Further Reflection: Easter and Resurrection

Fifth in a Series

In worship on May 3, Carla asked a few church family members to share the meaning they were finding in Easter. She liked what was said enough to suggest we publish the reflections here. We’re posting one each day.

If you have lived through a time of any physical injury, you would know what it means to go through suffering and being healed from the wound and the pain of those moments. This semester I am studying Cross Examination, and that has taken me on a survey of the different ways people make meaning, interpret, and understand the cross. The cross is central in my narrative as I ponder what Easter means to me. Without the cross, there is no Easter.

To speak of the cross is to talk about being wounded. The willing, self-selfless and self-giving sacrifice that Jesus gave his life, and out of the wounds of his body, blood and water bled and flowed into the soil of the earth, out of which comes the new life for all creation.

But what does it mean to go through sufferings with wounds visible, wounds hidden

and ignored? Where is the new life in wounds that never seem to go away—wounds inflicted as a result of the many kinds of injustices inherent in our world? It hurts!

Our world is hurting, and it requires each one of us to live what it means to be human in a world of woundedness. Just as Jesus’ body bore the mark of his vulnerability, wounds are the place of shared relationality. Not just witnessing it, but feeling, touching, and breathing the wounds together.

We may try to hide, ignore wounds as invisible, but God’s love always meets us in ways we can see and do not see. When I think of it that way, it makes me to embrace that wounds are the bonds through which we reorient and forge new meaning in our lives. It is in the very fractures of wounds that Jesus threads the life-giving power for new life to come through.

After many years of caregiving my mother, as much as it was painful, I’m able to come and study in this place of my mother’s passing. She told me, “Seek the way of God,” and you will always find your way. Despite the wounds, strength can still be found, when I seek God. In my helplessness, in my wounded situations, I take courage knowing that God’s love meets me there for that is the way of God. My journey is not about me, but the God who always sees and who walks with me until I am with my savior and our loved ones again all made possible because of Easter.

Nenio Pfuzeh