The Story We’re Living In Is Failing Us

Something isn’t working.

If you’re over thirty, you probably remember growing up with a quiet sense of optimism about where things were headed. Progress was the religion, and we were all true believers. Remove God from the center, the story went, and we’d finally be free. Finally happy. Finally whole.

And yet here we are: anxiety rising, loneliness epidemic, meaning harder to find than ever.

The cultural critic Andrew Delbanco traces how American society has built its sense of peace through three successive stories. First, peace was grounded in God. Then, after the Revolutionary War, in Nation. And now, for the last several decades, in Self. The 80s told us to serve ourselves. The 90s told us to find ourselves. The 2000s told us to accept ourselves. The 2010s, to express ourselves. The 2020s, to reconstruct ourselves.

But people are waking up to how hollow that story really is. Even the most successful people in the world, those who have everything secularism promises, are pouring billions into trying not to die. Because the story they’ve built their lives on has no answer for death.

Until we have an answer to death, we’re left with three things: grief, fear, and doubt.

There’s an empty tomb in the Middle East that addresses all three.

For the Grieving: Jesus Shows Up as the Gardener

John 20 opens with Mary Magdalene weeping outside the tomb. When the risen Jesus appears to her, she mistakes him for the gardener.

That’s not a throwaway detail. John is writing a new creation account throughout his gospel. In Genesis, God creates the world and declares it finished on the sixth day, then rests on the seventh. In John’s gospel, Jesus dies on the sixth day of the week declaring “It is finished,” rests in the tomb on the seventh, and then rises on the first day of the new week. A new creation is beginning. And at the center of it stands someone who looks like a gardener, because Adam’s original calling was to cultivate a garden, and Jesus is the new and better Adam.

To those carrying grief, the resurrection says this: the Gardener is making all things new. Gardens specialize in seeds dying in order to produce beauty. The resurrection is the sign that the renewal of all things has already begun.

For the Fearful: Jesus Shows Up as the Peacemaker

Later in John 20, the disciples are hiding behind locked doors. They’ve heard the tomb is empty. They’re still terrified.

Jesus walks through the walls and says, “Peace be with you.” And then he says it again. And then again. Three times in one passage, because in the ancient world, repetition was how you underlined something important.

The peace Jesus offers has three dimensions. There’s peace in this life, an interior settledness that comes from knowing guilt has been paid, shame has been nailed to the cross, and death has been defeated. There’s peace in life after death, the reality Paul describes as being absent from the body and present with the Lord. And there’s what N.T. Wright calls “life after life after death,” the bodily resurrection in the new creation that Jesus’ own resurrection points toward.

Because of the resurrection, our purpose isn’t to escape this world. It’s to renew it. Churches exist to be embassies of the coming kingdom, little outposts of forgiveness, reconciliation, and love planted into every corner of the world.

For the Doubting: Jesus Shows Up as the Pursuer

Thomas wasn’t in the room. He missed it. And when the others told him what happened, he refused to believe without seeing for himself.

Jesus didn’t write Thomas off. He came back for him.

There’s real historical evidence for the resurrection: an empty tomb that even non-believers acknowledge, a diverse group of eyewitnesses who included women (the last people anyone would fabricate as credible witnesses in that culture), and a movement of people willing to die for what they claimed to have seen. But evidence alone rarely moves a heart. What moves a heart is the Pursuer, coming back through locked doors for the one who doubts.

So wherever you find yourself today: the Gardener is making all things new. The Peacemaker is making all things right. And the Pursuer is making himself known.

He is risen.