I have been struggling with a question these last few weeks: What does Easter look like inside a hospital? How does talk of hope and resurrection sound within a place where so many people die? (Parenthetically, this thought is somewhat unfair as hospitals are just as much places of life and healing as they are of death; people just don’t generally call chaplains for the celebratory stuff). Those abstract musings became more concrete this past week as a patient whom I have been following for several months suddenly and unexpectedly died.
Over the past seven months at the hospital, I have bore witness to a fair amount of death. I do not write that with any particular pride; it is simply an unavoidable part of where I work right now. All of the losses have touched me in different ways, but the one from this past week cut deeply. I spent many hours in this patient’s room talking with him or his wife. I met their children. I witnessed recovery, setbacks, recovery, and then ultimately loss. I care deeply for this family and I wish to God that this all could have turned out differently.
So what is resurrection in the face of grieving widows, crying daughters, and hopes cut down? All I have been able to grasp is admittedly not that original, but it is this: what happens in the hospital does not have the final word. This death, this heartache, this loss is not the end. That is the hope to which I cling. The empty tomb and love defeating death can sometimes be my only hope.
This hope does not mean that I throw my hands up in the air and give up because a divine rescue will arrive. You can’t too far into reading the gospels before realizing that Jesus wanted to bring that new life into this world and not just into the world to come. Yes, God’s resurrection is the final word. Yet God wants us to take that word and form new sentences, new paragraphs, and new stories of resurrection in the here and now. God is not just saving resurrection for a grand finale as breathtaking as that finale will be.
God is reaching into our lives to bring new life today. To paraphrase a quote from Rachel Held Evans: our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair are the places where God gardens. Something new and beautiful can spring forth from the dirt. Yes, the days can be long. We will experience death, loss, broken relationships, and a broken world. So let us hold on to the hope that none of this mess has the final word and let us strive to live out that hope.
I believe that most of us experience an internal tug-of-war between the past and the future. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis’ titular demon supervisor advises his underling Wormwood that one of best ways to keep a human from doing good is to keep them ping-ponging between those two times that are not the present. One keeps trying to recapture or reach towards moments that are mist. It can keep a person from doing something.
The quote above resonates with me because it harnesses the past and unfinished future into a catalyst that animates our present. We remember the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus because it means something today and compels us to presently work for the Good that is already here, but also not yet. We remember the hope and pain of the past to do something that help us take some sort of step each and every day. We realize that the hope which exists within the gospel story is not yet fully realized. Many people are still being left behind and forgotten. The realization, as the theologian Metz states, puts pressure and questions on the present.