identity

Last night, Al and I drove up to Charlotte to see James Taylor at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre. On the way up, we were listening to The Lost Dogs, “Gift Horse” CD. There is a song on there that closes with the words, “… and after you’ve been broken, you may not realize that you are grace to the brokenhearted...”
No doubt, at some level or another, we’ve all been broken. Some haven’t yet realized it. Some of us bask in it, and refuse to be mended. But all broken. It occurred to me that those last lines depict what God did for us. He showed his grace to the brokenhearted by becoming broken.
Forgive me, but that seems like a very good summary of the salvation story. Jesus himself spoke of this often. This is my body broken for you. The strange thing is, that the salvation story seems somehow like a coin that has two sides. Of course we can do nothing to help write the story, as we often try to do by construing it to help us become what WE want to be, but we are called to participate in the story. It is has been written for millennia, and believe it or not, isn’t completed yet. Yes, the provision has been made and finished, but salvation is still unfolding all around us every minute of everyday. We are being saved.
On this side of the auction block of redemption, at which Christ made and paid the highest bid, the salvation story is written in the process of discipleship and growing toward becoming more like Christ.
In the discipleship side of the salvation story, we are called upon to take up our cross daily and follow Jesus. We are encouraged to participate in and identify with Christ’s suffering. This is an all-important concept that we seem to obsess on to the point that we try to help write the salvation story rather than simply participating in its unfolding like we’ve been asked or invited to. We somehow forget that he only asks us to participate in his suffering because he participated in ours. He participated in our brokenness so that we could be healed. In participating in the healing, we must be broken.
We are broken to become grace to the brokenhearted because Jesus was broken to become grace to the brokenhearted. This was spoken of in Isaiah, and then Jesus quoted it to refer to himself. “He has sent me to bring good news to the poor and to heal the brokenhearted.” Of course, God could identify with our suffering without physically participating in it, but he chose to write the story by participating in and identifying with our suffering, and became a literal sacrifice according to the law.
Jesus became grace rather than justice by being broken. We too, when broken, minister to others who are broken in ways that a whole person, unbroken, could never do.
This seems to me to be one of the most important ways that we participate in the story of salvation as it writes itself in the lives of others. When we identify with Jesus’ suffering that he endured to create identity in us, we also begin to identify with the suffering of those around us, and in turn, they are changed through our ability to identify with them.
So once again, I realize that I’m not left here to deal with the junk of life on my own, nor am I merely encouraged by a God who understands my suffering because he is omniscient and has created me, but I am held up by a God who chose to participate, even physically, in my suffering and is here to help me as I participate in his.