Easter Glory

I’ve been talking recently with my son about God and the existence of pain and evil. The problem is not theoretical for a child with chronic illness, and it doesn’t need a detached philosophical answer but ways of thinking about where God is and what He might be doing.

The events of Good Friday and Easter highlight what God is up to. As much as we might like a God who saves us from pain, we have one who does not but who treats it with deadly seriousness in another way: by entering into it and suffering alongside us. His final vindication came not in being saved from death but in being raised after he had died. It is in some sense encouraging, and in another sense not encouraging at all! It requires us to look at the final meaning of our lives and of human history from an external, cumulative perspective and see a final victory of God that subsumes and incorporates all the pain and loss without minimizing or negating any of its effects on us here, now. Easter is a promise that everything will be well. Not that it is well now, but that it will be well in the end.

This deferral can be a hard thing to accept. It requires us to step outside of the very thing most present to us: our own suffering. But this move is at the core of Christian spirituality. Listen to how the apostle Paul describes it:

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16-18)

He had described these “light momentary” afflictions a few verses earlier:

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. (2 Cor. 4:8-10)

If you read this passage properly, Paul’s description of his suffering as “light and momentary” should take your breath away. It is only from the perspective of the final victory of God over sin and death that the crushing weight of our own pain could be such a thing. Do you believe that there could ever be a state of affairs so joyous that your own suffering is light and momentary by comparison? It seems incredible, but Paul’s statements have a straightforward logic: the eternal is infinitely weightier than the temporal, and we are eternal beings.