Just as Holy Week began, astronomers gave us an amazing, seemingly impossible gift: a photograph of the invisible, seeing the unseeable!
Because no single telescope is powerful enough to distinguish a detail as relatively small as a 55 million-light-year-distant black hole, scientists harnessed eight observatories together to simulate a much greater instrument, one as large as the Earth itself. It took two years and more than 200 people sifting and refining the data gathered on four days in April 2017 to bring the final famous image into focus.
Black holes are created by the tremendous gravity of incredibly concentrated mass [think of the earth the size of a pea]. Black hole are:
…the definition of unseeable: mass and volume turning inside out, cosmic sinkholes from whose irresistible gravity nothing can escape — not a single lousy photon.
Not even photons (the speed of light by which the universe is measured) can escape.
But, paradoxically, that which emits no light is itself surrounded by incredible brightness that becomes a clue to its existence.
What might we “see” this Easter?
Most world religions acknowledge that evil exists, but believe human beings retain enough ability to live in ways that please God. God gives us rules; then judges how well we follow them.
Only Christians audaciously affirm that human effort is utterly powerless to please God.
We can live moral lives and at their end our goodness is still nothing but “filthy rags.” It’s not a happy thought:
All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. (Isaiah 64:6)
What power is greater than evil in our world?
It is God’s grace. God’s grace vacuums up all evil in the universe! So powerful is grace that, just as “not a single lousy photon” can escape a black hole, not a single lousy harsh word or envious thought or missed opportunity can escape the gravitational pull of God’s grace.
In an act which human beings (and indeed the universe itself) have done nothing to earn or deserve, God vanquishes evil for us as a free gift. How so?
In my imagination, the cross functions like a black hole. On the cross Jesus Christ, God in human flesh, absorbed into himself every spec of human sin, and not only sin itself but all the evil consequences sin has birthed in our world.
But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him. (Isaiah 53:5-6)
Jesus’ body on the cross became (like the black hole) an entity of inexorable attraction, pulling all the evil in the world into himself.
How can we “see” the unseeable?
This Sunday harried pastors will seek to convince Easter crowds that something beyond a family social occasion (preceded by obligatory church attendance) is going on. But to many, the true meaning of Easter is as invisible as a black hole.
There are good reasons for this. Evil still runs rampant around us, and too often, within us.
Contemporary churches can easily disgust us; we wonder if the cross really accomplished anything? Or we look at individual Christians—if we are really courageous, we look at ourselves—and easily see rampant hypocrisy.
Let’s return to black holes for a moment.
Einstein theorized the existence of black holes back in 1916. Astronomers confirmed their existence in the 1960’s by discovering that most galaxies swirl around a center of energy far beyond what stars themselves produce. What was this hidden source of energy?
[Black holes]...sat at the center of most galaxies, spinning their skirts of stars around them like dervishes. We couldn’t see them, but we could see the radiant clouds of light and energy surrounding them.
The paradox of the black hole is that, while no light can escape its limits, the regions just beyond the event horizon are some of the most energetic and bright places in the universe.
Just like black holes, the paradox of God’s grace leaves telltale evidence; the energy radiating from the cross is a clue to its reality.
We see the energy of the cross in the twelve fearful disciples of a failed prophet, who singlehandedly began a movement that changed the greatest empire the world has ever known.
We see glimpses of God’s grace in our own subjective experience.
We see God’s gravitational grace as the invisible “something” around which the lives of Jesus’ disciples orbit, including those people whose changed lives astonish us.
We see incredible sacrificial love demonstrated by churches all around the world. That such admittedly flawed institutions can let God’s light shine through them is a clue they are indeed empowered by God’s grace.
Jesus’ death is the perfect black hole—sucking every last bit of sin and evil out of us and into himself. While the mystery of the cross remains invisible (and unprovable) to human eyes, the “radiant clouds of light and energy” it generated by his death and resurrection these past 2,000 years bear their own witness.
I invite you to approach Good Friday and Easter Sunday this year with new eyes of wonder, seeing the unseesable for perhaps the first time.
what a dynamic image you’ve portrayed. How compelling to think that despite all of the mistakes we make in our inner and outer lives God has forgiven us. It is Everything