When bread turns into a snake
This post is the next in my 2023 Lenten series, where we’re following Jesus into the wilderness on his journey to his death and rising, and looking at places in our hearts and our broken world that are in need of resurrection and renewal. You can see the posts in the series so far right here. I’m glad to be on the pilgrimage with you.
This past summer, this planner and very content mother of four got the shock of her life: another positive pregnancy test. We had not been praying or trying for a fifth child. While not quite ready to say we were done having kids, it seemed that God had been growing in both of us a settledness and joy with the children God had given us. To say this positive test utterly astonished us would be an understatement. To say we had many complex emotions about it would be an even bigger one.
I wept the first time I looked at Jane after seeing those two blue lines appear on the test. She wouldn’t be the “baby of the family” as I had begun to think of her when I imagined our family growing together into the future. I mean, where would this new child sleep? How would a newborn schedule work in the midst of school for the oldest two and therapies between three of our kids? I had given away most of my maternity clothes, our bassinet, baby toys. Were we going to have to get one of those awful gigantic vans to fit all these car seats?
But just as we were beginning to wrap our heads around this unexpected new reality and meet it with joy, our baby passed into the arms of Jesus.
The shock of that unexpected pregnancy followed by the devastation of a third miscarriage left me with emotional whiplash and hard questions. Why, when we were content with what we had been given, did God give us a beautiful child we didn’t even ask him for, only to take it away once we had embraced it? What was the point of it all?
What does trusting God look like when a disappointment is unfixable and final? What are we to do in the face of unwanted things that can’t be undone—tragic losses of loved ones, abilities, cherished places, or long-held dreams, missed opportunities, the once-in-a-lifetime trips and celebrations knocked sideways by a pandemic?
Jesus said in Matt. 7: “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?”
But what do you do when it seems the Father has given you bread, only to watch it slither out of your hands? Is this a cosmic bait-and-switch? Is God unkind? Is he good? Is he good to me?
These are hard questions to live out, and there is no an answer—no matter how theologically sound—that will satisfy and fully drain our disappointment of its sting. Yet, we are not abandoned. In Christ, we have a Companion who has plumbed the depths of disappointment, who can say to our raw hearts, “My child, I know.”
Jesus knows what is like to carry an unfulfilled longing, a disappointment that seems permanent. In Matt. 23:37 (and Luke 13:34-35), after a grave warning to the leaders of the people of God (which they respond to with a death threat against Jesus), he cries, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
Can you hear the depth of his desire to draw his own into his love? Can you imagine the anguish in his voice as he recognizes that this desire will not be fulfilled?
And again, when Jesus returns to Jerusalem for the Passover Feast, the Passover that all of time had been leading up to, he weeps at his first sight of the city (Luke 19:41-44). He calls out, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
He longed for his people—created through him and held together by his power (Col. 1)—to experience the shalom of God through him, but gazing at the city, knowing all the was to come in the week ahead, he felt the weight of time that had run out. Rather than believe in him and respond to his love, they would reject and crucify him.
It seems that even God—all-powerful and sovereign in will—does not get everything he wants. Jesus knows the utter devastation of disappointment. Yet, we also see his unwavering trust in the Father as he walks in the tension of disappointment and hope, anguish and praise.
After his Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he tells the crowd, “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name” (John 12:27-28).
We see this similar pattern of deep questioning followed by a declaration of worship and trust in Psalm 89. The psalmist recounts the past faithfulness of God, but then he looks around him with a heart-wrenching, “But now…” (v. 38). Things look bleak. You can hear the anguish in the questions: “How long?” “For what vanity you have created all all the children of man!” “Who can deliver?” (v. 46-48).
There is no real resolution at the end of the psalm, just a declaration of praise right in the middle of the questions: “Blessed be the Lord forever!” (v. 52). This is not toxic positivity. The psalmist joins the Preacher in Ecclesiastes in his cry of “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” (Ecc. 1). He sees the cruelty of the world for what it is. Rather than jumping to easy, mildly comforting answers or not daring to ask the questions at all, he asks the unanswerable in faith, as an act of worship. The psalmist is “living the questions,” as Ranier Maria Rilke says.
In the depths of disappointment, we join with the psalmist in his question: “Lord, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David?” (v. 49). Instead of the explanation we believe will satiate our craving for justice, God the Father has answered this question that echoes in every generation through the death, resurrection, ascension, reign, and coming return of his Son. What can we do in response, but croak out, “Blessed be the Lord forever!” “Father, glorify your name!”
2022 was a year marked by grief like I have never experienced before. The infuriating, heartbreaking brokenness of the world, walking through grief with friends going through the unimaginable, the unexpected life in my own womb replaced in the next moment by echoing loss, seemed to loom large no matter which direction I looked. On some days, it still does.
In the most heart-rending moments, it was Christ himself who kept me tethered to trust in God’s goodness. When the age-old questions about God’s goodness in a world where good people are oppressed while the wicked gain by climbing on their backs, where the wise and the foolish all come to the same end (Ecc. 4), we can look to the Cross and remember that God did not exempt himself from the injustice of the world, the senselessness of tragedy, and the pain in our hearts, but rather entered into fully and drank it to the dregs. He responds to our soul-cries of “This is unjust! This is not fair! Somebody make it right!” with his broken body and shed blood.
Though disappointments will come in this world yearning to be made new, in our lives marked by so many “withouts,” we have been given the Bread of Life that will never be withheld, will never prove to be a stone or a snake. When we receive the bread and wine in communion, his Spirit testifies that we belong to a God who knows and who has given us himself, who alone has the power to resurrect our lives when we are leveled by loss.
I’ve never been one to laugh so hard that I cry. I mean, I laugh really often. And I cry—also really often. But this year I have laughed with tears coursing down my cheeks more times than I have in the rest of my years combined. What disappointment and grief has carved out, I notice Christ filling with his joy, his glory, his presence that reaches down deeper than it could before the carving, the hollowing. It makes no earthly sense, but he has done it all the same.
Jesus’s hands know how to hold our disappointments. His complete trust in the Father in the midst of his own disappointments is ours because he has united us to himself. His victory over the “vanities” of this world is ours by his Cross, and now we can have hope in the stark realities of this world still in need of renewal. We can say with Jesus, even in the thick of the bewilderment of disappointment, “Father, glorify your name,” and hear God’s response spoken over us: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (Jn. 12:27-28). On the other side of disappointment is, somehow, miraculously, God’s glory in us and through us. There is life springing up. By the power of the Spirit, there will be joy.