There is a “blessed assurance” about the goodness of the One who knows every sparrow fall.
Yet this trust is on the far side of contemplating—no, experiencing—the cruel pointlessness of the death of even small things, the dryness of the avian corpse, the shocking disintegration of its wingéd power, feathers stewing in the mud, skeleton uncloaked, magnificence gone.
That God joins these tiny catastrophes, weds the indignity of tiny birds by his infinite empathy; beholds their sad undoing up close; impassibly suffers in the human flesh of Jesus for and with his creation.
Christian trust is not in denial. Christian trust is awake and aware in the dark, a trust forged in despair.
By this divine humility, by the drawing near of the Son as co-suffering servant, creation learns to hope in God’s promises to his beloved cosmos, promises of permanence.
Death is not the end of anything. This is the startling trust of the Christian.
Resurrection is the end of all things, the end of the earth, our end.
This is what Christians mean when we say we trust in the God who *knows* every sparrow fall. He knows their fall, their death, their descent into corruption and nothingness—from the inside.
He *knows* the material creature’s death as his own but it’s what he *is*—Resurrection and Life—that he freely has alone the power to grant to all, death plainly in the rear view of the universe.
This is what we mean when we say that we trust in the resurrection of the dead. The God who knows our death from the inside is the death of death and the defeat of everything that opposes our participation in eternal embodied, animate life.
The skies of the kingdom are a murmuration of resurrected sparrows and starlings, their undulations a praise to the God who does not abandon his creation to corruption.
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