The Redemption of Our Rejection
credit: iStock / deepblue4you
No one likes to hear a “no.”
You’d think by now we’d have gotten used to it, maybe grown relational calluses. Some of us were the last ones picked for the playground team, the ones cut after auditions, the ones whose name never appeared in the email announcing promotions. We’ve stood at doors that did not open, knowing someone was hunkering inside. We bristle (or get discouraged) when we get the email that begins, “We reviewed your [application, article, etc.] and regret to inform you. …” We get a letter or voice mail dressing us down, making us feel little, humiliated. Our hearts flare (or sometimes just fold).
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In my latest book, I tell some stories of rejection I experienced from my parents as a young adult. In one of them, the cut-off entailed a letter with a request for me (away at grad school) to send back my house key. In another, in a chance meeting with my mom in the park near where I grew up, I experienced, newly married, an outpouring of her anger, a yelled question, “Why are you here?” I can speculate about the ways Mom had so self-isolated, so neglected friends and family that she couldn’t bear the thought of my journeying to independence and adult. Maybe I was witnessing the earliest signs of dementia that would later come into full view. And as I’m often asked, Yes, there was reconciliation.
But the reality of human brokenness is such that those we love the most sometimes reject us.
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Experiencing the inevitable stings of relating been part of human life since Adam and Eve. While God didn’t exactly reject them when they turned their backs on him in the Garden; he did exile them, and rupture became a nagging, ever-present result. And Cain and Abel? When Cain’s offering gets rejected, it doesn’t take long for estrangement to spiral throughout all human time.
You see it in romance, careers, family dynamics. In everyday slights or more massive hurts. But is rejection even more ever-present these day? Maybe.
Gen Z, as commentator Delia Cai put it, seems “the most rejected generation in human history.” All the competitive applying, auditioning, interviewing, only to be wait-listed, or ghosted, or told “We will get back to you.” (And they don’t.) Last year, “roughly 54,000 students applied to be part of the Harvard class of 2028, and roughly 1,950 were accepted.”
Ouch.
Rejection’s cousin, shame, sits as a heavy presence in our current cultural climate. Shaming someone may be the ultimate act of rejection: In the toxic world of online interaction, we witness (or experience) someone not only attacking but inviting others to participate in heaping on ridicule. What is better at that ugly collapse in relational coinage than “social” media?
But relationships being what they are, it’s a stretch to think we can altogether avoid the pain. Somehow this harder, darker reality has to be part of the tally.
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Rejection, you could argue, stands at the center of the Christian story. On the Cross, the One who was perfect love was rebuffed. The One made for communion was snubbed by his fellow citizens.
Crucifixion Day names rejection as a current coursing through human history. The cross was not just about physical suffering but also bore down on the sheer shame. It attempted to make the one punished despised and despicable. The beams of the hard wood loomed above any byway as not only an instrument of physical torture; it all became an open-air theater of humiliation.
Not only did crucifixion wound the body, but just as searingly, it stripped dignity. It led to “nothing in his appearance,” as Isaiah had already prophesied, “that we should desire him.” It aimed to obliterate not only the victim’s worth but any lingering memory of the person. It was meant to unmake, and, given how distasteful it was, to erase the name of the crucified from memory—forever.
Or so the Romans thought.
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Here is one reason I find the narrative of the Christian faith so compelling. So real. Its story line recognizes that hardships often center around our being considered of no account by others—often someone whose love we counted on to be steadfast and immoveable. We are asked to return our house key because we are no longer welcome. Whole peoples, too, have been persecuted, rounded up, “disappeared.” Rejection can take on biblical, global proportions.
But what if Christ joined with us in all of the sorrows of human brokenness—facing even singeing rejection by his own people? He would understand our predicament. As the Gospel story plays out, I’ve been coming to see how I’m not cosmically alone, how I’m accompanied through the worst: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,” the New Testament writer to the Hebrews said of Jesus.
And there’s more. You have to keep watching, but this rejection undergoes a great reversal. His agony and squeezed-out breath and humiliation reduced his friends to confusion and sorrow, but only for a time.
For one thing, what he did—how he offered himself for our separation from God and sin—became a sign not of forsakenness and erasure but a declaration of costly, extravagant love. And not just reassurance, but also reconciliation. And for another thing, instead of driving him from memory, this death began to endear Jesus even more to a watching humanity.
In a matter of days in the church calendar, we will see, the trauma transfigures into a story of how divine love profoundly triumphs over death. Over death and loss. Over our daily griefs. God’s love persists amid rejection and jeers. In the place of defeat, God brings life to bear. God wins the day. And yes, that truth holds for our breaks with those we love, like when we come across them on an online thread, a lawyer’s office, a town hall, or anywhere.
As The Book of Common Prayer reminds us, if we are “wonderfully created,” we are “yet more wonderfully restored.” This season is not only drama; it is reclamation. God does not turn away from what is broken in us or between us. In the risen Jesus, we see how even rejection’s welts and bruises are not the final condition. We dare, perhaps only tentatively at first, to believe that the last word has not yet been spoken.
Instead, there comes an opening. The whiff of a possibility of healing. Not always quickly, not always easily. But the story we are about to tell again is also a story we are invited to live. What has been fractured will yet be covered over with grace, mended, so we rediscover the richness possible in everyday life, in every life—even ours.
Where You Can Find Me:
Near Nashville:
Book signing / Meet the Author The Fellowship Coffee House 2944 US-31W, #105 / White House, TN, Saturday, April 4, 9-11 am.
Book signing / Meet the Author The Rabbit Room (North Wind Manor) Wednesday, April 15, 2-4pm https://www.rabbitroom.com 3321 Stephens Hill Ln, Antioch, TN 37013
In Nashville:
Preaching at 7:30, 8:45, 11 am services, with booksigning at 10:05 am, St. George’s Episcopal Church, 4715 Harding Road 37205
Preaching at the 10 am service, with booksigning to follow: Sunday, May 31 at 11:15, St. George’s Episcopal Church, 4715 Harding Road Nashville, 37205.