Our Lord Jesus builds, forms, and fashions his church as an artist forms a mosaic.
Beneath a prison floor in Tel Megiddo, Israel, a town not far from Nazareth, archaeologists found a Christian house of prayer from the early third century. On the floor where the altar used to be, little bits of colored stone and glass, called tesserae, form a mosaic of patterns, shapes, and two fish.
The Megiddo mosaic gives us much more than a closer acquaintance with antiquity, however. The mosaic is also the story of Christ’s church and his holy people, his saints.
Have you ever tried your hand at making a mosaic? Admittedly, when it comes to mosaics, I am no Antoni Gaudí. But even my art classes in high school and college taught me there’s nothing clean or clear-cut about this particular medium. Your hands get messy, dusty, and bloody.
Where most of us see only a pile of bits and pieces of shells, broken ceramic tiles, shattered stones, or shards of glass, an artist sees a masterpiece. All those broken bits and pieces are made whole, beautiful, and joined together with care and love by the artist.
Where we may look at our own lives and see nothing more than broken bits and pieces lying in ruins, our Lord, the artist of grace and goodness, sees a masterpiece of his mercy.
When Christians celebrate All Saints’ Day, we’re witnessing a marvelous, gracious mashup of God’s saving mercy and a messy mosaic of sinners and saints made holy in the blood of the Lamb.
In Revelation 7, John sees the finished work of art: the holy people of God are a saintly mosaic carefully crafted by God’s grace surrounding the throne of the Lamb:
“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Rev. 7:9-10).
In our own day, it’s hard to see the saintly mosaic John saw in Revelation. Life often looks more like the artist’s workshop than the finished, polished masterpiece. Most days, our faith and hope feel more like a junkyard than an art museum.
How does the hymn put it? We feebly struggle; they in glory shine. That about sums it up.
We’re a broken mess, the whole lot of us. We try and cobble our lives together, but what do we produce in the end? Not a masterpiece, but a sinful mess of everything. Shattered promises; bits and pieces of our hearts of stone chipped and littered all over the landscape of our lives; shards of relationships. Broken vessels, dusty, dry, and crumbling covered in a desert of guilt and shame. The Swedish rector in Bo Giertz’s novel, The Hammer of God, got it right when he said:
“One does not choose a Redeemer for oneself, you understand, nor give one's heart to him. The heart is a rusty old can on a junk heap. A fine birthday gift, indeed! But a wonderful Lord passes by, and has mercy on the wretched tin can, sticks his walking cane through it, and rescues it from the junk pile and takes it home with him. That is how it is.”
That is how it is on All Saints’ Day too. It’s a day we look around at the mess of our own sinful lives, at all the broken bits and pieces, call it what it is, and then belt out a loud, Alleluia! Not because of our brokenness, but because of what Christ has done and will do for broken vessels like us.
Imagine the mosaic once again. A mosaic is not created out of a solid piece of marble, from a single pane of glass, or a massive slab of granite. A mosaic is made from broken bits and pieces of pottery, shattered stones, shards of glass, slivered shells. That’s all of us sinner-saints, scooped up by our gracious Lord Jesus, the merciful artist himself.
Our Lord Jesus builds, forms, and fashions his church as an artist forms a mosaic. Christ makes us whole, holy, and beautiful out of our broken pieces. Adorned in his grace and goodness. Robed in his mercy. It is not grout or glue or grit that holds Christ’s holy people together, but the holy blood of Jesus.
So when you look around, and your life resembles the rubble more than the rare artifact, rejoice. You’re in good company with the saints. As St. Augustine once said, “God gives into empty hands.”
Christ has picked us up, chosen us graciously, and placed us carefully into the greatest and most beautiful saintly mosaic of all: his body, the Church. On days when you weep and mourn the faithful departed saints in your own life, remember and rejoice in this: together we are Christ’s masterpiece of grace, fashioned and formed out of the workshop of his cross and empty tomb.
