I can’t get this line out of my head: “The tearing began the mending.” It comes from a poem about Jesus’ final words, written by an Anglican poet, and honestly? These five simple words feel like they hold the entire mystery of the cross.
When Everything Falls Apart
We all know what tearing feels like, don’t we? Relationships fall apart. Our bodies betray us. Communities split down the middle. Dreams we held onto so tightly just… crumble. Sometimes it honestly feels like the whole world is coming undone at the seams. The same poet wrote, “Creation reflected the groaning of our hearts” – and doesn’t that just nail it? Our pain isn’t happening in isolation. It’s part of something bigger, something that goes way beyond just our individual struggles.
In the Gospels, we read that when Jesus died, the temple curtain was torn in two from top to bottom. This wasn’t just symbolic window dressing – it was a fundamental ripping apart of the old order. The barrier between the holy and the common, the sacred and the secular, was literally torn away. What had been carefully constructed, meticulously maintained, and jealously guarded was suddenly, violently undone.
The Paradox of Divine Love
But here’s the thing that completely stops me in my tracks: this tearing wasn’t just random destruction. It was the start of something entirely new. “The tearing began the mending.”
I mean, think about that for a minute. God doesn’t fix things the way we might expect – by slapping a band-aid over the wound or pretending everything’s fine when it’s clearly not. Divine healing is messier than that. Sometimes things have to be completely torn open before they can truly heal. We have to see the full extent of what’s broken before we can understand what needs mending.
The cross shows us a God who doesn’t stand on the sidelines watching our pain from a safe distance. This is a God who jumps right into the mess with us. Christ doesn’t take a detour around suffering – he walks straight through it and somehow, mysteriously, transforms it from the inside out. The wounds themselves become the places where healing starts.
Creation’s Groaning and Our Own
The same poet wrote, “If they could praise, why couldn’t they wail?” There’s something liberating about this question. It acknowledges that authentic faith includes space for lament, for the full expression of pain and confusion. The stones that might cry out in praise are the same stones that witness our tears.
Too often, we try to rush past the tearing straight to the mending. We want resurrection without crucifixion, new life without acknowledging what has died. But the poetry of the cross suggests that the tearing itself is sacred – not because suffering is good, but because it’s where God meets us most intimately.
Where Tearing Becomes Mending in Our Lives
[Personal reflection space – I’d love to share here about a time in my own life or in our community where I’ve witnessed this kind of redemptive tearing, where something that felt like pure loss became an opening for God’s grace…]
Living in the Space Between
We live in the space between tearing and mending, between Good Friday and Easter morning. This isn’t a comfortable place to be, but it’s where we find Christ most present. It’s where we learn that God’s love isn’t fragile – it doesn’t break when we bring our full, unvarnished selves to the table.
The temple curtain that was torn has never been sewn back up. Access to the holy remains radically open. The mending that began on the cross continues in every moment when we choose vulnerability over self-protection, when we let love tear down the barriers we’ve built around our hearts, when we trust that what feels like ending might actually be the beginning of something we couldn’t have imagined.
Perhaps the most hopeful thing we can say is this: the tearing is not the end of the story. It never is. Even when we can’t see past the pain, even when the mending seems impossible, the God who transforms crosses into empty tombs is already at work, making all things new.
What tearing in your own life might God be using as the beginning of mending? Where do you see the redemptive work of love transforming what seemed like pure loss into something life-giving?