Breaking

As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus acted as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening: the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him…      Luke 24:30-31

I was chopping firewood the other day and had several large pieces I had to split. There’s a trick to chopping the big ones that just bounce the axe back at you. Chop it till it starts to crack. Then, use the axe as a wedge.  Take the blunt end of a sledge and split the wood into smaller pieces. The wood makes a terrible sound. It’s the sound of the wood splintering. It’s the sound of the wood pulling apart and breaking.

That sound seems be all around me these days. It’s within me as well. It’s the painful sound of our world pulling apart and breaking. Splintering. I hear it in my own pain and in the pain of friends. We live in the breaking. You could trace that sound all the way back to a garden when a husband and wife experienced the first split. The wedge was driven between them and between them and God. It was the wedge of the fall. The division of the first rebellion. The first exposed nudity. The first shame. The first secret. The first pain. The first lie. The first insecurity. The first loss of innocence. The first death. The very first splintering…  and it is splintering still. But there was and is Jesus. And he stepped down from heaven to live in the breaking. And it crushed him until it killed him. And he came back. And he took a piece of bread and he broke it and he handed it over to them. He gave it, the same way he gave himself. And his friends said, “Oh, there you are. You’re in the breaking.” 

As I listen to the voice of the one who calls me his own, I am reminded that my brokenness does not remain under hell. It rests under heaven and He is in it. Jesus is in the breaking. And I am beginning to recognize him in my own brokenness and in the broken parts of my neighbors and my neighborhood. Because after all, only someone who’s been here before, in the breaking, would know the way back to find the rest of us.