This is the final entry in a series of readings that were shared during our Sunday morning gatherings through Lent. You can find the other installments here: (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)
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During Lent, we have been looking at Jesus as a Mirror that perfectly reveals to us who we have been and who we are, in all of our brokenness.
In the Mirror, we are known.
That image came from a Barbara Brown Taylor reading I shared on Ash Wednesday, and again on Friday. She says that the reaction of the Romans, the Jews, and all of us, upon seeing ourselves for who we really are in this Mirror, is to smash it every way we can. And so, on Friday, we remembered the shattering of Jesus. But today we are reminded that the shattering didn’t take. The Mirror was made whole again.
Only now, this Mirror carries a network of cracks—scars of the shattering. The cracks don’t obscure the reflection, but they do transform it in a way. We see a different kind of self looking back at us—the kind only a broken mirror can reveal. Held in tension with the truth about who we have been, and who we are, we find reflected back at us the truth about who we can be, and about what we can do; the truth that we can be changed.
Yes, now the Mirror tells us a story about who we’ve been, who we are, and who we can be. In the Mirror, we are known. In the Mirror, we are loved.
And in the cracks, we see another story. A story that makes the cracks in our own hearts ache. A story that makes our own broken pieces cry out. It’s a story where we see what God makes of broken pieces, and where we start to see what God might make of us. We see the cycle of birth, living, and death--the song that has been sung for ages, both through the various seasons that make up a single life, and in life itself—now crowned with Resurrection; an emphatic yes to life. And this changes everything. And in the midst of everything, we find it changes us.
In the Mirror, we are known. In the Mirror, we are loved. In the Mirror, we are transformed.
No longer people of the shattering, we are resurrection people. Those who mourn deeply the loss or violation of life, because we know that life is most definitely a gift. And those who hope fiercely because we have seen just how far God is willing to go to put broken pieces back together. Freed from the finality of death that haunts us, threatens to paralyze us, we are able to embrace the fullness of the beauty that God has woven into life.
Yes, we are resurrection people. Those who in the once-shattered Mirror of Christ are known, loved, transformed, and free.
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JM