Jesus broke its jaw

Without the resurrection of Jesus, life would be cruel because sin and death would reign. More to the point, without the resurrection of Jesus we would still be in our sin and life with all its cruelty would repeatedly, crushingly hit against us like a wrecking ball hits a doomed building.
Dostoevsky brings this point out poignantly in, The Idiot. One of the characters, the sick and depressed Ippolit gives a sort of suicide speech at Myshkin’s birthday party. He called it An Essential Explanation. In it he describes a painting he had seen of Jesus just after he had been taken down from the cross. He is puzzled because the painting is so brutally honest, and it makes him reflect on death. Most paintings, he says, “Strive to preserve that beauty (the beauty of Jesus), even in His most terrible agonies.” But it was not so in this one. Ippolit says this about the painting.

“It’s true it’s the face of a man only just taken from the cross – that is to say, still bearing traces of warmth and life. Nothing is rigid in it yet, so that there’s still a look of suffering in the face of the dead man, as though he were still feeling it. Yet the face has not been spared in the least. It is simply nature, and the corpse of a man, whoever he might be, must really look like that after such suffering. I know that the Christian Church laid it down, even in the early ages, that Christ’s suffering was not symbolical but actual and that his body was therefore fully and completely subject to the laws of nature on the cross. In the picture the face is fearfully crushed by blows, swollen, covered with fearful, swollen and blood-stained bruises, the eyes are open and squinting: the great wide-open whites of the eyes glitter with a sort of deathly, glassy light.”

From this entry we see Dostoevsky held a strong incarnational theology. Jesus was God and really man. He suffered for men as a man in cruelty, all the cruelty of violence and death – in our place. However, would this cruelty remain embedded in that face? How could hope and life come from a pulverized human being? Ipploit goes on…

“But, strange to say as one looks at this corpse of a tortured man, a peculiar and curious question arises: if just such a corpse (and it must have been just like that) was seen by all His disciples, by those who were to become his chief apostles, by the women that followed him and stood by the cross, by all who believed in Him and worshipped Him, how could they believe that that martyr would rise again? The question instinctively arises: if death is so awful and the laws of nature so mighty, how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He did not conquer them, He who vanquished nature in His lifetime, who exclaimed, ‘Maiden, arise!’ and the maiden arose – ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ and the dead man came forth? Looking at such a picture, one conceives of nature in the shape of an immense, merciless, dumb beast, or more correctly, much more correctly, speaking, though it sounds strange, in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of that Being.”

Ipploit went on to say that "the disciples must have experienced the most terrible anguish and consternation on that evening, which had crushed all their hopes, and almost their convictions.” Another came to Ipploit’s mind, “And of the Teacher could have seen Himself on the eve of the crucifixion, would He have gone up to the cross and have died as he did? That question too rises involuntarily, as one looks at the picture.” I have felt this way when looking at Matthias Grunwald’s, The Crucifixion.

Dostoevsky forces the reader to look at the power of sin and death in many places in his novels, but this is to get us to look at Jesus and remind us that he overcame death. The reader asserts in his mind, “Yes, Jesus suffered, but he did not stay dead!” Even in what I have quoted above the reader is reminded of the resurrection. Yes, death, and the sin which caused it is an immense, merciless, dumb beast crushing, crushing, crushing. But it tried to crush Jesus into oblivion but Jesus broke its jaw! He conquered it with the young girl and Lazarus, and it was finally conquered, when on the third day he rose from the dead.

Hope is not now shattered into pieces. Jesus understood the great suffering he was to endure and prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done.” The word of forgiveness was even uttered from bruised and bloody lips, perhaps with teeth knocked out. Jesus had the hope of the resurrection. Life is not an immense, merciless, dumb beast crushing itself out. God never intended it for that so he sent his Son and killed death in and through him.

The resurrected Jesus is the hope for people crushed by sin. All who are in him by faith were crushed with him in his death, only to be raised again with him unto everlasting life. Bless God for the gospel.