Perhaps my favorite quote these days is from Beth Moore, “Tears fill my eyes often these days and as often over awe and gladness as sadness. The gifts to be had here — stubborn beauties among thorns — grow sacred with age.”
I think the reason this quote resonates so much is because of another quote I recently heard, “Aging is just the continual adjustment to relentless loss.”
Life is beautiful, and it gives many gifts, but that beauty certainly grows amidst some very sharp thorns. Every day I experience the many little deaths of passing youth: gray and thinning hair, wrinkled skin, arthritic joints, failing eyesight, diminishing strength and stamina. Ever present reminders that, “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass; the grass withers and the flower falls away.”
Those are just the ones afflicting me. Add to it the sting of watching my parents growing older and losing pieces of who they’ve always been as sickness and age slowly pull them away a little more day by day. And of course there are the ones we have already lost to the grave: my mother in law, my grandparents, friends, cousins, aunts and uncles. You’ve felt the prick of your own thorns I’m sure: pain, loss, separation, sadness.
Perhaps we could use a bit of the encouragement God offered to the traumatized and exiled prophet Ezekiel, as he sat by the river, grieving the loss of all his hopes and dreams, his hometown, his friends and family, and his freedom. It was in the midst of this grief and suffering that God says, “Do not be afraid, though briers and thorns are all around you.” (Ezekiel 2:6). God did not say to him, I will take away these thorns, or I will take you out of all these thorns. He simply said to Ezekiel, don’t be afraid of them.
And yet, even as the prick of these thorns reverberates through our bodies, by faith we hear the echo of Paul’s victory song: Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory? His victory chant is itself but an echo of a song that was 700 years old when Paul was writing these words. As the sun set on the once bright kingdom of Israel, nearly a millennium of darkness fell upon the people, and Isaiah told the people to listen to God who sang of the beauty He would bring amidst these thorns,
“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind…
the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.
Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years…
They will not labor in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them.
Isaiah 65:17-23
Keep in mind, this was written in a time when eighty percent of the people lived at a level of poverty that was barely able to sustain life. This resulted in widespread malnutrition and disease which made the average life expectancy around 20 years. Almost twenty percent of women died in childbirth and forty percent of babies did not survive to birth. Twenty-five percent of babies born did not survive their first year. Only half the population would survive the first five years. Of those that survived the first five years, the life expectancy doubled to forty years old, but thirty percent would die before their eighteenth birthday.
Knowing this, listen to His words again,
“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind…
the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.
Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years…
They will not labor in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them.”
Something was coming, something was changing, and all He was asking them to do was hold on and not lose faith. Genesis ends with Joseph’s death. Deuteronomy ends with Moses’s death. Joshua ends with Joshua’s death. But the Gospels end with Jesus’s resurrection, and that changes everything.
Paul reminds us, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied….if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith…if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.” (1 Corinthians 15:13-19)
Fleming Rutledge once said, “Perhaps the strongest statement we can make about the resurrection is that if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we would never have heard of him.”
“But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22-25).
Now we don’t just hear the echos of Paul’s victory song, we too take up the chant: Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory? Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
1 John 3:8 says, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil." Three hundred years later, the early Christian writer and preacher John Chrysostom (John the golden mouth) reminded us that, “Christ conquered the devil with the same weapons the devil used against us: a virgin, a tree, and death. The tokens of our demise have now become the tokens of our victory.” Why the thorns? Why not just the beauty? Some of these thorns are of our own making. When Adam chose not to trust God in the garden, he found himself toiling ground that was filled with thorns. In the parable of the sower, some seed fell among thorny ground, which Jesus would later explain was the heart that was consumed with the pleasures and worries of this world along with its riches.
Perhaps C.S. Lewis said it best, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” In our moments of honesty, we’d have to admit that the times in our lives when we most immediately and diligently seek God are not the good times, but when our world has fallen apart. The Apostle Paul tells us, “In order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh…Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
It is the pain of the thorns that often drives us to lean on the grace of Christ rather than our own strength and ability, constantly reminding us not to trust in that which cannot sustain us. Paul continues, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). The thorns keep us humble and if needed they humble us. Oscar Romero, who was assassinated during a church service during the El Salvador Civil War, said it this way, “There are some things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.”
We remind one another to “Stop and smell the roses”, but perhaps we also need to remember to feel the sting of the thorns. On the day our father Adam sinned in the Garden he was told that for the rest of his life he would feel the sting of sweat in his eyes and the prick of thorns on his hands, struggling to survive, but destined to return to the dust from which he was formed. And that is precisely where we find our King. Face down in the dirt in the Garden of Gethsemane, weeping and sweating blood, mere hours away from having His head pierced with thorns. And though they were meant as a mockery and a torture, He transformed them into a symbol of His victory….a crown….a crown of thorns.
For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
1,700 years ago Basil of Caesarea wrote a hymn on the Saturday before Easter. Scripture is almost completely silent about the events of this day. Paul says, “He descended to the lower parts of the earth” (Ephesians 4:9) and Peter says of that time, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits— to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. “ (1 Peter 3:18-20). In Christian theology this event is known as the harrowing (grieving, distressing) of hell. In this hymn, Basil personifies death and gives voice to it as Death wails and laments.
Today hell groans and cries aloud:
“My power has been destroyed.
I accepted a mortal man as one of the dead;
Yet I cannot keep him prisoner,
And with him I shall lose all those whom I ruled.
I held in my power the dead from all ages;
But see, he has raised them all.”
Glory to your cross, o lord, and to your resurrection.
Like the song in Isaiah’s days of darkness where they were only asked to hold on and trust that He was making all things new, God sings to us in our pain to soothe us, by asking us to do the same thing. Though we are surrounded by many thorns, hold on, He will bring beauty from among these thorns.
“Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’” (Revelation 21:1-6)
Something is coming, something is changing, and all He is asking us to do is hold on and not lose faith.
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