students of jesus

Walk among the tombstones in any cemetery and you’ll see signs of the sure and certain hope of resurrection. Apart from Jesus, the grave is a place of grief and finality. But, to borrow Michael Card’s neat phrase, in Jesus the grave became a place of hope.

Our Lord had a way of turning things around. The cross, that Roman instrument of terror, became the sign of love without borders. The cross was built to bend others into submission; in Jesus the sign of the cross is an invitation to a kingdom filled with righteousness, peace, and joy.

One sure mark that “Jesus was here” is where the signposts of despair are set on their heads and become the evidence of his presence.

Nor is the mark of Jesus consigned to history: in Jesus, his people gather the sick to hospitals where we will pray for them, and if we cannot see them healed we will care for them. If our care is not good enough we will remain with them, because no one should die alone. We make a place for the orphan; the very ones cast aside by fate or the corrupted values of society become the objects of our affection and treasure. We go into the streets to find the homeless and hungry, and—even if they have no interest in our gospel—we give them food and warmth day after day in the hope that one day the message will take root.

All the while we ourselves are a disordered people, in need of these very ministries and more. We, who bear the good news, struggle to believe that anything this wonderful applies to us as well. Sometime God’s people will share news so good we dare not believe it ourselves. This means we ourselves are markers of the kingdom: flawed, broken, incapable, and often ridiculous, we are the vessels of unspeakable grace. We are the cracked pots who carry and leak the eternal treasure poured out from heaven.

This is why I love His church, because even as we carve hope into tombstones, we ourselves marked for death. Though we work in places of healing, we ourselves are subject to sickness. Even as we open our homes to others, we ourselves struggle with feelings of alienation. Who else would choose to use so mixed and fragile a collection of misfits? Only him who delights in turning refuse into treasure.

We ourselves are the markers of God’s kingdom who declare, “we have absorbed the worst the world and the devil have to give, and in Jesus, we have seen darkness give way to dawn.”