The God of the gaps

“Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words. They should remain open. Our only comfort is the God of the resurrection, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This was one of the quotes I used Sunday in my Easter message about Jesus and his entering, experiencing and redeeming the darkness, the abandonment of God, the crying out, the 'giving up' of spirit and the tearing of the curtain in the temple that all of that caused.

I see a deep and necessary connection between Friday and Saturday's trauma and drama with the hope of Sunday's resurrection.

Christ' work of redemption let God out of the temple once and for all. Suffering opens a way to God. It brings us into places that nothing else could accomplish. It liberates what was confined. It shatters and shakes all that was and unleashes what will be.

As Easter people, practicing resurrection, we too are invited to share in the mystery of death and life, dark and light, forsakeness and being found.

We, followers of The Living One, are a forgiven and no longer forbidden people, dangerously free, released from the fear of dying.

Jesus raised people from the dead before the cross, on resurrection morning, in the early church and in his coming return. Death is no longer the last word — life is.

One biblical writer described it like a scorpion losing its stinger. What do you do with a people who no longer fear death?

You send them off into the world to live and proclaim this new life trusting in the God of ressurection.

We are not called to “fill the gaps” with human words but to invite one another to discover the sacred in the sacrifice, the holy in the holes, the possibilities in the pain and the hope of the dawn in the dusk.