Several years ago I attended an Easter morning service that has been indelibly etched in my mind. It was an outdoor service hosted by a church I had never before attended. The morning was gray and still, the sun still buried in shadow as I walked toward a crowd of unknown faces. The quiet rain seemed to speak both naturally and figuratively of God’s provision, the assurance of his plans for creation, the tender cost of his beloved Son. That creation seemed to weep as we celebrated the event that split history and unites strangers only added to the reality that we were standing in a cemetery. Surrounded by silent stones, each one marking a life put to rest, with the sting of my father’s death still fresh in my mind, we sang:

Lives again our glorious King,
Where, O death, is now thy sting?
Once He died our souls to save,
Where thy victory, O grave?

Soar we now where Christ hath led,
Following our exalted Head,
Made like Him, like Him we rise,
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies.

It is not unfair to say that Resurrection Sunday meant for me something wholly different that year. It was the celebrated reminder that it had always been: that Jesus is our exalted King, that he is alive and seated at the right hand of the Father. But it was more. I see now that I came to that service more like the disciples who gathered after Jesus’ death than I ever had before. I came knowing the blow of defeat and the finality of silence, having seen death steal away the last word. In the rain that morning, I knew more of what it meant that Christ was dead. And in that sorrow, I discovered what it means that Christ is alive.

It was grief that marked the difference between celebrating Christ’s resurrection in a vacuum and experiencing the hope of knowing that we live our lives beneath the One in whom death did not get the final word.

Author Walter Wangerin Jr. once wrote, “The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can’t stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope – – and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend upon it) disappoint us.”

As the disciples experienced the joy of Christ’s resurrection through the sting of grief, so, I believe, do we. Their suffering through Jesus’ death made their experience of his resurrection a joy that emphatically marked the remainder of their days. May it mark ours also. For in our own woundedness we find an avenue in which to find the one that was wounded for our transgressions.

When Thomas proclaimed to the risen Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” it was the first time any of the disciples formally addressed Jesus as God. Significantly, it was a declaration made in response to Jesus’ scars. “Put your hand in my side,” Jesus told Thomas. Similarly, when he first appeared to the disciples who were grieving behind locked doors in fear, Jesus showed them his hands and his side. And the disciples were overjoyed.

The prophet Isaiah described Jesus as a man of sorrows, wounded for our transgressions. That Jesus chose to keep his scars when all else was enveloped in newness and shining life is something I, like Thomas, cannot overlook. When I envision the stripes of the resurrected Christ I am reminded that my sorrow is not meaningless, that my scars are not empty. I am reminded that there is a God who knows our pain and hears our prayers, a God in whose image we are made and in whose resurrection we will follow.

Indeed, where, O death is thy sting?

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Copyright © 2004 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. “A Slice of Infinity” is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.