My torso is a map of past hardships. Top left is a scar from where I had a port put in for my chemo years ago. There are more scars where various moles had to be scraped off. Then there are the sundry scars left over from the multiple procedures I had done a few years ago dealing with a bad gall bladder and another intrusion of kidney stones. Each one tells a story.
Which, I believe, is how it ought to be. I spend a fair amount of time, relatively speaking, dealing with the glory of the promises of God. I have an optimistic eschatology, and a forward looking mindset. I talk and I think both about heaven, and the new heavens and the new earth. Glory, I am beginning to learn, is glorious indeed. No more tears, no more pain, no more sin. And yet I find something in the new heavens and the new earth that puzzles me. Jesus, the Bible tells us, is the first born of the new creation. When He walked out of that tomb He walked into eternity, into our future, blazing a trail of glory for us. But He took with Him His scars. Why are they there? Is He not fully healed? Is such not all behind Him, swallowed up in victory?
I am tempted to see those scars this way. How many times, in the great stories, do the heroes win the battle against all odds? The banners are waved, the feasting begins, but it all happens under the pall of those who were lost. Are these scars eternally painful reminders, like Ransom’s bloody foot in That Hideous Strength, of the cost Jesus paid? Will He limp through eternity? Will He, as He dances with us at the great marriage feast, mingle tears of remembered pain with tears of joy? I think not.
Instead I would suggest that the victory encompasses the scars rather than erases them. I believe Jesus rejoices over His past suffering, that it is a joyful not forlorn reminder of all that He has won. Jesus, I believe, is all joy all the time. And so, because of Him, will we be. Will we have reminders of the hardships we endured? Will we remember the shameful sins we committed? Yes, and we will laugh in their faces with a godly boldness. We will be glad to remember, for these are the very trophies of the victory. I do not mourn that cancer found me. Instead I hear cancer mourning that it lost me. Jesus won again. And if, in His providence, I had been one that didn’t make it back alive, Jesus still would have won. This is the king we love and serve, who moves ever from victory to victory, scars and all.