“By His wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5)

This past Easter Sunday, I placed a flower in one of 100 holes drilled into a large wooden cross. My husband and I were serving Communion, so after placing our flowers we turned, picked up our trays of bread and juice, and had the privilege of watching the rest of our congregation place their own flowers, one by one, into the cross of Christ—until what was once full of holes became laden with beauty. The flowers reminded us that resurrection is not only possible; because of Jesus, the blossoming of life from death is our inevitable end, too—an end which is no end at all, but a beautiful beginning.

There’s a quote I’ve always loved from a Dostoevsky novel, and it gets tossed about frequently in artsy Christian circles because it sounds good and is true, though I’ve never taken the time to pinpoint exactly why it is true: “Beauty will save the world.” ¹Fyoder Dostoevsky, The Idiot. Essex, UK: Wordsmith Editions Ltd (1998). Part 3, Chapter 5. Quote accessed via https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/23423-beauty-will-save-the-world

I am taking the time now, because I need beauty to save me. And the truth is, I suspect it already has. I think it is nothing less than beauty that has saved me from a life of despair and giving in to chronic depression; it is beauty that kept me from crumbling in my 20’s during an abusive marriage, and it is beauty that shines as the bright morning star above me, guiding me home through every dark night unto dawn.

Wounds That Blossom

For those who follow the way of Jesus, it is important to know what we mean when we talk about beauty—because after all, beauty has the power to save the world. Beauty is neither some ethereal spiritual reality nor an unattainable Hollywood ideal. No, beauty is the flesh-and-blood body of God hanging on a tree, dying to bring us back to ultimate reality: the Kingdom, rule, and reign of God on earth as it is in heaven. The most beautiful thing that has ever happened in the universe is Jesus Christ—the one who was pierced with holes that wounded his body, later flowering with the fruit of walking through death for our sake, bringing resurrection to the entire created order. 

We feel the ache for eternity, don’t we? We ache because the most beautiful things in this life also carry within them the inevitability of death. It is in the bittersweetness of each day’s sunset, when we look into the faces of our aging parents and sense the time to say goodbye is drawing closer than we wish. Beauty is experienced when our own bodies begin to fail us and when those Easter lilies that triumphantly adorned our celebratory Sunday altars begin to wither and wilt. And Jesus—the most beautiful person to ever walk the earth—was no exception. In fact, it is his death which makes him so beautiful. Jesus seemed to think so too, even inviting his incredulous disciples to identify him in his resurrected state by his wounds (John 20:19-20). 

What does this tell us about our own wounds? Rather than marks of shame, could the wounds that Jesus died to redeem be portents of a beautiful life? 

If Jesus—the wounded one—is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to the world, and has indeed saved the world by surrendering to death to the fullest extent, then what does that tell us about our relationship to our own experience of suffering in this life? For those who walk in the footsteps of Jesus, it possible to live a truly beautiful life apart from pain? To hearken back to my Easter Sunday experience: without holes, where would the flowers go? Without death, how will resurrection occur? Yet even in the church, we are taught to avoid death and suffering at all costs. If we suffer, we are often told it is because there is unaddressed sin in our life or we are not trying hard enough to reach God. Rarely have I heard “Rejoice! Your wounds are bringing you closer to the death and resurrection of Christ!” proclaimed to those who are suffering.

Instead, in my experience with the Western church in particular, we have been handed a doctrine of suffering avoidance that promises us a happy, successful life if we do all the morally right things in all the right ways, and essentially appease God into giving us what we want: a life free of suffering. I am not suggesting that we seek suffering. Jesus himself taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:13). What I am saying is this: What if we viewed our experience of suffering not as a problem to be solved but as an invitation to journey deeper into the redemptive work of Christ on our behalf?

For Christ’s is a paradoxical beauty that invites us to die that we might truly know life, but His invitation is also a beauty that has saved the entire world, and is saving it still. In a world that is obsessed with self-promotion, suffering avoidance, and instant gratification at all costs, we need a vision of beauty that is, above all things, cruciform. Now more than ever, we need the strange beauty of our resurrected Savior, the lamb that was slain—“the one with hair as white as wool…eyes like fire…and a voice like rushing waters” (Revelation 1:12-16)—to purify our vision and enable us to behold God’s redemptive gardening at work in all things, even now. 

To hearken back to my Easter Sunday experience: without holes, where would the flowers go? Without death, how will resurrection occur? Share on X

Revealing Our Wounds

To paraphrase Leonard Cohen’s famous lyric, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in,” there are wounds in all of us, but that’s where the flowers of resurrection will grow—if we let them. The cruciform beauty that can only flower from death does require us to acknowledged the fact that our wounds exist at all—to imitate our Savior in the vulnerability of hanging naked and wounded on the cross. I had my own experience of this a few hours after symbolically placing a flower into one of the ‘wounds’ on our Easter cross. I wonder if that practice prepared me to share my own wounds and trust that something might flower from them.

After sharing a meal together, my two friends reached across my kitchen table and prayed over me for freedom from an area of death in my life to which I have been enslaved for years. As they prayed, I saw Jesus breaking the handcuffs that bound my wrists together—only the handcuffs weren’t on my wrists, they were on his. In the image I saw, he waited until my bowed head looked up and met his steady gaze before pulling his wrists apart and snapping the chains that represented my bondage as easily as if they had been made of paper. This was something I could never do in my own power and strength, and it was as if Jesus was saying to me, “Behold what My resurrection can do!”

This moment of beholding Jesus breaking my chains only happened because of an earlier choice in which I died to my pride and admitted to my trusted community—nakedly, and not without shame—that I was struggling and needed help. It was a return to the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:25), my soul standing unmasked before God and others, asking to be clothed with His healing and deliverance (Genesis 3:21). Revealing the hidden woundedness I carry deep within and dying to my appearance of having it all together ushered in the salvific presence of Christ’s healing beauty, and I do not regret the risk it took to get there. In this way, I found that for those who are hidden in Christ, it is indeed true that the wounds Jesus died to redeem are portents of a beautiful life. But they are not only portents that reveal the seeds of resurrection beauty God plants in the wounds of this life—they are also portals into the eternal life to come, in which heaven and earth will be one.

In a world that is obsessed with self-promotion, suffering avoidance, and instant gratification at all costs, we need a vision of beauty that is, above all things, cruciform. Share on X

Towards an Undying Beauty

In a beautiful irony, apart from those who are alive at Christ’s return, our entrance into unending life and an untainted experience of beauty, truth, and goodness in the new heavens and earth is through the portal of death. One day, we will walk through the wound at the heart of the world into a life of unending, worshipful wonder. One day, what began as a funeral dirge will end in a bridal march at the great wedding supper of the lamb. As we look forward to the wedding supper of the lamb, I cannot help but look back to my own wedding day as a symbol of what that day might be like. I am not referring to the delicious food, the presence of loved ones, or even to the celebratory hours spent laughing and dancing. My wedding day was utterly beautiful because of the wounds my husband and I brought with us into the small wooden A-frame church by the shores of a mountain lake in which we exchanged our vows. That day, we placed the ashes of our former marriages, which had ended in devastation and unwanted divorce, upon the altar in declaration that death does not have the final word—that resurrection is not only possible, but is our right, good, and necessary inheritance as the Beloved of God. Though the scenery which surrounded us was stunning, what made the day beautiful was the flowering of our wounds, beholding beauty rising from the ashes. Tears of sorrow turned to tears of joyful awe on our wedding day, as if to say, Behold what His resurrection can do!

And so it will be, I think, at the final flowering of all things—that wedding feast in which God promises to wipe every tear from our eyes. We are people of the resurrection who identify with the wounded one, and it was and is our wounds Jesus bore, heavily pregnant with our collective and individual brokenness. It is only when our internalization of beauty is cruciform, shaped by the cross of Christ, that we will find ourselves awake and alive, blinking in the unremitting light of eternal dawn. Until then, we refuse to hide our wounds, because Jesus didn’t. We practice walking through death, because Jesus did—and that’s the only way toward resurrection. And as we walk in His way, we will find that beauty has saved, is saving, and will save the world.

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Death does not have the final word. Resurrection is not only possible; it is our right, good, and necessary inheritance as the Beloved of God. Share on X