suffering, not in spite of it, that God extends his reign and rule to the world he so loves. Truly, as Wright encourages, “the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom will come as the church, energized by the Spirit, goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always—as Paul puts it in one of his letters—bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.”13
To bear the death of Jesus in our bodies, we must recount his embodied life. Jesus came to walk where we walk, to see, to touch, to hold, to weep, and to heal. His embodied life changes everything about ours. Jesus’ real body, his real trust, his real feelings, and his real agony create his real victory for us.
Jesus has a body.
Jesus’ perfect faithfulness culminated in the sacrifice of his life. He carried the weight of all our brokenness to the cross—every failure, every abuse, every trauma, every disappointment, every genetic abnormality, every depressive episode, every curse, every speck of human selfishness. Jesus lifted every ounce of this world’s heaving brokenness in his body until he could breathe no more. This is love on full display: Jesus allowed our brokenness to break him, and the breaking bought our life.
But his lungs rattling as his breath slowed to nothing and his spear-pierced side form but the consonants of his love. To hear the full sound of love’s force, we must listen for the human vowels of Christ’s story. Love leaped humanward from heaven, and it forever changed the sound of being alive.14 If we jump straight to the climax of the cross and the resurrection, love won’t reverberate through our every breath and bone. So listen, listen to the syllables of God’s love.
Love entered the world set on suffering for us as one of us. Love came not in sparkling array, not in a form that would stop us on the street. Love entered the world like we all do, through the womb of a woman, as a crying, sticky infant in need of his mother’s milk. Jesus did not plummet down from heaven into a thirty-three-year-old’s body to carry our sin to Calvary.15 Love came not as a swift, stealth infiltration mission but as a human being who would grow from a baby to a man. To hear the sound of God’s love, we have to hear the sounds of being human. A Jesus who never screamed as a baby is hard to receive as Lord when I am screaming in pain. A Jesus who never hungered is distant from the distress of those who do. This is not our God. This is not love. But Love, Jesus is.
It’s so simple and scandalous, we could miss the sound: in choosing to become human, God knew dependency. The sound of love comes in the dependency of a baby who needed to be fed, wiped, and soothed. Saint John Chysostom wrote in the fifth century, “The Ancient of Days has become an infant. He who sits upon the sublime and heavenly throne now lies in a manger. . . . He who has broken the bonds of sinners is now bound by an infant’s bands.”16 I wonder if we struggle to hear the sound of God’s love because we have been listening for the sublime instead of cries. It’s a body that brings God’s love to us.
Jesus’ body carries his story. His body speaks. Remembering Jesus lived in a body amplifies his story to a volume loud enough to hear as our own. As we consider the real, embodied life of Christ, we can encounter him with imaginative hope of how his humanity is recreating ours. As theologian Julie Canlis encourages in her lovely book A Theology of the Ordinary, when we look at the life of Jesus, we can continually ask, what is Christ doing to my humanity here?17
Without realizing it, “we often think of the Incarnation as the warm-up to the real drama,” writes systematic theologian Oliver Crisp. “Jesus needed to become human so he could die for us. What many Christians have forgotten is that our redemption began with the Incarnation.”18 It is Jesus’ willingness to be born, to be dependent, to be embodied that forms the substance of our faith. The cross has to carry something. Jesus’ real body is what forms our real hope.
Hope is not found in a far-off Jesus but in the God who was willingly born as a baby, learned to walk and talk, frustrated his parents, felt the heat of the sun, and knew the pain of misunderstanding. Luke tells us that as a boy, Jesus “grew up and became strong, filled with wisdom, and God’s grace was on him”19 and that he “increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and with people.”20 Jesus experienced human development like we all do. His faithfulness included growing up.
Jesus was not just inhabiting a physical body long enough to be killed on a cross, after which he could go back to being Light of Light. He was not God in disguise. He was not acting at being human. We know this, but I’m not sure we believe it in our bones enough to hold it in our hurt. Something about God being human enough to have diarrhea just doesn’t sit well with our Sunday-school-trained sensibilities.
If I cannot allow Jesus to be as human as me, then I cannot allow him to be Lord. He hands me redemption from nail-pierced hands and speaks life with lips that cried out in anguish. My faith is only as real as I believe his body to be. As I consider this reality that I would have blushed at or been corrected for as a kid in church, Jesus becomes real enough to make my broken body his home.
“God, who cannot get sick, who cannot grow hungry, who cannot bleed, who cannot die—this God comes near so that the impossible becomes possible,” Kelly Kapic reminds us.21 The seemingly impossible task of enduring suffering and rejoicing in it is born in the impossible reality that God became human. The implausibility of having joy in a body wi
th an incurable disease is made possible by God in a body. The possibility of hope in your despair is alive, here, as close as your breath.
Because of Jesus, the sound of love is human. Its echo is no farther than the thrum of your heartbeat, the sobs of your spouse, or the gurgling of your stomach. If we separate Christ’s work from his physicality, we will undervalue the substance through which he chose to redeem the world. Love came in a body like mine and like yours. I cannot worship what I would like to ignore. To hold love in my heart, I have to honor Christ’s body by valuing my own. The healing of our brokenness comes through the cross first in Jesus’ willingness to live an embodied, human life. The whole of our redemption is found in the whole of his life. Joy and love are forever bound in skin and bones.
Jesus had to trust his Father.
Questions dangle in the closet of my heart, hanging as the clothing of my mistrust. I reach in without realizing, grasping for a rain jacket to protect me from being soaked through by suffering. The pain that keeps falling from the sky makes me want to stay inside or at least well-covered. Somehow, even though my mind knows God didn’t cause my body to create an internal civil war between my immune system and my body’s native tissues, my soul still isn’t sure. My mind knows, as Tim Keller writes, that “God will allow evil only to the degree it brings about the very opposite of what it intends.”22 But my heart sinks in what feels like an existential abyss. I want to cover myself from God because the storms I fear he’s sent are wiping me away like a flash flood, eroding roots that felt secure. Branches that blossomed fall and are swept away. The storms of suffering can make me feel like a tree stripped of leaves. No fruit. A withering vestige of former vitality.
Suffering can erode our trust in God. I think it also rebuilds it. But first suffering kills the god I thought I was worshiping so I can know the God who is actually here. In his book The God-Shaped Brain, psychiatrist Timothy Jennings discusses a study done by Baylor University researchers who found that only 23 percent of Americans view God as benevolent or loving, while 72 percent have a fear-based view of God. Further, Jennings describes research that demonstrates worshiping a God of love stimulates the brain to heal and grow.23 Jennings argues that worshiping a God of love is what shapes our brain to be healthy and whole, which I agree with entirely, but we can’t scrunch our face, hope really hard, and open our eyes to believing in a God who is love when we’ve spent a lifetime accustomed to believing God might be punishing us. This is the central, critical reversal of suffering in faith. Will I allow suffering to strip away the angry god I fear but want to love so that I can encounter the God who loves me through my fear?
Jesus’ life offers the power we need to let ourselves be loved.24 Where you and I reach for jackets of self-protection, Jesus offers the clothing of his own lived trust in his Father. Just as the sound of love is physical, the clothing of trust is the material of Jesus’ real faith lived out in real time and space. Mistrust lives in a hidden closet full of coats in my heart, but God is renovating my heart, giving me the new clothing of his Son. I cannot form trust on my own, and neither can you. But this is grace: the coming of Christ “is not only the coming of God as God, but it is also the coming of God as man to do vicariously for us what we cannot adequately do for ourselves.”25
Our lasting clothing of trust was woven and sewn in the lived experience of Jesus walking this earth. Somehow we think that because Jesus was God, his work and trust must have come easy, as though he could snap his fingers to do all he wanted. By focusing on his deity, we’ve forgotten his humanity, and in forgetting his humanity, we’ve lost sight of the footsteps that can guide us to hope. Jesus “emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity.”26 To save us, Jesus became us. Fully human. My Lord, your Lord, had to trust his Father every hour of his life.
Jesus had to depend on the Father to do everything. He had to trust the Father’s heart to carry him forward, and walking forward meant walking toward death. In chapter 5 of John’s gospel, we read about Jesus healing a man who had been disabled for thirty-eight years. We’re told the Jews persecuted Jesus after this because he was healing on the Sabbath. Jesus told the Jews he was working on the Sabbath because “my Father is still working, and I am working also.”27 Then he says, “Truly I tell you, the Son is not able to do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing.”28 His response rings like a bell, waking me up to the actuality that Jesus Christ knows what it is to be utterly dependent on God to guide, fill, and empower his work.
Further, Jesus identified the Father’s love for him as the power filling everything he did. He tells the Jews, “Whatever the Father does, the Son likewise does these things. For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything he is doing, and he will show him greater works than these so that you will be amazed.”29 In this passage, we’re told the Jews had started trying even harder to kill Jesus for calling God his Father. This is a hostile, threatening conversation, and as a human, Jesus’ real physical body had to be coursing with cortisol, just as ours would. He felt the stress. His chest had to be tight with alarm, his heart beating fast in the presence of those who wanted him dead. The physical reality of a body in danger makes his response astounding. Jesus’ response to judgment and palpable stress was to tell the truth about his relationship with the Father. In the face of threat, Jesus told the true story of who he was—loved by the Father—and what his purpose was—to do the Father’s work of giving life to the dead.
There, among people who hated him, who judged him as disrupting their community of faith, in circumstances that were more tense than we can imagine simply reading words on a page, Jesus stood secure because he knew his Father loved him. He persisted in doing his Father’s work, because he knew his Father’s love was true and with him, and later he declared, “The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what pleases him.”30 If I am busy shielding myself from harm or trying to answer the question of evil, I could miss this: Jesus had to have faith. And the foundation of his faith was his relationship with his Father. Jesus confessed to those who hated him his Father’s love was the center of his bold work in the world, the center of his purpose, and the center of his trust. Jesus found his security in the Father alone.
The faith of someone impermeable to stress means nothing to me. I can’t take Jesus’ faith as mine if I don’t think he really had to believe. I can’t wear the coat of his trust if I think his trust came easy. I can’t experience the crouching dependency of my suffering as the prostration of prayer without beholding Jesus as needy—needing his Father’s love, reliant on him for every breath, looking to him for guidance and strength. Jesus’ neediness might offend our theological sensibilities. It might make us squirm. But it also might help us treat our own needs as prayers that are heard. Our Lord is no stranger to the painful dependency we feel so intimately in suffering. In Jesus, our needs find communion. In him, reliance was not shame; it was grace. As I behold Jesus’ real trust in his Father, the storms of suffering don’t diminish me. Jesus’ human trust in God in his life, which was full of stress and suffering, makes me more fully human in mine. His trust creates the possibility of ours.
Jesus has emotions.
Where sanitized religion tries to desaturate the influence of emotions by demonizing them as parts of ourselves we above all cannot trust, Jesus shows us feeling.31 Jesus lived affected by life, by human suffering, and by love. We often picture him as static and placid. We picture him wrong. The pastor and theologian B. B. Warfield wrote in 1912, “It belongs to the truth of our Lord’s humanity, that he was subject to all sinless human emotions.”32 Love did not come to us unaffected, even though we might picture perfection as a continuously happy countenance or an always-firm handle on life. Just as our emotions are the energy moving us through life, Jesus’ emotions guided his work. We cannot separate our redemption from his emotion. The part of ourselves we are often most uncomfortable with was the energy th
at moved Jesus in the work of our redemption.
Warfield and other scholars have said that the emotion we see most frequently in Jesus in the gospels is compassion.33 Throughout the gospels we see him especially moved to compassion by people experiencing physical suffering and pain.34 Jesus was moved by what others might ignore. He didn’t consider those who were suffering an impediment to his work or a frustrating detour from the thing he’d rather be doing but the heart and summary of his mission. He said, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”35
While working on this book, I stayed briefly at a monastery where one afternoon the guest master mused, “I think every person in the Bible Jesus healed is a snapshot of him.” To think that God saw himself in those whom society casts aside makes me reconsider my value as one who doesn’t earn much, who can’t always fully participate in life, whose suffering often feels like an inconvenience and an obstacle. I wonder if the blind men, the woman who bled for twelve years, the man with a shriveled hand, the demon-possessed, the deaf, and the lepers were each a snapshot of my Lord. Can we tolerate a God who identifies himself with the weak? The frequency of Christ’s compassion toward the suffering must change the way we see our weakness.
Jesus was moved by love, and his love included anger. He turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple, furious at the way people were treating his Father’s house. Just before he healed the man with a shriveled hand, Jesus became angry at the religious people watching him for caring more about following rules and being right than about the suffering person right in front of them.36 In Matthew 23 he spoke with a sharpness far from any peaceful image we have of him, repeating six times, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” He called them fit for hell, whitewashed tombs, blind guides, and snakes! Jesus used words of force, and if we had seen him, we would have felt his fury.