Originally published on The Electric Gospel on March 28, 2015.
We’re heading into Holy Week – an annual remembrance of Jesus’ darkest hours. At week’s beginning, he was hailed with cheers and acclaim by the people of Jerusalem. By week’s end they looked upon him with revulsion and demanded his death. During his unthinkable suffering, his thoughts were on us, the people for whom he was living his life, for whom he was dying in ignominy at our hands. In any suffering we face now, we look to our Lord as the one who has suffered for us, who has redeemed us, who gives us hope.
Writing to someone she knows is suffering, Jenni Mickelson points to Jesus and the hope we have in him — even when circumstances seem hopeless. We know that not only did he suffer for us; he reclaimed his life in victory and assures us of victory.
A letter to someone who is suffering
by Jenni Mickelson
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For the one who wants to let go…but must hold on: “We walk by faith, not by sight.”
(2 Corinthians 5:7)
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“I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.
I believe in love even when I do not feel it.
I believe in God even when he is silent.”
– Etched on cellar wall during the Holocaust
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Dear one, I feel your pain behind the smile, the hopeful words and “musts” and “dos.” You are longing for a present much better than the one you are in. It’s as if you are in a thick mud at the side of a road, struggling in panic like an injured deer, back legs broken, to flee her fear and her pain. You speak of a new day, a new heaven and a new earth, and you pray and you read and you thank. But in the next breath you are crying for another time, another place, another life.
Let me tell you this: Your life has been a prelude to this moment. This moment, when the cross feels too unbearable to carry, the strain too great for your feeble arms, the fear and the agony too overwhelming to endure one more step on the narrow road. God has led you here, to this moment, to follow the blood-stained footsteps of Jesus.
Rejection, torture, anguish – these defined the hours, the days, the years of our Lord here on earth. True God and true Man – and this was his destiny: to be forsaken by his children, to be gruesomely flogged and crucified like a criminal, to hang in the sight of unbelieving onlookers and a Father who put his only Son through the pain of hell – for us.
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?…
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)
Sin did not waste its time in tormenting our Savior. But sin was not greater. Sin’s wrath did not define our dear Jesus. For, on that early Sunday morning, in the pale of a new dawn, he rose above the grave and received the glory of life. And it is this that he gives us, too, willingly.
When you fall under your cross, let the blood of our God renew you and give you strength. As you collapse under the load, let the power of Jesus’ love and mercy pick your feeble body back up. And when sin finally threatens to impale you with the nails of hell forever, point to the hill at the end of the road – the hill of victory, the hill of God’s Passion. You will live another day. This moment is God’s love letter to you: “Live. Do you see the light of my Son in you? ‘Your faith has made you well’” (Luke 17:19).
“I am still confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord” (Psalm 27:13-14).
