His Body Broken For You
by Rev. Dr Maja Whitaker
Not so long back I spent a week with fellow leaders on an Arrow Leadership course. Three residentials in, and with a commitment to open-heartedness and a safe environment, we’ve been sharing places in our hearts that few others see. One morning after we had collectively unburdened our leadership pain, passing the tissues from one to the other, one of the co-ordinators shared a prophetic dream she’d had the night before which led to her to proclaim over each one of us and over our pain: “His body broken for you.”
It was a deeply moving moment, and it’s a proclamation that I keep coming back to and centring my prayers around. The more I reflect on it, the more I understand how it answers a need within me that little else has been able to touch.
The cross of Christ stares full-faced at the reality of sin, suffering, and shame, and there is a great relief in having all that properly named and acknowledged.
The broken body of Christ is the only thing that could ever fully answer our pain, the only response that fully addresses it: without minimising it, offering thin or false comfort, or moving on too quick.
As a card-carrying Pentecostal I am well aware of our tendency to leap forward to resurrection, skipping the spaces of defeat, hopelessness, shame, disappointment, and death. Yes, Sunday is coming, but we’re often not there yet. It’s the already-but-not-yet of our current human experience: disappointed but ever-hopeful, partially healed but still bleeding out. In this season of my life I remain quietly confident, but triumphalism is untenable.
While his blood poured out for me is as significant as it has always been, it’s the broken body that I keep coming back to.
Only Christ’s shoulders can carry my sin. Only his body can absorb my pain.
This Easter past I attended a Tenebrae service on Maundy Thursday. I thought I’d packed enough tissues along with my grief and shame, but even my ample supply was insufficient. As we journeyed through the shadows the image that stayed with me is of the space between Christ’s shoulders as he hung on the cross.
Here I can rest.
Here I can place my sin, my shame, my suffering – not as a one-off unloading so that now I may walk away clean and unburdened. Instead, this is my ongoing experience, my new location and place of rest.
Here my unruly heart finds a home, one that can truly carry it, as is.
I started writing this from a bedside vigil during my mother’s last days. It was a difficult but precious space as I offered my embodied presence, my playlists, and my one-sided jokes. I continued to marvel at the human body even at the limits of life; the dying body is truly a remarkable thing.
But it was a costly experience, and now that she has passed, I find myself depleted and weary. Sad, yes, but more than anything right now I am weary. It’s a tiredness that even a week of afternoon naps hasn’t shifted.
That weariness I too take to Christ’s shoulders on the cross.
I am trying to resist the wondering of whether I am grieving “right,” or “best.”
Instead, I take what is, what I have, and I sit with it. I bring my sorrows and my joys, my self-sabotage and unhealthy coping strategies, my sense of relief and my shame at naming that – knowing that it is my Saviour who carries it all with him on the cross, for my redemption.
Rev. Dr Maja Whitaker
Maja is a lecturer in Practical Theology at Laidlaw College, based at the Christchurch campus, and a pastor in the Equippers network of churches. She is passionate about spiritual formation and helping others understand how to follow the way of Jesus in contemporary cultural contexts. Her teaching centres around developing Christian leaders who flourish in ministry and vocation and who are deeply formed by their followership of Christ. Maja’s research interests include disability theology, human flourishing, and body theology. She is married to Dave and they have four daughters. Maja is a current participant in the Arrow Leadership NZ programme.
