In the gospel according to Luke, Jesus picked up on a song (a psalm) that was well-known to his audience. In the lyrics, the coming Messiah was likened to a stone. Jesus elaborates on the imagery in Luke 20:18, saying:
“Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.”
Broken or crushed. Ouch.
Reading this verse as a non-believer, I saw little difference between the two outcomes. The stone wins either way.
But reading it now, through the lens of a different belief and a different set of experiences, I see the difference profoundly. Jesus lovingly and starkly contrasts a clear set of choices.
One choice that is available to all of us is to keep on living as if God is irrelevant—as if he is non-existent or else inconsequential to our lives. In the story of Genesis, humanity first got off track in precisely this way. The first offense human beings committed was to violate what would later be called the first commandment, Have no other gods before me. Since then, human beings have been losing their way by beginning with the same wrong step. We live as though we are somehow the source of our own lives. We refuse to seek God or even try to know him, giving worship instead to ourselves or to the people we want to please. But all of this “idle worship” is ultimately futile, because the stone is real.
The other choice is to seek the stone. To go to the stone. To anchor your life upon the stone. However, there is a cost.
Jesus is nothing but straightforward about this. Stating it simply: You will be broken.
Each of us who truly believes is broken. We stand before the Lord trapped within brittle lives, making us stunted and misshapen versions of ourselves. God breaks the old life in order to set you free. He reassembles the pieces to form a fully realized version of the person you were always meant to be.
Happiness and joy are two different things. The process of brokenness typically involves unhappiness, as we are transformed into vessels of greater joy. In perfect faith, we would have no fear of this. Because our faith is still incomplete, however, we do experience fear—or sadness, longing, or pain—during those times when God is remaking us. In fact, these very periods grow our faith as we reach for God more fervently. The stone is real, our worth is real, and that worth is too precious to remain bottled up beneath the burdens and barriers that have kept us for so long. The brokenness comes, and we discover that what is actually broken are our chains (Psalm 107:14).
I don’t know what your own personal brokenness will look like. It might look much different from anything I have heard of or known. What I can say is that the instruction will involve events. The greatest lessons God has in store for you personally will involve not just words you hear or ideas you read—but also happenings within your life. Your life is where your attention is, and God wants to get your attention.
I can also safely predict that there will be successive periods of brokenness. We are all works in progress, remade one step at a time.
Finally, I can say that God loves you, and knows you better than you know yourself. It is a common human failing to cling desperately to things we think we need, even as they drag us down. But God knows what you really need, including not only what to give you, but also what to take away.
The first entry I made on this blog spoke of the first recorded sentence of Jesus’ public ministry. A later entry spoke of Jesus’ second recorded sentence. I am almost done with that model now, because it’s not truly possible to know the order of all of the various events the gospels record. Matthew’s gospel itself might not be in chronological order. However—just for a moment—if we limit our view to the events of Matthew in the order Matthew presented them, then the third recorded sentence of Jesus Christ refers to the state of brokenness.
Matthew 5:3 has it:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
That line captures the picture of a person low enough and humble enough that his own spirit is no longer sustaining him. He has the Spirit of God instead.
This third recorded sentence was actually the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount. If you have never seriously read it before, then you are in for a treat. It is a long, colorful, radical dissertation on the ways that the kingdom of heaven and the life of joy are different from the world that we have been hypnotized to accept. I suggest reading it aloud, and listening to what you hear.
The Sermon on the Mount is where Jesus gets down to teaching us in detail. He clears his throat, draws a breath, then begins that teaching by saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Being broken, in other words, is the beginning of instruction.
