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In an episode of the old TV series Chicago Hope, a patient receives an anesthetic, and while under its influence, is visited by the spirit of a dead friend. The patient asks him what God wants from us. “He wants you to feel joy,” the spirit answers. “It really offends him when people don’t do that.”
The patient had lost both his son and his wife. Joy was the last thing he felt that day. “How are we supposed to feel joy in a world full of pain and suffering?” he asks. “The suffering in this life is enormous.”
His departed friend replies, “So is the beauty, my friend, but you wouldn’t know it. You’re not looking for it.”
What child hasn’t heard about life, “You get what you ask for.” Or, “You find what you’re looking for.” We teach children these lessons because we believe them. Mostly.
There is an awful lot of suffering in this world, and all our philosophers haven’t really explained it. There is, as the patient heard, a lot of beauty—and philosophers have a pretty tough time explaining it, also.
I don’t have an explanation, either, but what I know is that suffering and beauty meet at the Lord’s table. There is a cross here, to be sure. We hear the raucous crowd yelling for a crucifixion; we observe the cynical miscarriage of justice that condemns an innocent man to die; we cringe when a crown of thorns is jammed onto his head; we see “the sorrow and love flow mingled down.” Communion is about suffering.
But . . . Communion is also about beauty, isn’t it? It’s a picture of love that doesn’t let go, of obedience that won’t run away from God’s saving plan no matter what. It shows us death, to be sure, but also the assurance that death doesn’t have the final say, that a tomb isn’t the last stop, that the grace of God is, as the hymn insists, “greater than all my sin.”
There’s another beautiful fact. We’re not alone at this table. Look at these people here with us. There is beauty in them. They have drunk the cup of suffering, but it has not poisoned them. They are here, eating the bread and drinking from a different cup, the one the Bible calls the cup of blessing. They have had their fill of the hurt this world inflicts; now they are quietly enjoying something far better.
Because they looked for it, they have found beauty.
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