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, or allowing what He’s allowing.

 

But for Jesus, He did not sin in His despair.  He died rightly because even in His

bewilderment he submitted to God.  “Into Thy hands I commit my spirit,” He cries.

 

The tomb speaks of our dying.  We can die wrongly–perplexed by our situations we can die to the idea that God is good; that He  cares for us and those we love in

concrete and tangible ways.   Or we can die rightly.  We can die with Jesus, attached to Him through the waters of Baptism and trusting all His promises.

 

The tomb speaks of the death of Jesus.  Jesus started to die at the Mount of Olives when He, terrified by what lay ahead of Him, said, “not my will, but Thy will be done.”  When the body of Jesus was carried to the tomb, it was evidence to His

enemies and to many of His disciples that He was not the Messiah–that much of what He said could not be true.

 

Today we continue to be tempted to doubt that Jesus is the Messiah when bad things happen; that He continues to live and reign as ruler over heaven and earth.  We wonder if it’s all true when we pray to Jesus our heavenly intercessor and

nothing changes, perhaps for years.  We carry the dead body of Jesus to the tombs of our hearts.

 

Are you dying rightly with Jesus, or wrongly?  Do you trust the promises of God, or in the midst of life’s perplexing problems and painful conditions are you dying to the goodness of God–dying to trust and hope? 

 

Jesus knows what it’s like to be perplexed.  It is no sin to be perplexed, for Jesus was sinless–we are told this over and over again in the Bible.  But He was perplexed.   “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  Yet in it all, in the

brokenness of this world that brought Him to the cross, our Lord never gave up on His heavenly Father.  “Into Your hands— Your hands!-- I commit my spirit.” 

Obedient He was, even unto death on a cross!

 

The death of Christ which began at the Mount of Olives is spoken from the tomb.  It is one of the messages of the tomb.  Yet to the faithful it is not a message of

despair, but a beacon of hope.  It says to us when we are perplexed and suffering that God is not out of control... our situation (no matter how bad it is), is not out of control.  God is working something through it all.  The tomb tells us that the world is broken and that as we travel on the way to New Jerusalem in this broken world it is quite natural, quite ordinary, to suffer.

 

 

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