Easter Devotional

I was watching a documentary recently on PBS and there was a minister who was asked, "Do you believe Jesus was raised from the dead?"  And he responded, "The purpose and the personality and the power that was in Jesus continues, so that today he is a risen and living presence and possibility."  What was he saying?  He was suggesting that the purpose of Jesus lives on but that he is still physically dead.

But if Jesus' example lives on while he is really dead, you can only know him as an example.  You can't talk to him, and he can't talk to you.  If Jesus is not really living, he is not a living force who can come in and intervene in your life.  You will have a form of religion without any power.

But on the other hand, it is also possible to be orthodox about your belief in the resurrection of Jesus, but if you've never had a profound experience of that resurrection, your own spiritual resurrection, then you have a form of religion without power as well.

On one hand, the resurrection is a fact to be believed.  On the other hand, it is an experience to connect with.  If you have one without the other – if you believe in the resurrection as historical fact but never experience the resurrection personally, or if you think of the resurrection as a spiritual experience but don't believe it was a fact – you come out with a form of religion with no power.

My question is: Do you know them both?  Do you believe in the resurrection as a historical event, and have you also had that profound personal experience of spiritual resurrection?  Christianity refuses to be stuck in either category.  It is not all about rationality, nor is it all about mysticism.  It's both.  On one hand, Christianity is about beliefs, proposition, and ethics.  But that's not enough.  You have to experience him to know him.  There has to be a real connection.  And on the other hand, Christianity is not only a mystical religion.  It's not like Eastern religions with no rational content.  Christianity has hard edges to it.  It says, "This is true, and this is false.  This will get you saved.  This will get you damned.  This actually happened."…

To be a Christian is not just to believe in a set of propositions.  It is that, but it's much more.  It is to say, "I count everything as loss or rubbish in comparison to my number one ambition, which is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his suffering."  Paul is saying that if you understand the doctrine of the resurrection you don't just believe, you have a passion.

When I talk about having a passion for Christ, it might make you afraid that I mean you need to be a fanatic.  Maybe you think, I had an aunt like that.  All she did was talk about religion and the Bible and made everybody sick of it.  That's not what we're talking about when we talk about a passion for Christ.

It's like my glasses.  I don't spend all my time looking at and talking about my glasses.  But I do spend all my time seeing everything through my glasses.  And if my relationship between me and my glasses gets off, if they get too far down on my nose or get too dirty, it affects my perception of everything.

Likewise, a person with a passion for Christ is not necessarily always talking about Christ, but is looking at everything through Christ.

from Tim Keller

Let us go in thought to the palace of Caiaphas the priest, and there let us, in deepest sorrow, realize the meaning of these terrible words: "Then did they spit in his face."  There is more of deep and awful thunder in them than in the bolt that bursts overhead, there is more of vivid terror in them than in the sharpest lightning flash: "Then did they spit in his face."

Observe that these men, the priests, and scribes, and orders, and their servitors, did this shameful deed after they had heard our Lord say, "Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Matt. 26:64).  It was in contempt of this claim, in derision of this honor which he foretold for himself, that "then did they spit in his face," as if they could bear it no longer, that he, who stood to be judged of them, should claim to be their Judge; that he, whom they had brought at dead of night from the garden of Gethsemane as their captive, should talk of coming in the clouds of heaven: "Then did they spit in his face."

Nor may I fail to add that they thus assaulted our Lord after the high priest had rent his clothes.  My brethren, do not forget that the high priest was supposed to be the representative of everything that was good and venerable among the Jews.  The high priest was the earthly head of their religion; he it was who, alone of mortal men, might enter within the mysterious veil; yet he it was who condemned the Lord of glory, as he rent his clothes, and said, "He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses?  Behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy" (Matt. 26:65).  It makes me tremble as I think of how eminent we may be in the service of God, and yet how awfully we may be enemies of the Christ of God.  Let none of us think that, though we even clamber up to the highest places in the church, we are therefore saved.  We may be high priests, and wear the Urim and the Thummim, and put on the breastplate with all its wondrous mystic stones, and bind around us the curious girdle of the ephod, and yet, for all that, we may be ringleaders in expressing contempt of God and of his Christ.  It was when Caiaphas, the high priest, had pronounced the word of condemnation against Christ, that "then did they spit in his face."…

O my brothers, let us hate sin; O my sisters, let us loathe sin, not only because it pierced those blessed hands and feet of our dear Redeemer, but because it dared even to spit in his face!  No one can ever know all the shame the Lord of glory suffered when they did spit in his face.  These words glide over my tongue all too smoothly; perhaps even I do not feel them as they ought to be felt, though I would do so if I could.  But could I feel as I ought to feel in sympathy with the terrible shame of Christ, and then could I interpret those feelings by any language known to mortal man, surely you would bow your heads and blush, and you would feel rising within your spirits a burning indignation against the sin that dared to put the Christ of God to such shame as this.  I want to kiss his feet when I think that they did spit in his face…

If ever anybody should despise us for Christ's sake, let us not count it hard, but let us be willing to bear scorn and contempt for him.  Let us say to ourselves, "Then did they spit in his face.  What, then, if they also spit in mine?  If they do, I will 'hail reproach, and welcome shame,' since it comes upon me for his dear sake."  See, that wretch is about to spit in Christ's face!  Put your cheek forward, that you may catch that spittle upon your face, that it fall not upon him again, for as he was put to such terrible shame, every one who has been redeemed with his precious blood ought to count it an honor to be a partaker of the shame, if by any means we may screen him from being further despised and rejected of men.

from Charles Spurgeon

Mark tells us that Joseph of Arimethea was a "respected member of the council" (Mark 15:43).  John tells us that Nicodemus was a "leader of the Jews" (John 3:1), which likely meant that he too was a member of the Sanhedrin.  Both men were sympathetic toward Jesus.  In John 3 we read that Nicodemus met Jesus at night for a conversation in which Jesus told him that he must be "born from above" (John 3:3).  Nicodemus came to Jesus at night for fear of what the other members of the council would say about his interest in the teachings of Jesus.  John notes that Joseph "was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews" (John 19:38).

Presumably, these two men were at the trial of Jesus early Friday morning.  Although Luke does report that "Joseph…had not agreed to their plan and action" (Luke 23:50-51), none of the four Gospels records dissenting arguments by any of the seventy-one Sanhedrin members.  Why didn't Nicodemus or Joseph speak up for Jesus?

Several years ago a man sent me an e-mail detailing a sermon he had heard as a boy some forty years before but had never forgotten.  He had attended a small, rural church where the preacher that day had been the lay leader, a big man with a booming voice and a gentle spirit.  The sermon was called "Standing on the Edge of the Crowd."  In it, the lay leader described an experience he had had in the 1920s.  A crowd had gathered on the edge of town, and he had gone to see what was happening.  In the center of the crowd was a young black man who was about to be hanged.  In his sermon the lay leader described his feelings as he watched the lynching, repulsed by it and knowing how wrong it was, yet too afraid to stand up against the crowd.  The image of the young man being hanged and the memory of his own silence haunted this man forty years after the event.

Joseph and Nicodemus were respected leaders who were afraid to let others know they were sympathetic to Jesus and who seem to have stood by in silence as he was condemned to die.  Are you willing to stand up and speak out when you see something you know in your heart is wrong?  Or do you silently acquiesce to the crowd?

from Adam Hamilton

Go with me for a moment to witness what was perhaps the foggiest night in history.  The scene is very simple; you'll recognize it quickly.  A grove of twisted olive trees.  Ground cluttered with large rocks.  A low stone fence.  A dark, dark night.

Now, look into the picture.  Look closely through the shadowy foliage.  See that person?  See that solitary figure?  What's he doing?  Flat on the ground.  Face stained with dirt and tears.  Fists pounding the hard earth.  Eyes wide with a stupor of fear.  Hair matted with salty sweat.  Is that blood on his forehead?

That's Jesus.  Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Maybe you've seen the classic portrait of Christ in the garden.  Kneeling beside a big rock.  Snow-white robe.  Hands peacefully folded in prayer.  A look of serenity on his face.  Halo over his head.  A spotlight from heaven illuminating his golden-brown hair.

Now, I'm no artist, but I can tell you one thing.  The man who painted that picture didn't use the Gospel of Mark as a pattern.  When Mark wrote about that painful night, he used phrases like these: "Horror and dismay came over him," "My heart is ready to break with grief," and "He went a little forward and threw himself on the ground."

Does this look like the picture of a saintly Jesus resting in the palm of God?  Hardly.  Mark used black paint to describe the scene.  We see an agonizing, straining, and struggling Jesus.  We see a "man of sorrows" (Isaiah 53:3 NASB).  We see a man struggling with fear, wrestling with commitments, and yearning for relief.

We see Jesus in the fog of a broken heart.

The writer of Hebrews would later pen, "During the days' of Jesus life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death" (Hebrews 5:7 NIV).

My what a portrait!  Jesus is in pain.  Jesus is on the stage of fear.  Jesus is cloaked, not in sainthood, but in humanity.

The next time the fog finds you, you might do well to remember Jesus in the garden.  The next time you think that no one understands, reread the fourteenth chapter of Mark.  The next time your self-pity convinces you that no one cares, pay a visit to Gethsemane.  And the next time you wonder if God really perceives the pain that prevails on this dusty planet, listen to him pleading among the twisted trees.

The next time you are called to suffer, pay attention.  It may be the closest you'll ever get to God.  Watch closely.  It could very well be that the hand that extends itself to lead you out of the fog is a pierced one.

from Max Lucado

In 1960, a pastor in East Germany wrote a play called The Sign of Jonah.  The last scene dealt with the Final Judgment.  All the peoples of the earth are assembled on the plain of Jehosaphat awaiting God's verdict.  They are not, however, waiting submissively; on the contrary, they are gathered in small groups, talking indignantly.  One group is a band of Jews, a sect that has known little but religious, social, and political persecution throughout their history.  Included in their number are victims of Nazi extermination camps.  Huddled together, the group demands to know what right God has to pass judgment on them, especially a God who dwells eternally in the security of heaven.

Another group consists of American blacks.  They too question the authority of God who has never experienced the misfortunes of men, never known the squalor and depths of human degradation to which they were subjected in the suffocating holds of slave ships.  A third group is composed of persons born illegitimately, the butt all their lives of jokes and sneers.

Hundreds of such groups are scattered across the plain: the poor, the afflicted, the maltreated.  Each group appoints a representative to stand before the throne of God and challenge his divine right to pass sentence on their immortal destinies.  The representatives include a horribly twisted arthritic, a victim of Hiroshima, a blind mute.  They meet in council and decide that this remote and distant God who has never experienced human agony is unqualified to sit in judgment unless he is willing to enter into the suffering, humiliated state of man and endure what they have undergone.

Their conclusion reads: You must be born a Jew; the circumstances of your birth must be questioned; you must be misunderstood by everyone, insulted and mocked by your enemies, betrayed by your friends; you must be persecuted, beaten, and finally murdered in a most public and humiliating fashion.

Such is the judgment passed on God by the assembly.  The clamor rises to fever pitch as they await his response.  Then a brilliant, dazzling light illuminates the entire plain.  One by one those who have passed judgment on God fall silent.  For emblazoned high in the heavens for the whole world to see is the signature of Jesus Christ with this inscription above it: I have served my sentence.

from Brennan Manning

Over a hundred years ago in the Deep South, a phrase commonplace in our Christian culture today, born again, was seldom used.  Rather, the words used to describe the breakthrough into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ were: "I was seized by the power of a great affection."

It was a profoundly moving way to indicate both the initiative of almighty God and the explosion within the human heart when Jesus becomes Lord.  Seized by the power of a great affection was a visceral description of the phenomenon of Pentecost, authentic conversion, and the release of the Holy Spirit.

In March 1986 I was privileged to spend an afternoon with an Amish family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Jonas Zook, a widower, is eighty-two years old.  His oldest daughter, Barbara, 57, manages the household.  The three other children, Rachel, 53, Elam, 47, and Sam, 45, are all severely retarded.  When I arrived at noon with two friends, Joe and Kathy Anders, "little Elam" – about four feet tall, heavy-set, thickly bearded, and wearing the black Amish outfit with the circular hat – was coming out of the barn some fifty yards away.  He had never laid eyes on me in his life, yet when he saw me step out of the car, he ran lickety-split in my direction.  Two feet away, he threw himself into the air, wrapped his arms around my neck, his legs around my waist, and kissed me smack on the lips.

To say that I was stunned would be an understatement.  But in the twinkling of an eye, Jesus set me free.  I returned Elam's kiss.  Then he jumped down, wrapped both his hands around my right arm, and led me on a tour of the farm.  The Zooks raised piglets for a living.

A half-hour later at a lovely luncheon prepared by Barbara, Elam sat next to me.  Midway through the meal, I turned around to say something to Joe Anders.  Inadvertently, my right elbow slammed into Elam's rib cage.  He did not wince; he did not groan.  He wept like a child.  His next move utterly undid me.  Elam came to my chair and kissed me even harder on the lips.  Then he kissed my eyes, my nose, my forehead, and cheeks.  And there was Brennan, dazed, dumbstruck, weeping, seized by the power of a great affection.  In his simplicity, Elam Zook was an icon of Jesus Christ.  Why?  Because his love for me did not stem from any attractiveness or lovability of mine.  It was not conditioned by any response on my part.  Elam loved me whether I was kind or unkind, pleasant or nasty.  His love arose from a source outside of himself or myself.

Jesus came as the revealer of love.  Jesus reveals God by being utterly transparent to him.  What had been cloaked in mystery is clear in Jesus – that God is love.  No man or woman has ever loved like Jesus Christ...

Jesus was seized by the power of a great affection and experienced the love of his Father in a way that burst all previous boundaries of understanding.  And it is this Jesus, the wounded Jesus, who provides the final revelation of God's love.  The crucified Christ is not an abstraction but the ultimate answer to how far love will go, what measure of rejection it will endure, how much selfishness and betrayal it will withstand.  The unconditional love of Jesus Christ nailed to the tree does not flinch before our perversity.  "He took our sickness away and carried our diseases for us" (Matt. 8:17)

from Brennan Manning

God sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.  He also selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was — that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct.  Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

Then comes the real shock.  Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God.  He claims to forgive sins.  He says He has always existed.  He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time.  Now let us get this clear.  Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it.  But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God.  God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else.  And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to.  I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins.  Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic.  We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself.  You tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you.  But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money?  Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct.  Yet this is what Jesus did.  He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured.  He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned; the person chiefly offended in all offences.  This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.  In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit.  Still less do unprejudiced readers.  Christ says that He is 'humble and meek' and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.'  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.

from C.S. Lewis

The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.  Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.  Man claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which belong to man alone.

As we stand before the cross, we begin to gain a clear view both of God and ourselves, especially in relation to each other.  Instead of inflicting upon us the judgment we deserved, God in Christ endured it in our place.  Hell is the only alternative.  This is the "scandal," the stumbling-block, of the cross.  For our proud hearts rebel against it.  We cannot bear to acknowledge either the seriousness of our sin and guilt or our utter indebtedness to the cross.  Surely, we say, there must be something we can do, or at least contribute, in order to make amends?  If not, we often give the impression that we would rather suffer our own punishment than the humiliation of seeing God through Christ bear it in our place...

The proud human heart is there revealed.  We insist on paying for what we have done.  We cannot stand the humiliation of acknowledging our bankruptcy and allowing somebody else to pay for us.  The notion that this somebody else should be God himself is just too much to take.  We would rather perish than repent, rather lose ourselves than humble ourselves.

Moreover, only the gospel demands such an abject self-humbling on our part.  As Emil Brunner put it, "All other forms of religion – not to mention philosophy – deal with the problem of guilt apart from the intervention of God, and therefore they come to a 'cheap' conclusion.  In them man is spared the final humiliation of knowing that the Mediator must bear the punishment instead of him.  To this yoke he need not submit.  He is not stripped absolutely naked."

But we cannot escape the embarrassment of standing stark naked before God.  It is no use our trying to cover up like Adam and Eve in the garden.  Our attempts at self-justification are as ineffectual as their fig-leaves.  We have to acknowledge our nakedness, see the divine substitute wearing our filthy rags instead of us, and allow him to clothe us with his own righteousness.  Nobody has ever put it better than Augustus Toplady in his immortal hymn "Rock of Ages":

     Wash me, Savior, or I die.

from John Stott

Let us look at some of the people who brought Jesus of Nazareth to crucifixion.  They were not monsters, but ordinary men and women like you and me.

Pilate receives most of the blame for Jesus' death, and yet Pilate didn't want to crucify the man.  Why did Pilate condemn Jesus?  Because Pilate was a coward.  He cared more about his comfortable position than he did about justice.  He didn't have the courage to stand for what he knew was right.  It was because of this relatively small flaw in Pilate's character that Jesus died on a cross.  Whenever you and I are willing to sacrifice someone else for our own benefit, whenever we don't have the courage to stand up for what we see is right, we step into the same course that Pilate took.

And Caiaphas, was he such a monster?  Far from it.  He was the admired and revered religious leader of the most religious people in the ancient world.  He was the High Priest.  His personal habits were impeccable.  He was a devout and sincerely religious man.  Why did he seek to have Jesus condemned?  He did it for the simple reason that he was too rigid.  He thought he had to protect God from this man, thought he had to protect the Jewish faith, and so he said: "It is good for one man to die instead of a nation being destroyed."  Caiaphas's essential flaw was that he thought he had the whole truth.  People who have fought religious wars, those who have persecuted in the name of religion, have followed in his footsteps.  Those who put their creeds above mercy and kindness and love, walk there even now.

Why did Judas betray his master?  He wasn't interested in the thirty pieces of silver, at least not primarily.  Judas had wanted Jesus to call upon heavenly powers, to take control of the situation and throw the Romans out of Palestine.  When he failed to do this, Judas no longer wanted anything to do with him.  Judas' fault was that he couldn't wait.  When we can't wait and want to push things through, when we think we can accomplish a noble end by human means, we are just like Judas.

Then there was the nameless carpenter who made the cross.  He was a skilled workman.  He knew full well what the purpose of that cross was.  If you questioned him he probably would have said: "But I am a poor man who must make a living.  If other men use it for ill, is it my fault?"  So say all of us who pursue jobs which add nothing to human welfare or which hurt some people.  Does the work I do aid or hinder human beings?  Are we crossmakers for our modern world?  There are many, many of them.

These were the things that crucified Jesus on Friday in Passover A.D. 29.  They were not wild viciousness or sadistic brutality or naked hate, but the civilized vices of cowardice, bigotry, impatience, timidity, falsehood, indifference – vices all of us share, the very vices which crucify human beings today.

This destructiveness within us can seldom be transformed until we squarely face it in ourselves.  This confrontation often leads us into the pit.  The empty cross is planted there to remind us that suffering is real but not an end, that victory still is possible if we strive on.

from Morton Kelsey

Christianity begins not with a big do, but with a big done.  We begin our Christian life by depending not upon our own doing but upon what Christ has done.  Until you realize this you are no Christian; for to say: "I can do nothing to save myself; but by his grace God has done everything for me in Christ," is to take the first step of faith.

If I put a dollar bill between the pages of a magazine, and then burn the magazine, where is the dollar bill?  It has gone the same way as the magazine – to ashes.  Where the one goes the other goes too.  Their history has become one.  But, just as effectively, God has put us in Christ.  What happened to him happened also to us.  All the experiences he met, we too have met in him.  "Our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin" (Rom. 6:6).  That is not an exhortation to struggle.  That is history: our history, written in Christ before we were born.  Do you believe this?  It is true!  Our crucifixion with Christ is a glorious historic fact.  Our deliverance from sin is based, not on what we can do, nor even on what God is going to do for us, but on what he has already done in Christ.  When the fact dawns upon us and we rest back upon it (Rom. 6:11), then we have found the secret of a holy life...

An engineer living in a large city in the West left his homeland for the Far East.  He was away for two or three years, and during his absence his wife was unfaithful to him and went off with one of his best friends.  On his return home he found he had lost his wife, his two children and his best friend.

At the close of a meeting that I was addressing, this grief-stricken man unburdened himself to me.  "Day and night for two solid years my heart has been full of hatred," he said.  "I am a Christian, and I know I ought to forgive my wife and my friend, but though I try and try to forgive them, I simply cannot.  Every day I resolve to love them, and every day I fail.  What can I do about it?"  "Do nothing at all," I replied.  "What do you mean?" he asked, startled.  "Am I continue to hate them?"

So I explained: "The solution of your problem lies here, that when the Lord Jesus died on the cross he not only bore your sins away but he bore you away too.  When he was crucified, your old man was crucified in him, so that unforgiving 'you,' who simply cannot love those who have wronged you, has been taken right out of the way in his death.  God has dealt with the whole situation in the Cross.  Just say to him, 'Lord, I cannot love and I give up trying, but I count on Thy perfect love.  I cannot forgive, but I trust Thee to forgive instead of me, and to do so henceforth in me.'"

The man sat there amazed and said, "That's all so new, I feel I must do something about it."  Then a moment later he added again, "But what can I do?"  "God is waiting till you cease to do," I said.  "When you cease doing, then God will begin.  Have you ever tried to save a drowning man?  The trouble is that his fear prevents him from entrusting himself to you.  When that is so, there are just two ways of going about it.  Either you must knock him unconscious and then drag him to the shore, or else you must leave him to struggle and shout until his strength gives way before you go to the rescue.  If you try to save him while he has any strength left, he will clutch at you in his terror and drag you under, and both he and you will be lost.  God is waiting for your store of strength to be utterly exhausted before he can deliver you.  Once you have ceased to struggle so hard, he will do everything.  God is waiting for you to despair.  He has done it all!"

And with radiant face he went off rejoicing.

from Watchman Nee

The blood of Jesus has an intimate connection with remission of sins.  The Bible says, "This is my blood of the new [testament] covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins" (Matthew 26:28).  Jesus, suffering, bleeding, dying, has produced for sinners the forgiveness of their sins.

Of what sins?

Of all sins of every sort and kind, however heinous, aggravated, and multiplied.  The blood of the covenant takes every sin away, be what it may.  There was never a sin believingly confessed and taken to Christ that ever baffled His power to cleanse it.  This fountain has never been tried in vain.  Murderers, thieves, liars, and adulterers have come to Jesus by penitence and faith, and through the merit of His sacrifice for their sins have been put away.

Of what nature is the remission?

It is pardon, freely given, acting immediately and abiding forever, so that there is no fear of the guilt ever being again laid to the charge of the forgiven one.  Through the precious blood our sins are blotted out, cast into the depths of the sea, and removed as far from us as the east is from the west.  Our sins cease to be.  They are made an end of.  They cannot be found against us anymore forever.  Yes, hear it, hear it, oh wide earth!  Let the glad news startle your darkest dens of infamy; there is absolute remission of sins!  The precious blood of Christ cleanses from all sin; yes, turns the scarlet into a whiteness that exceeds that of the newly fallen snow – a whiteness that can never be tarnished.  Washed by Jesus, the blackest sinners shall appear before the judgment seat of the all-seeing Judge without spot.

How is it that the blood of Jesus effects this?

The secret lies in the vicarious, substitutionary character of our Lord's suffering and death.  Because He stood in our place, the justice of God is vindicated, and the threatening of the law is fulfilled.  It is now just for God to pardon sin.  Christ's bearing the penalty of human sin instead of man has made the moral government of God perfect in justice, has laid a basis for peace of conscience, and has rendered sin immeasurably hateful, though its punishment does not fall on the believer.

This is the great secret, this is the heavenly news, the gospel of salvation, that through the blood of Jesus, sin is justly put away.

from Charles Spurgeon

The words "I thirst," literal as they are, spoken to meet a deep human need, become for us pregnant with new and deeper meaning in the spiritual sense.  Their symbolism becomes real as we think of life.  When we look out upon the bedraggled flock of humanity, sheep without a shepherd, we know that they have many thirsts.  There are those who thirst for everything save righteousness.  Their lives are so engrossed and encompassed within the limits of their world of time-space that they forget that there might be some other relations to life.  Such crass limitations make life little and cramped.  By shutting out the Eternal, they lose all that is truly worthwhile.  They forget that life abundant is not to be found within their little cosmos of human desires.

We have seen people thirsting for wealth.  So great was their thirst for the yellow metal that they were willing to sell their very souls to gain possession of it.  They imagined that they would like to become a second King Midas, this without really thinking their ways through all the limited implications of the tragic final results.  To such the words of Jesus come back and he says, "Life consists not in the abundance of things which one possesses."

There have been those who have thirsted for pleasure, for a life of thrills.  Many have given themselves with singleness of purpose to this end, and have found it very unsatisfactory.  Somewhere I read of an actress who had given herself to the pursuit of the flying phantom – pleasure.  She tried all and then life began to grow weary and tiresome.  Blasé and jaded, she gave up in despair.  In her sad plight, she thought of one more thrill and that was through the gateway of death.  So she arranged to commit suicide in as artistic a manner as possible, in order to make life yield its greatest and final thrill.  Others may be like – was is Shelley? – who, after he rubbed cayenne pepper on his tongue, drank down a glass of cold sherry wine, saying, "O, for a life of sensations!"

Some have thirsted for rank and station.  Their desire has been to get into the select circle.  In order to do this they have been willing to compromise with their better selves in order to live a life of sham and outward show.  Little does man know that in these pathetic plights of his, when he is trying to assuage his thirsts, his needs are deeper, far deeper than money, pleasure, rank or station.  He needs God!

Our deep spiritual needs, which are thirsts, can be met by Christ.  It is God's desire that every person should know the real joys of life.  Augustine, the great churchman, expressed the idea as follows: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and we cannot find rest until we find it in Thee."  In other words, we cannot have our thirst satisfied until God does it for us.

This age needs to become more realistic.  It needs to listen again to the words of Jesus, who said, "I thirst."  He who is the Son of Man, the Son of God, is our example.  He is the great pioneer in every realm of life.  Surely if he thirsted, how much more do we?  Humanity needs to get away from the world of "things as they are" into the world of "things as they ought to be."  This means that men and women must learn to live for others.  It is only when we can live a life of self-forgetfulness that we get our truest joy out of life.  One needs to keep on thirsting because life grows and enlarges.  It has no end; it goes on and on; it becomes more beautiful.  When one has done his best there is, he finds, still more to learn and so much to do.  He cannot be satisfied until he attains unto the stature of Jesus, unto a perfect man, and ever thirsts for God.

from Alexander Stuart Baillie

After I became a father, and for years had only one son, as I looked at my boy I thought of the Father giving His Son to die, and it seemed to me as if it required more love for the Father to give His Son than for the Son to die.  Oh, the love that God must have had for the world when he gave His Son to die for it!  "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).  I have never been able to preach from that text.  I have often thought I would, but it is so high that I can never climb to its height; I have just quoted it and passed on.  Who can fathom the depths of those words: "God so loved the world"?  We can never scale the heights of His love or fathom its depths.  Paul prayed that he might know the height, the depth, the length, and the breadth of the love of God, but it was past his finding out.  It "passeth Knowledge" (Ephesians 3:19).

Nothing speaks to us of the love of God like the cross of Christ.  Come with me to Calvary and look upon the Son of God as He hangs there.  Can you hear that piercing cry from His dying lips: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do!" and say that He does not love you?  "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).  But Jesus Christ laid down His life for His enemies.

Another thought is this: He loved us long before we even thought of Him.  The idea that He does not love us until we first love Him is not to be found in Scripture.  In 1 John 4:10 it is written: "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."  He loved us before we even thought of loving Him.  You loved your children before they knew anything about your love.  And so, long before we ever thought of God, we were in His thoughts.

What brought the prodigal home?  It was the thought that his father loved him.  Suppose the news had reached him that he was a cast-off and that his father did not care for him anymore.  Would he have gone back?  Never!  But the thought dawned upon him that his father loved him still: so he rose up, and went back to his home.  Dear reader, the love of the Father ought to bring us back to Him.  It was Adam's calamity and sin that revealed God's love.  When Adam fell, God came down and dealt in mercy with him.  If any one is lost it will not be because God does not love him; it will be because he has resisted the love of God.

from D.L. Moody

All action ends in passion because the response to our action is out of our hands.  That is the mystery of work, the mystery of love, the mystery of friendship, the mystery of community – they always involve waiting.  And that is the mystery of Jesus' love.  God reveals himself in Jesus as the one who waits for our response.  Precisely in that waiting the intensity of God's love is revealed to us.  If God forced us to love, we would not really be lovers.

All these insights into Jesus' passion were very important in the discussions with my friend.  He realized that after much hard work he had to wait.  He came to see that his vocation as a human being would be fulfilled not just in his actions but also in his passion.  And together we began to understand that precisely in this waiting the glory of God and our new life both become visible.

Precisely when Jesus is being handed over into his passion, he manifests his glory.  "Whom do you seek?...  I am he" are words that echo all the way back to Moses and the burning bush: "I am the one.  I am who I am" (see Exodus 3:1-6).  In Gethsemane, the glory of God manifested itself again, and they fell flat on the ground.  Then Jesus was handed over.  But already in the handing over we see the glory of God who hands himself over to us.  God's glory revealed in Jesus embraces passion as well as resurrection.

"The Son of Man," Jesus says, "must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him" (John 3:14-15).  He is lifted up as a passive victim, so the cross is a sign of desolation.  And he is lifted up in glory, so the cross becomes at the same time a sign of hope.  Suddenly we realize that the glory of God, the divinity of God, bursts through in Jesus' passion precisely when he is most victimized.  So new life becomes visible not only in the resurrection on the third day, but already in the passion, in the being handed over.  Why?  Because it is in the passion that the fullness of God's love shines through.  It is supremely a waiting love, a love that does not seek control.

When we allow ourselves to feel fully how we are being acted upon, we can come in touch with a new life that we were not even aware was there.  This was the question my sick friend and I talked about constantly.  Could he taste the new life in the midst of his passion?  Could he see that in his being acted upon by the hospital staff he was already being prepared for a deeper love?  It was a love that had been underneath all the action, but he had not tasted it fully.  So together we began to see that in the midst of our suffering and passion, in the midst of our waiting, we can already experience the resurrection.

Imagine how important that message is for people in our world.  If it is true that God in Jesus Christ is waiting for our response to divine love, then we can discover a whole new perspective on how to wait in life.  We can learn to be obedient people who do not always try to go back to the action but who recognize the fulfillment of our deepest humanity in passion, in waiting.  If we can do this, I am convinced that we will come in touch with the glory of God and our own new life.  Then our service to others will include our helping them see the glory breaking through, not only where they are active but also where they are being acted upon.

from Henri Nouwen

I was invited to a friend who was very sick.  He was a man about fifty-three years old who had lived a very active, useful, faithful, creative life.  Actually, he was a social activist who had cared very deeply for people.  When he was fifty he found out he had cancer, and the cancer became more and more severe.

When I came to him, he said to me, "Henri, here I am lying in this bed, and I don't even know how to think about being sick.  My whole way of thinking about myself is in terms of action, in terms of doing things for people.  My life is valuable because I've been able to do many things for many people.  And suddenly, here I am, passive, and I can't do anything anymore."  And he said to me, "Help me to think about this situation in a new way.  Help me to think about my not being able to do anything anymore so I won't be driven to despair.  Help me to understand what it means that now all sorts of people are doing things to me over which I have no control."

As we talked I realized that he and many others were constantly thinking, "How much can I still do?"  Somehow this man had learned to think about himself as a man who was worth only what he was doing.  And so when he got sick, his hope seemed to rest on the idea that he might get better and return to what he had been doing.  If the spirit of this man was dependent on how much he would still be able to do, what did I have to say to him?...

The central word in the story of Jesus' arrest is one I never thought much about.  It is "to be handed over."  This is what happened in Gethsemane.  Jesus was handed over.  Some translators say that Jesus was "betrayed," but the Greek says he was "handed over."  Judas handed Jesus over (see Mark 14:10).  But the remarkable thing is that the same word is used not only for Judas but also for God.  God did not spare Jesus, but handed him over to benefit us all (see Romans 8:32).

So this word, "to be handed over," plays a central role in the life of Jesus.  Indeed, this drama of being handed over divides the life of Jesus radically in two.  The first part of Jesus' life is filled with activity.  Jesus takes all sorts of initiatives.  He speaks; he preaches; he heals; he travels.  But immediately after Jesus is handed over, he becomes the one to whom things are being done.  He's being arrested; he's being led to the high priest; he's being taken before Pilate; he's being crowned with thorns; he's being nailed on a cross.  Things are being done to him over which he has no control.  That is the meaning of passion – being the recipient of other people's initiatives.

It is important for us to realize that when Jesus says, "It is accomplished," he does not simply mean, "I have done all the things I wanted to do."  He also means, "I have allowed things to be done to me that needed to be done to me in order for me to fulfill my vocation."  Jesus does not fulfill his vocation in action only but also in passion.  He doesn't just fulfill his vocation by doing the things the Father sent him to do, but also by letting things be done to him that the Father allows to do done to him, by receiving other people’s initiatives.

Passion is a kind of waiting – waiting for what other people are going to do.  Jesus went to Jerusalem to announce the good news to the people of that city.  And Jesus knew that he was going to put a choice before them: Will you be my disciple, or will you be my executioner?  There is no middle ground here.  Jesus went to Jerusalem to put people in a situation where they had to say "Yes" or "No."

from Henri Nouwen

The speaker is Jayber Crow in Wendell Berry's novel of the same name:

For a while again I couldn't pray.  I didn't dare to.  In the most secret place of my soul I wanted to beg the Lord to reveal himself in power.  I wanted to tell him that it was time for his coming.  If there was anything at all to what he had promised, why didn’t he come in glory with angels and lay his hands on the hurt children and awaken the dead soldiers and restore the burned villages and the blasted and poisoned land?  Why didn’t he cow our arrogance?...

But thinking such things was as dangerous as praying them.  I knew who had thought such thoughts before: "Let Christ the king of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe."  Where in my own arrogance was I going to hide?

Where did I get my knack for being a fool?  If I could advise God, why didn't I just advise him (like our great preachers and politicians) to be on our side and give us victory?  I had to turn around and wade out of the mire myself.

Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave.  And why not otherwise?  Wouldn't it have put fine comical expressions on the faces of the scribes and the chief priests and the soldiers if at that moment he had come down in power and glory?  Why didn't he do it?  Why hasn't he done it at any one of a thousand good times between then and now?

I knew the answer.  I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it.  He didn't, he hasn't, because from the moment he did, he would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be his slaves.  Even those who hated him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in him then.  From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to him and he to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended.

And so, I thought, he must forebear to reveal his power and glory by presenting himself as himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of his creatures.  Those who wish to see him must see him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, and wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.

I would sometimes be horrified in every moment I was alone.  I could see no escape.  We are too tightly tangled together to be able to separate ourselves from one another either by good or by evil.  We are all involved in all and any good, and in all and any evil.  For any sin, we all suffer.  That is why our suffering is endless.  It is why God grieves and Christ’s wounds still are bleeding. 

from Wendell Berry

"Thy will be done," in its full extent, must be the guideline for the Christian life.  It must regulate the day from morning to evening, the course of the year, and the entire of life.  Only then will it be the sole concern of the Christian.  All other concerns the Lord takes over.  This one alone, however, remains ours as long as we live.  And, sooner or later, we begin to realize this.  In the childhood of the spiritual life, when we have just begun to allow ourselves to be directed by God, we feel his guiding hand quite firmly and surely.  But it doesn't always stay that way.  Whoever belongs to Christ must go the whole way with him.  He must mature to adulthood: he must one day or other walk the way of the cross to Gethsemane and Golgotha.

Will you remain faithful to the Crucified?  Consider carefully!  The world is in flames, the battle between Christ and the Antichrist has broken into the open.  If you decide for Christ, it could cost you your life.  Carefully consider what you promise.

Before you hangs the Savior on the cross, because he became obedient to death on the cross.  He came into the world not to do his own will, but his Father's will.  If you intend to be the bride of the Crucified, you too must completely renounce your own will and no longer have any desire except to fulfill God's will.

The Savior hangs naked and destitute before you on the cross because he has chosen poverty.  Those who want to follow him must renounce all earthly goods.  It is not enough that you once left everything out there and came to the monastery.  You must be serious about it now as well.  Gratefully receive what God's providence sends you.  Joyfully do without what he may let you do without.  Do not be concerned with your own body, with its trivial necessities and inclinations, but leave concern to those who are entrusted with it.  Do not be concerned about the coming day and the coming meal.

The Savior hangs before you with a pierced heart.  He has spilled his heart's blood to win your heart.  If you want to follow him in holy purity, your heart must be free of every earthly desire.  Jesus, the Crucified, is to be the only object of your longings, your wishes, your thoughts.

The world is in flames.  Are you impelled to put them out?  Look at the cross.  From the open heart gushes the blood of the Savior.  This extinguishes the flames of hell.  Make your heart free by the faithful fulfillment of your vows; then the flood of divine love will be poured into your heart until it overflows and becomes fruitful to all the ends of the earth.

Do you hear the groans of the wounded on the battlefields in the west and the east?  You are not a physician and not a nurse and cannot bind up the wounds.  You cannot get to them.  Do you hear the anguish of the dying?  You would like to be an angel of mercy and help them.  Look at the Crucified.  If you are bound to him by the faithful observance of your holy vows, your being is precious blood.  Bound to him, you are omnipresent as he is.  You cannot help here or there like the physician, the nurse, the priest.  You can be at all fronts, wherever there is grief, in the power of the cross.  Your compassionate love takes you everywhere, this love from the divine heart.  Its precious blood is poured everywhere, soothing, healing, saving.

The eyes of the Crucified look down on you, asking, probing.  Will you make your covenant with the Crucified anew in all seriousness?  What will you answer him?

"Lord, where shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life."

from Edith Stein

Calvary is judo.  The enemy's own power is used to defeat him.  Satan's craftily orchestrated plot, rolled along according to plan by his agents Judas, Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas, culminated in the death of God.  And this very event, Satan's conclusion, was God's premise.  Satan's end was God’s means.  God won Satan's captives – us – back to himself by freely dying in our place.

It is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world.  Yet it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe, and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at.  And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs.  We needed a surgeon; he came and reached into our wounds with bloody hands.  He didn’t give us a placebo or a pill or good advice.  He gave us himself.

He came.  He entered space and time and suffering.  He came, like a lover.  He did the most important thing and he gave the most important gift: himself.  It is a lover’s gift.  Out of our tears, our waiting, our darkness, our agonized aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, out of our cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" he came, all the way, right into that cry.

He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water.  Are we broken?  He is broken with us.  Are we rejected?  Do people despise us not for our evil but for our good, or attempted good?  He was "despised and rejected of men."  Do we weep?  Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost?  Do we ever say, "Oh, no, not again!  I can't take it any more!"?  Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us?  They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper.  Is our love betrayed?  Are our tenderest relationships broken?  He too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved.  "He came unto his own and his own received him not."

Does it seem sometimes as if life has passed us by or cast us out, as if we are sinking into uselessness and oblivion?  He sinks with us.  He too is passed over by the world.  His way of suffering love is rejected, his own followers often the most guilty of all; they have made his name a scandal, especially among his own chosen people.  What Jew finds the road to him free from the broken weapons of bloody prejudice?  We have made it nearly impossible for his own people to love him, to see him as he is, free from the smoke of battle and holocaust.

How does he look upon us now?  With continual sorrow, but never with scorn.  We add to his wounds.  There are two thousand nails in his cross.  We, his beloved and longed for and passionately desired, are constantly cold and correct and distant to him.  And still he keeps brooding over the world like a hen over an egg, like a mother who has had all of her beloved children turn against her.  "Could a mother desert her young?  Even so I could not desert you."  He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins.  He does not turn his face from us, however much we turn our face from him.

Does he descend into all our hells?  Yes.  In the unforgettable line of Corrie ten Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp, "No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still."  Does he descend into violence?  Yes, by suffering it and leaving us the solution that to this day only a few brave souls have dared to try, the most notable in our memory not even a Christian but a Hindu.  Does he descend into insanity?  Yes, into that darkness too.  Even into the insanity of suicide?  Can he be there too?  Yes, he can.  "Even the darkness is not dark to him."  He finds or makes light even there, in the darkness of the mind – though perhaps not until the next world, until death’s release.

Love is why he came.  It’s all love.  The buzzing flies around the cross, the stroke of the Roman hammer as the nails tear into his screamingly soft flesh, the infinitely harder stroke of his own people's hammering hatred, hammering at his heart – why?  For love.  God is love, as the sun is fire and light, and he can no more stop loving than the sun can stop shining.

Henceforth, when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our hearts, we can know – we must know – that he is here with us, taking our blows.  Every tear we shed becomes his tear.  He may not yet wipe them away, but he makes them his.  Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or his tear-filled ones?  He came.  He is here.  That is the salient fact.  If he does not heal all our broken bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished.  And he shows us that we can henceforth use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love.  Since we are his body, we too are the bread that is broken for others.  Our very failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love.  When those we love hang up on us, he keeps the lines open.

God's answer to the problem of suffering not only really happened two thousand years ago, but it is still happening on our own lives.  The solution to our suffering is our suffering!  All our suffering can become part of his work, the greatest work ever done, the work of salvation, of helping to win for those we love eternal joy.

from Peter Kreeft

Very few of us have any understanding of the reason why Jesus Christ died.  If sympathy is all that human beings need, then the Cross of Christ is a farce, there was no need for it.  What the world needs is not "a little bit of love," but a surgical operation.

When you are face to face with a soul in difficulty spiritually, remind yourself of Jesus Christ on the Cross.  If that soul can get to God on any other line, then the Cross of Jesus Christ is unnecessary.  If you can help others by your sympathy or understanding, you are a traitor to Jesus Christ.  You have to keep your soul rightly related to God and pour out for others on His line, not pour out on the human line and ignore God.  The great note today is amiable religiosity.

The one thing we have to do is to exhibit Jesus Christ crucified, to lift Him up all the time.  Every doctrine that is not imbedded in the Cross of Jesus will lead astray.  If the worker himself believes in Jesus Christ and is banking on the Reality of Redemption, the people he talks to must be concerned.  The thing that remains and deepens is the worker's simple relationship to Jesus Christ; his usefulness to God depends on that and that alone.

The calling of a New Testament worker is to uncover sin and to reveal Jesus Christ as Saviour, consequently he cannot be poetical, he must be sternly surgical.  We are sent by God to lift up Jesus Christ, not to give wonderfully beautiful discourses.  We have to probe straight down as deeply as God has probed us, to be keen in sensing the Scriptures which bring the truth straight home and to apply them fearlessly.

from Oswald Chambers

Let us say again: Into God as God, no pain, grief, or dislike can come.  Yet God is grieved on account of our sin.

Since grief cannot be in God outside the creature, it occurs when God is in man or in a divine man.

Sin is such a pain to God, it saddens him so much, that he would himself be tortured and bodily die so that he might thereby wipe out a person's sin.

If we asked God if he would live so that sin should remain, or die in order to destroy sin, he would choose death.

For God feels more pain over our sin and it gives him more grief than his own torture and death.

Now, if one person's sin causes God pain, how much more, then, the sins of all people?  So you see how deeply we grieve God with our sins.

Where God is man, he does not grieve over anything but sin.  Nothing else gives real pain.

For all that is or occurs without sin, that is what God will have and be.

Yet grief of sorrow over sin should and must remain in a divine person until he leaves his body in death, even if he were to live until the latter day, or forever.

From this came Christ's hidden anguish of which no one reports or knows but Christ himself.  Therefore we call it what it is: hidden.

This hidden sorrow over our sinful condition is an attribute of God's that he has chosen and that he is pleased to see in man.  But it is God's attribute above all.  Sorrow over sin does not finally belong to us humans; we ourselves are not capable of it.  Wherever God can bring it about in us, it is the most pleasing and most appropriate but at the same time the most bitter and heavy undertaking on which we can enter.

What we have been describing here is one of God's attributes, which he would like to see realized in us.  For it is we who should practice it and put it into effect.  The true Light teaches us about sorrow over sin; it teaches us moreover, that we, in whom it is put into effect and practiced, should claim that divine mood for ourselves as little as though we were not there.

For then we recognize with inner knowledge that we ourselves would not be capable of creating the awareness of sin and that it does not belong to us.

from Martin Luther

2 Corinthians 5:21

"My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death," Jesus said (Mark 14:34).  It was not that he turned a corner in the road and was confronted by something that took him unawares.  He had been moving purposely toward this event.  Indeed, from all of eternity the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in a covenant of redemption had planned what each of them would do.  And Jesus, in light of this, had been moving inexorably toward Jerusalem.  He had "set his face to go to Jerusalem."

In John's gospel, he records Jesus saying to his father, "Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour" (John 12:27)....

On a daily basis we see courtroom scenes on the news of people on trial for various crimes.  We see the defendant accompanied by his advocate or lawyer.  Can you imagine turning on CNN and the roles are reversed?  Can you imagine seeing the lawyer or advocate on trial for the crime his client committed?  Or even more incredible, can you imagine that a judgement of guilty is made and the death penalty is meted out and it is the attorney who dies and not the defendant?  That would be bizarre.  It would be immoral.  It would be wrong, because the attorney didn't do anything.

But that's what we see in Jesus as our sinless Advocate receives the punishment we, who are guilty, deserve.

Jesus is our high priest, but what kind of priest is this who becomes the sacrifice?  Priests offer sacrifices—but this priest is the sacrifice.  The priest lays himself on the altar....

There is no story in all of human history like this.  There is no notion in all religions of the world that comes close to touching this.  This is imponderable, mysterious, majestic, glorious.  This is all about God and the wonder of his grace.

As Jesus faced this awesome prospect, he brings his disciples close and says, "My soul is overwhelmed to the point of death."

When the lights come on for the disciples after the resurrection, they realize that in the cross Jesus was substituting himself for us, changing places with us, taking the guilt of our sin to himself, accepting divine judgment that is justly and rightly against us.

In the cross God does two things, which would be otherwise impossible.

First, he pardons those who believe in Christ.  Although they have sinned and deserve only condemnation, he pardons sinners.  How can a just God pardon sinners?  Only because all of our sin was transferred to Christ.  This lays the ax at the roots of every religious person's endeavors to make himself acceptable to God by trying harder, attending more, praying more intensely—as if by some mechanism, we might be able to tip the scales in our favor.

God pardons sinners even though they have sinned and sinned and deserve only condemnation.  And if he didn't, we would be forever excluded from his presence.

Second, he displays and satisfies his perfect, holy justice by executing the punishment our sins deserve.  Without this God would not be true to himself.

Here's the gospel in a phrase.  Because Christ died for us, those who trust in him may know that their guilt has been pardoned once and for all.

What will we have to say before the bar of God's judgment?  Only one thing.  Christ died in my place.  That's the gospel.

from Alistair Begg

This season of repentance calls us to another kind of surrender: reconciliation.  We search our hearts in hopes of forgiveness, not only wanting God to forgive us but also to forgive ourselves.  Some of us carry the early memory of our own wrongdoing long after God and others have forgiven us.  Not realizing it, we hold onto our regrets.  We forget that time and grace wash clean.

Jesus teaches us about God's forgiveness.  But sometimes we are reluctant to believe in such a compassionate and forgiving God.  If we have done something to hurt a marriage, a friendship, a family relationship, we refuse to let it go.  Do we believe, fully, that repentance can restore us?  That we can be reconciled?

Lent is a good time to reassess our understanding of God.  If a parent or teacher has formed our idea of God as a hard taskmaster, we may need to revise our theology.  Often a new sense of forgiveness begins when we admit these inward feelings about God.  Anger against God can be buried very deep.

People sometimes can't forgive what they think God has done wrong.  A friend of mine once told me she could not forgive God because of the Holocaust.  It was easier for her to become an atheist than to work out what kind of God would permit such evil.  In a similar statement for National Public Radio, the comedian Penn Jillette said: "Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force...."  In the same essay series, Bill Nunan, a scientist, describes how he has revised his conception of God to fit with his knowledge of science.  I don't accept Nunan's theology.  But I do understand what's driving him. He does not want to retreat into atheism.  So he has refocused his picture of God.

Sometimes people recovering from pain say they have rejected religion in favor of spirituality.  Alas, every spirituality hangs on a theology, even when that theology is unspoken.  The best theological starting point in Scripture is in the First Letter of John: "God is love."  John's letter continues: "And those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them."  If we begin with a childlike spirit and a loving God, we will soon arrive at the kind of religion taught by Jesus.  Jesus maintains high moral principles but allows for human weakness.  That is the Jesus whom Father Rolheiser wants us to understand.

Rolheiser speaks of being raised in a church with an unsparing moral code.  "I was raised in a Catholicism which was deeply moral.  It took commitment seriously and called sin sin.  It was, on most moral issues, brutally uncompromising."  Looking back, Rolheiser values the clarity of that upbringing, contrasted with the moral relativism of today.  But he thinks that worldview was sometimes unforgiving and lacking in compassion, in giving second chances.  "We need a theology that teaches us that even though we cannot unscramble an egg God's grace lets us live happily and with renewed innocence..."  He calls this a theology of brokenness, adding that we must learn that "time and grace wash clean."

Recently I shocked a room full of women by telling them the story of Dorothy L. Sayers and the child she had out of wedlock.  The year was 1923, the preganancy was unplanned, Sayers was not married, and the father refused to take responsibility for the child.  Sayers took a leave from her job in London, gave birth to her baby in a discreet country hospital, and placed the boy with her aunt and cousin, who cared for him.  Later, when Sayers married, she intended to claim the child as her own, but did not.  When the boy was about ten, "Cousin Dorothy" and her husband said they would adopt him.  In fact, no adoption took place.  For years she provided financial support and paid for his Oxford education.  But the young man did not know Dorothy L. Sayers was his mother until after her death.  This incident shows what can happen in harshly judgmental societies when reconciliation is lacking.

In today's more tolerant atmosphere, it is hard to understand why an enlightened woman would engage in such deception, risking her own emotions and her son's self-esteem to protect them both from social stigma.  To me, the story has a special power.  It underscores the bitterness of a world without Christian forgiveness.  It shows how much we need time and grace to wash us clean.  Dorothy L. Sayers paid for her son's upbringing and education.  But, hemmed in by social stigma, she never went far enough to be reconciled to him.

Is there a value in such a painful memory?  Perhaps it is only this, that in our own lives we may need to surrender our pride and break barriers to forgive and to be reconciled.  This Lent, may we surrender not only our sins, but the memory of our sins, to the grace that washes clean.

from Emilie Griffin

For this reason it is important to distinguish between two kinds of sorrow for sin.  The one has to do with feeling sorry over some wrong or sin we have committed.  This feeling seems to provide a sort of guarantee that we are not disposed to do the same wrong again, and that our better self is still alive enough to enter its protest against the sin our lower self has done.  And we count this feeling of reproach, which treads so closely on the act, as a sort of compensation or atonement for the wrong.

In this kind of sorrow, however, there is no real repentance, no true sorrow for sin.  It is merely wounded self-love.  It is a sorrow over weakness, over the fact that when we were put to the test we found to our chagrin that we had failed.  But this chagrin is what we are apt to mistake for repentance.  This is nothing but wounded pride – sorrow that we did not do better, that we were not so good as we and others thought.  It is just as if Peter turned and looked upon Peter.  And when Peter turns and looks upon Peter, he sees what a poor, weak creature Peter is.  And if God had not looked upon Peter he might have wept well-nigh as bitterly, not because he had sinned against his God, but because he, the great apostle, had done a weak thing – he was weak as other men.

All this amounts to little more than vexation and annoyance with ourselves, that, after all our good resolutions and attempts at reformation, we have broken down again.  This kind of sorrow bears no lasting fruit, and is certainly far removed from the publican's prayer of repentance in the temple.  "Lord be merciful to me, a sinner!"  Stricken before his God, this publican had little thought of the self-respect he had lost.  He certainly felt it no indignity to take the culprit's place.

All this to say that there is a vast difference between divine and human sorrow.  True contrition occurs when God turns and looks upon us.  Human sorrow is us turning and looking upon ourselves.  True, there is nothing wrong in turning and looking at oneself – only there is a danger.  We can miss the most authentic experience of life in the imitation.  For genuine repentance consists of feeling deeply our human helplessness, of knowing how God comes to us when we are completely broken.

In the end, it is God looking into the sinner's face that matters.  Knowing first hand the difference between human and divine sorrow is of utmost importance.  It is the distinction Luke brings out in the prodigal son's life, between coming to himself and coming to his father.  "He came to himself," and then "he came to his father."  So we are always coming to ourselves.  We are always finding out, like the prodigal, the miserable bargains we have made.  But this is not the crucial thing.  Only when we come to our Father in response to his waiting look can we be freed and forgiven.

Peter turned around, but note well that it was the result of a mere glance.  The Lord did not thunder and lightning at Peter to make him hear his voice.  A look, and that was all.  But it rent Peter's heart as lightning could not, and melted into his soul.  God did not drive the chariot of his omnipotence up to Peter and command him to repent.  God did not threaten.  He did not even speak to him.  That one look laid a spell upon his soul.

We misunderstand God altogether if we think he deals coarsely with our souls.  If we consider what has really influenced our lives, we will find that it lies in a few silent voices that have preached to us, the winds which have passed across our soul so gently that we scarce could tell when they were come or gone.  Even in the midst of the battle, when coarser weapons fail, let us not forget the lesson of Elijah: "A great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.  After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.  And after the fire came a gentle whisper" (I Kings 19:11-12).

When God speaks he speaks so loudly that all the voices of the world seem dumb.  And yet when God speaks he speaks so softly that no one hears the whisper but yourself.  Today, perhaps, the Lord is turning and looking at you.  Right where you are, your spirit is far away just now, dealing with some sin, some unbearable weight; and God is teaching you the lesson himself – the bitterest, yet the sweetest lesson of your life, in heartfelt repentance.  Stay right where you are.  Don’t return into the hustle and bustle of life until the Lord has also turned and looked on you again, as he looked at the thief upon the cross, and until you have beheld the "glory of the love of God in the face of Jesus."

from Henry Drummond

Every person at some time in his life has fallen.  Many have fallen many times; few, few times.  And who of us can fail to shudder at the tale of Peter's guilt?

We are well aware of how the plot thickens round him.  When we read the story for ourselves we feel an almost unconscious sympathy with Peter, as if his story has happened in our own lives.  And we know, as we follow the dreary stages of his fall, these same well-worn steps have been traced ever since then by every human foot.  Anyone who possesses an inner history can surely understand how Peter could have slept in the garden, when he should have watched and prayed.  Who of us would dare to look down upon the faithlessness that made him follow Christ far off, instead of keeping at his Master's side?  For we know too well what it means to get out of step with Christ.  Wouldn't we, like the worldly company who warmed themselves by the fire and to our shame, be quick to question Peter?

Those of us who know the heart's deceit would surely find it difficult to judge this man – this man who had lived so long in the inner circle of fellowship with Christ, whose eyes were used to seeing miracles, who witnessed the glory of the transfiguration; this man whose ears were yet full of the most solemn words the world had ever heard, whose heart was warm still with Communion-table thoughts.  We understand how he could have turned his back upon his Lord, and, almost ere the sacramental wine was dry upon his lips, curse him to his face.  Such things, alas, are not strange to those of us who know the appalling tragedy of sin.

But there is something in Peter's life that is much greater than his sin.  It is his repentance.  We all too easily relate to Peter in his sin, but few of us grasp the wonder of his repentance.  Sinful Peter is one man, and repentant Peter is another; and many of us who kept his company along these worn steps to sin have left him to trace the tear-washed path of repentance alone.  But the real lesson in Peter's life is one of repentance.  His fall is a lesson in sin that requires no teacher, but his repentance is a great lesson in salvation.  And it is this great lesson that contains the only true spiritual meaning to those who have personally made Peter's discovery – that they have betrayed our God.

What then can we learn from Peter's turning around?  First, it was not Peter who turned.  It was the Lord who turned and looked at Peter.  When the cock crew, that might have kept Peter from falling further.  But he was just in the very act of sin.  And when a person is in the thick of his sin his last thought is to throw down his arms and repent.  So Peter never thought of turning, but the Lord turned.  And when Peter would rather have looked anywhere else than at the Lord, the Lord looked at Peter.  This scarce-noticed fact is the only sermon needed to anyone who sins – that the Lord turns first.

from Henry Drummond

God does not seek his own benefit.  In everything he acts only out of love.  Thus, the person who is united with God lives the same way – he is innocent and free.  He lives for love without asking why, and solely for the glory of God, never seeking his own advantage.  God alone is at work in him.

As long as we look for some kind of pay for what we do, as long as we want to get something from God in some kind of exchange, we are like the merchants.  If you want to be rid of the commercial spirit, then by all means do all you can in the way of good works, but do so solely for the praise of God.  Live as if you did not exist.  Expect and ask nothing in return.  Then the merchant inside you will be driven out of the temple God has made.  Then God alone dwells there.  See!  This is how the temple is cleared: when a person thinks only of God and honors him alone.  Only such a person is free and genuine.

Jesus went into the temple and drove out those that bought and sold.  His message was bold: "Take this all away!"  But observe that when all was cleared, there was nobody left but Jesus.  And when he is alone he is able to speak in the temple of the soul.  Observe this also, for it is certain.  If anyone else is speaking in the temple of the soul, Jesus keeps still, as if he were not at home.  And he is not at home wherever there are strange guests – guests with whom the soul holds conversation, guest who always seek to bargain.  If Jesus is to speak and be heard the soul must be alone and quiet.

And what does Jesus say when the soul has been cleared?  His word is a revelation of himself and everything the Father has said to him.  He reveals the Father's majesty with unmeasured power.  If in your spirit you discover this power, you will possess a like power in whatever you do – a power that will enable you to live undividedly and pure.  Neither joy nor sorrow, no, nor any created thing will be able to disrupt your soul.  For Christ will remain and he will cast aside all that is insignificant and futile.

When Jesus is united with your soul, the soul's tide moves back again into its own, out of itself and above all things, with grace and power back to its prime origin.  Then your fallen, fleshly self will become obedient to your inner, spiritual self, and you will in turn have a lasting peace in serving God without condition or demand.

from Meister Eckhart

We read in the gospel how Holy Week began with Jesus entering the temple and driving out all those that bought and sold.  He then rebuked the vendors of doves: "Get these things out of here!"  He was so crystal clear in his command that it was if he said, "I have a right to this temple and I alone will be in it and have control of it."

What does this have to say to us?  The temple God wants to be master of is the human soul, which he created and fashioned just like himself.  We read that God said, "Let us make man in our own image."  And he did it.  He made each soul so much like himself that nothing else in heaven or on earth resembles him as much.  That is why God wants the temple to be pure, so pure that nothing should dwell there except he himself.  And that is the reason why he is so pleased when we really prepare our souls for him.  When we do this, when he alone dwells in our hearts, he takes great comfort.

But who, exactly, are the people who buy and sell?  Are they not precisely the good people?  See!  The merchants are those who only guard against mortal sins.  They strive to be good people who do their good deeds to the glory of God, such as fasting, watching, praying, and the like – all of which are good – and yet do these things so that God will give them something in exchange.  Their efforts are contingent upon God doing something they ardently want to have done.

They are all merchants.  They want to exchange one thing for another and to trade with our Lord.  But they will be cheated out of their bargain – for what they have or have attained is actually given to them by God.  Lest we forget, we do what we do only by the help of God, and so God is never obligated to us.  God gives us nothing and does nothing except out of his own free will.  What we are we are because of God, and whatever we have we receive from God and not by our own contriving.  Therefore God is not in the least obligated to us – neither for our deeds nor for our gifts.  He gives to us freely.  Besides, Christ himself says, "Without me, you can do nothing."

People are very foolish when they want to trade with God.  They know little or nothing of the truth.  And God will strike them and drive them out of the temple.  Light and darkness cannot exist side by side.  God himself is the truth.  When he enters the temple, he drives out ignorance and darkness and reveals himself in light and truth.  Then, when the truth is known, merchants must depart – for truth wants no merchandising!

from Meister Eckhart

John 20:25

Thomas appears to have been a realist – reserved, cool, perhaps a little obstinate.

The days went by, and the disciples went on living under this considerable tension.

Another week, and they were together again in the house, and this time Thomas was with them.  The same thing repeated itself.  Jesus passed through closed doors, stepped into their midst, and spoke: "Peace be upon you!"  Then he called the man who was struggling against faith: "Let me have thy finger; see, here are my hands.  Let me have thy hand; put it into my side.  Cease thy doubting, and believe!"  At this point Thomas was overwhelmed.  The truth of it all came home to him: this man standing before him, so moving, arousing such deep feelings from within him, this man so full of mystery, so different from all other men – He is the very same One they used to be together with, who was put to death a short time ago.  And Thomas surrendered: "Thou art my Lord and my God!"  Thomas believed.

Then we come upon the strange words: "And Jesus said to him, 'Thou hast learned to believe, Thomas, because thou hast seen me.  Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have learned to believe!' "

Such words as these are really extraordinary!  Thomas believed because he saw.  But our Lord did not call him blessed.  He had been allowed to "see," to see the hands and the side, and to touch the blessed wounds, yet he was not blessed!

Perhaps Thomas had a narrow escape from a great danger.  He wanted proofs, wanted to see and touch; but then, too, it might have been rebellion deep within him, the vainglory of an intelligence that would not surrender, a sluggishness and coldness of heart.  He got what he asked for: a look and a touch.  But it must have been a concession he deplored having received, when he thought on it afterwards.  He could have believed and been saved, not because he got what he demanded; he could have believed because God's mercy had touched his heart and given him the grace of interior vision, the gift of the opening of the heart, and of its surrender.

God could also have let him stay with the words he had spoken: in that state of unbelief which cuts itself off from everything, that insists on human evidence to become convinced.  In that case he would have remained an unbeliever and gone on his way.  In that state, external seeing and touching would not have helped him at all, he simply would have called it delusion.  Nothing that comes from God, even the greatest miracle, can be proven like 2 x 2 = 4.  It touches one; it is only seen and grasped when the heart is open and the spirit purged of self.  Then it awakens faith.  But when these conditions are not present there are always reasons to be found to say solemnly and impressively that it is all delusion, or that such-and-such is so because some other thing is so.  Or, the excuse that always is handy: We cannot explain it yet…the future with enlighten us about it!

Thomas was standing a hairsbreadth away from obduracy and perdition.  He was not at all blessed.

Blessed indeed are "those who have not seen, and yet have learned to believe!"  Those who ask for no miracles, demand nothing out of the ordinary, but who find God's message in everyday life.  Those who require no compelling proofs, but who know that everything coming from God must remain in a certain ultimate suspense, so that faith may never cease to require daring.  Those who know that the heart is not overcome by faith, that there is no force or violence there, compelling belief by rigid certitudes.  What comes from God touches gently, comes quietly; does not disturb freedom; leads to quiet, profound, peaceful resolve within the heart.

And those are called blessed who make the effort to remain open-hearted.  Who seek to cleanse their hearts of all self-righteousness, obstinacy, presumption, inclination to "know better."  Who are quick to hear, humble, free-spirited.  Who are able to find God's message in the gospel for the day, or even from the sermons of preachers with no message in particular, or in phrases from the Law they have heard a thousand times, phrases with no quality of charismatic power about them, or in the happenings of everyday life which always end up the same way: work and rest, anxiety – and then again some kind of success, some joy, an encounter, and a sorrow.

Blessed are those who can see the Lord in all these things!

from Romano Guardini

We know why so many refuse to hear this message and why they can make neither head nor tail of it.  The person for whom his reasoning power furnishes the supreme criterion of truth cannot believe that truth exists which does not flow from his own intellectual activity; truth which we cannot, by our own powers of recognition, apprehend, or by our powers of reason demonstrate; truth which does not dovetail into our own systems of thought and which lies entirely beyond the reach of our capacities.  All this clashes greatly with our pride.

Still more serious than its folly is the offensiveness of the gospel's message.  The Greeks sought after wisdom; the Jews desired by their good works to merit favor with God.  Has not the thought come to you: Well, what then remains for us to do?  What room is there for our own exertions, our own sense of responsibility?

Look once again at the revolt of our natural pride, this time not the pride of reason, but pride in our moral powers and in our determination to get things done for ourselves.  Consider once more what it is that God bestows upon us.  He imparts to us his love, communion with himself, and the fact that sin, which causes the deepest, most inward separation from him, is done away.  How could the person who truly appropriates that gift become frivolous and irresponsible?  Can one really receive the love of God without henceforth living in the strength of that love?

All man-made religion stands in opposition to the gospel.  It is an ascent toward the eternal, perfect God.  Up, up – that is its call.  God is high above, we are down below; and now we shall soar by means of our moral, spiritual, and religious endeavors out of the earthly, human depths into the divine heights.

God is too high and the evil in us too deep for us to reach the goal this way.  Our souls become crippled and cramped by trying to rise to the highest height.  The end is despair, or a self-righteousness that leaves room neither for love of God nor for love of others.

So if we are honest, we have to say that we cannot reach the goal.  We cannot become what we ought to become, true men and women.  Many let the matter rest there; they confess it, but take no action.  They make themselves satisfied with half because they cannot have the whole.  God demands all, not just half.  And this "all" we are not capable of giving.  What is impossible for us is what God wants – all love to him and to our fellow humans.  If this is true, it would seem that we can have no good conscience, no trusting relationship with God, no inner peace, and no freedom of the soul.

But God has in his mercy shown us a different way.  "You cannot come up to me, so I will come down to you."  And God descends to us human beings.  This act of becoming one of us begins at Christmas and ends on Good Friday.

God goes to the end.  He reaches the goal.  To be sure, this end is exactly the opposite of what we fix as our goal.  We wish to climb up to heaven; God, however, descends – down to where?  To death on the cross.  This is why Jesus Christ had to descend into hell.  He had to go the way to its very end.  Our rightful end is hell, that is, banishment from God – godforsakenness.  Only there has God completely come to us, there where he has taken upon himself everything, even the cursed end of our way.

Jesus Christ has gone into hell in order to get us out of there.  For with everything he does, that is his goal, that he may get us out, reconcile us with God, and fill us with God's Spirit.  He had to despair of God for us ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") so that we do not have to despair of God.  He has taken this upon himself so that we may become free of it.

from Emil Brunner

Why is it that Paul describes the gospel as a folly and a scandal and that worldly wisdom feels so repelled by it?

The wisdom of this world gives us occasion to be proud of our own achievement.  Even the Jewish religion with its piety holds that it is still we who must do the decisive thing in order to win the good pleasure of God.  This applies still more to oriental and mystical religions.  The latter do not mortify human nature nor expose human sin, but bypass it.  But the message of the cross proclaims to each one of us, even the best and most pious: You are a sinner, you are in a wrong relationship with God and hence with your neighbor also.  You are seeking yourself.  You wish to appear clever, and to attain the highest by means of your own intrinsic powers.

But why, you may ask, must we make so much ado about human sin?  Is it because in our inmost being we have each gone astray: I am godless, loveless, self-seeking, God-escaping.  This is not manifested merely in those obvious weaknesses and vices that everyone condemns and with which, to a very large extent, we ourselves can deal.  No, sin – the corruption of our nature – lies much deeper and is manifest even when we are occupied with the highest and holiest things.

The message of the cross goes to the root of our ills, and it alone can cure them radically.  Just for that reason it spells folly and scandal.  How?  In the Bible it is not we who find a way to God; it is God who comes to us.  It says nothing about practicing mystical introspection, of otherworldliness, of cultivating the interior life, with a view to reaching ultimately the divine ground of the soul.  It is not a question of our own performances and exercises as a result of which we might hope to become pious and well-pleasing to God.  That, in the last analysis, is self-praise.  The central point of scripture is that God has mercy on us who are stuck so fast in the mire – if I may be pardoned the expression – that we cannot help ourselves.

from Emil Brunner

When John the Baptist was languishing in prison, he sent a message to Jesus asking him to explain himself.  Apparently John could not understand why Jesus had not begun to exercise his Messianic authority and power in a way that John thought he would.  Jesus replied with a definition of his ministry and then said, "Blessed is he who takes no offense at me" (Matthew 11:6).  Yet, we are repeatedly told throughout the four Gospels, people did just that.  Here is the story of two women who took offense at him.

The first woman (let's call her Sally) told me she was having trouble finding an Episcopal church that she liked.  I suggested that she try St. Such and Such.  "Oh, no," she exclaimed.  "I could never go there."  "Why not?" I asked.  To my amazement she said, "I would have to look at that big cross they have behind the altar with that figure of Christ hanging on it.  It would upset me terribly!"

The second woman (let's call her Jane) is a woman whose husband and children I used to know pretty well.  Although Jane appeared to be a very agreeable person to those who saw her socially at the club or the church, I knew it to be a fact that she made life difficult for her family.  She was manipulative, domineering, willful, and unforgiving.  The fact that she had a pleasing personality on the surface only made it worse, because she was used to getting her own way with blandishments.  It was almost impossible to get hold of her to help her see what she was doing; she considered herself a person of superior virtue.

During Holy Week several years ago she said something that, from my point of view, was deeply revealing.  First I should explain that, although many churches have been doing dramatic readings of the Passion narrative for many years, the church she belonged to had not done it before.  On one Palm Sunday, she participated in such a dramatized version for the first time.  As a member of the congregation, representing the crowd, she was supposed to shout, "Let him be crucified!"  This part of the reading is often a significant moment for those who take part; in fact, I know people whose faith has been kindled, or rekindled, at that moment.  After the service was over, several of us were standing around at the coffee hour talking about how moving the service had been.  People were especially talking about how they had felt when they shouted, "Let him be crucified!"  At this point Jane said, with considerable energy, "I just couldn't do it!  I just couldn't say it!  I just couldn't say such an awful thing!"

I have often thought, since, how terribly sad that was.  In her stubborn blindness, Jane could not identify herself as a sinner like all the rest of us.  She could not admit that she, too, was capable of evil thoughts and malicious deeds.  She was preoccupied with her own virtue and her own religiousness.  Because of this, she could not see who Jesus is or who she is.  A wise Benedictine monk once said, "If you can't handle the violence in the Psalms, you can't come to terms with the violence in yourself."  This is even more true of the cross.  If we can't look at the cross, then we can't look at ourselves either.

I have one more little story to tell.  This is another story about Sally, the woman who didn't want to look at the figure of Jesus on the crucifix.  She told some of her friends about an experience she'd had in a department store.  In order to appreciate this, you have to picture the department store and you have to picture Sally.  The store in question is fashionable and elegant.  Sally herself is fashionable and elegant, the epitome of aristocratic dignity.  She bought an expensive blouse at the store and took it with her in a shopping bag.  Unfortunately, the saleswoman had forgotten to remove the white plastic device that was attached to the blouse.  When Sally tried to go through the door, the alarms went off and the security forces pounced upon her.  "Oh, my dear, how horrible for you!" cried her friends, listening to the story, "It must have been so distressing!  Did you call your husband?  Did you have your identification?  Did you call your lawyer?  Did you ask to see the president of the store?"

"Oh," said Sally, "that wasn't a problem.  I didn't have any trouble establishing who I was.  That wasn't the bad part.  The really bad part was the feeling of being treated like a common criminal!"

Those were her exact words.  Like a common criminal.  This is the woman who won't go to the church in her neighborhood because it has a figure of Jesus on the cross and she doesn't want to look at it.

Sally was able to tell the department store who she was; and yet the truth is that she does not know who she is.  I tried to explain to Sally that the feelings of shame she had felt was a clue to the meaning of the death of Jesus, who was arrested like a common criminal, exhibited to the public like a common criminal, executed like a common criminal.  I was unable to put this across.  She does not believe herself to be guilty of anything.  Wronged, yes; misunderstood, yes; undervalued, yes; imperfect, perhaps; but not guilty, certainly not sinful.  Because she believes herself to be one of the "good" people, because she could never, never commit a small sin like shoplifting, she cannot see the connection between Jesus' death as a common criminal and herself.

Sally could not hear the message of Good Friday, Jane could not hear it, but perhaps you can hear it today, on their behalf as well as your own.  When you reflect upon Jesus Christ hanging on the cross of shame, you understand the depth and weight of human sin.  How do we measure the size of a fire?  By the number of firefighters and fire engines sent to fight against it.  How do we measure the seriousness of a medical condition?  By the amount of risk the doctors take in prescribing dangerous antibiotics or surgical procedures.  How do we measure the gravity of sin and the incomparable vastness of God's love for us?  By looking at the magnitude of what God has done for us in Jesus, who became like a common criminal for our sakes and in our place.

When you really come to know the unconditional love and forgiveness of Jesus, then you will also come to know the depth of your own participation in sin.  And at the very same moment (this is the glory of Good Friday) you will come to know the true reality, the true joy and gladness, of the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord.

from Fleming Rutledge

Every believer knows that Christ went the way of the cross for our sakes.  But it is not enough just to know this.  Each of us must find the cross.  He suffered in vain unless we are willing to die for him as he died for us.  Christ's way was a bitter way.  It ended in a victory of light and life, but it began in the feeding trough of an animal in a cold stable, and passed through tremendous need: through suffering, denial, betrayal, and finally, complete devastation and death on a cross.  If we call ourselves his followers, we must be willing to take the same path.

When a grain of wheat is laid in the earth, it dies.  It no longer remains a grain, but through death it brings forth fruit.  This is the way of true Christianity.  It is the way Jesus went when he died on the cross for each of us.  If we want our lives to be fruits of Christ's death on the cross, we cannot remain grains.  We must be ready to die too.

Christ died on the cross to break the curse of evil and vanquish it once and for all.  If we do not believe in the power of evil, we cannot comprehend this.  Until we realize that the main reason for his coming to earth was to do this on our behalf – to free us from the powers of darkness – we will never fully understand our need for the cross.  We can search the whole world, but we will find forgiveness of sins and freedom from torment nowhere except at the cross.

Many people say, "God is so great, so mighty, that he could have saved humankind without the cross."  But that is not true.  We should remember that God is not only one hundred percent love – which might have allowed him to forgive our sins without the cross.  He is also one hundred percent justice.  To kill the son of God was the most evil deed ever done.  But it was just through that deed that God showed his greatest love and gave everyone the possibility of finding peace with him.

The image of a sweet, gentle Savior, like the thought of an all-loving God, is wonderful, but it is only a small part of the picture.  It insulates us from the real power of his touch.  Christ comforts and heals, saves and forgives – we know that; but we must not forget that he judges too.  If we truly love him, we will love everything in him; not only his compassion and mercy, but his sharpness too.  It is his sharpness that prunes and purifies.

There is something in modern thinking which rebels against the Atonement.  Perhaps our idea of an all-loving God keeps us from wanting to face judgment.  We think that love and forgiveness is all that is needed, yet that is not the whole Gospel – it makes God too human... His cross is the center, the linchpin, of the struggle between God and Satan, and as such it must become the center of our hearts too.  In the cross alone is victory!  In the cross alone is purity!  It is there that the hosts of evil are overcome; that Christ's love to each human being springs eternal and gives us peace.

Unless these truths live in our hearts – unless they grip us in a deeply personal way and infuse our very being – they remain nothing but meaningless words.  Jesus offers to give himself to each one of us – by inviting us to eat his flesh and drink his blood.  Jesus does not offer a philosophy, but life.  He is real food.  He will change everything for someone who experiences this, not only for that moment but for all eternity.

When we know Jesus in the depths of our hearts, we will begin to realize (even if only to a tiny degree) what he went through for our sake.  This means surrendering ourselves to him in prayer and quiet, confessing our sins to one another, and laying them before the cross in a spirit of repentance.  Then he will accept us and give us reconciliation with God, a clean conscience, and a pure heart.  In rescuing us from inner death and granting us new life, his love for us will spill over into our own hearts and give us a great love for him.

Naturally it cannot end here, however.  The experience of personal purification at the cross is vital, yet to remain focused on that alone would be useless.  Christ's love is so great, it must lift our minds above our little struggles – and any preoccupation with our own salvation – so that we can see the needs of others, and beyond that the greatness of God and his Creation.  The cross is so much greater than the personal; it has cosmic significance, for its power embraces the whole earth and more than this earth!

from J. Heinrich Arnold

If you have any knowledge at all of human nature, who can doubt that Judas was an admirer of Christ!  And we know that Christ at the beginning of his work had many admirers.  Judas was precisely such an admirer and thus later became a traitor.  It is not hard to imagine that those who only admire the truth will, when danger appears, become traitors.  The admirer is infatuated with the false security of greatness; but if there is any inconvenience or trouble, he pulls back.  Admiring the truth, instead of following it, is just as dubious a fire as the fire of erotic love, which at the turn of the hand can be changed into exactly the opposite, to hate, jealously, and revenge.

There is a story of yet another admirer – Nicodemus.  Despite the risk to his reputation, despite the effort on his part, Nicodemus was only an admirer; he never became a follower.  It is as if he might have said to Christ, "If we are able to reach a compromise, you and I, then I will accept your teaching in eternity.  But here in this world, no, I cannot.  Could you not make an exception for me?  Would it not be enough if once in a while, at great risk to myself, I come to you during the night, but during the day (yes, I confess it, I feel how humiliating this is for me and how disgraceful, indeed also how very insulting it is toward you) I say 'I do not know you'?"  See in what a web of untruth an admirer can entangle himself!

Nicodemus, I am quite sure, was well-meaning.  I'm also sure he was ready in the strongest phrases to attest that he accepted the truth of Christ's teaching. Yet, is it not true that the more strongly someone makes assurances, while his life still remains unchanged, the more he is only making a fool of himself?  If Christ had permitted a cheaper edition of follower – an admirer who swears by all that is high and holy that he is convinced – then Nicodemus might very well have been accepted.  But he was not!

Now suppose that there is no longer any special danger, as it no doubt is in so many of our Christian countries, bound up with publicly confessing Christ.  Suppose there is no longer need to journey in the night.  The difference between following and admiring still remains.  Forget about danger connected with confessing Christ and think rather of the real danger which is inescapably bound up with being a Christian.  Does not the Way – Christ's requirement to die to the world and deny self – does this not contain enough danger?

The admirer never makes any true sacrifices.  He always plays it safe.  Though in word he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, will not reconstruct his life, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.  Not so for the follower.  No, no.  The follower aspires with all his strength to be what he admires.  And then, remarkably enough, even though he is living amongst a "Christian people," he incurs the same peril as he did when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ.  And because of the follower's life, it will become evident who the admirers are, for the admirers will become agitated with him.  Even these words will disturb many – but then they must likewise belong to the admirers.

from Søren Kierkegaard

It is well know that Christ consistently used the expression "follower."  He never asks for admirers, worshippers, or adherents.  No, he calls disciples.  It is not adherents of a teaching but followers of a life Christ is looking for.

Christ understood that being a "disciple" was in innermost and deepest harmony with what he said about himself.  Christ claimed to be the way and the truth and the life (Jn. 14:6).  For this reason, he could never be satisfied with adherents who accepted his teaching – especially with those who in their lives ignored it or let things take their usual course.  His whole life on earth, from beginning to end, was destined solely to have followers and to make admirers impossible.

Christ came into the world with the purpose of saving, not instructing it.  At the same time – as is implied in his saving work – he came to be the pattern, to leave footprints for the person who would join him, who would become a follower.  This is why Christ was born and lived and died in lowliness.  It is absolutely impossible for anyone to sneak away from the Pattern with excuse and evasion on the basis that it, after all, possessed earthly and worldly advantages that he did not have.  In that sense, to admire Christ is the false invention of a later age, aided by the presumption of "loftiness."  No, there is nothing to admire in Jesus, unless you want to admire poverty, misery, and contempt.

What then, is the difference between an admirer and a follower?  A follower is or strives to be what he admires. An admirer, however, keeps himself personally detached.  He fails to see that what is admired involves a claim upon him, and thus he fails to be or strive to be what he admires.

To want to admire instead of to follow Christ is not necessarily an invention by bad people.  No, it is more an invention by those who spinelessly keep themselves detached, who keep themselves at a safe distance.  Admirers are related to the admired only through the excitement of the imagination.  To them he is like an actor on the stage except that, this being real life, the effect he produces is somewhat stronger.  But for their part, admirers make the same demands that are made in the theater: to sit safe and calm.  Admirers are only too willing to serve Christ as long as proper caution is exercised, lest one personally come in contact with danger.  They refuse to accept that Christ's life is a demand.  In actual fact, they are offended by him.  His radical, bizarre character so offends them that when they honestly see Christ for who he is, they are no longer able to experience the tranquility they so much seek after.  They know full well that to associate with him too closely amounts to being up for examination.  Even though he says nothing against them personally, they know that his life tacitly judges theirs.

And Christ's life indeed makes it manifest, terrifyingly manifest, what dreadful untruth it is to admire the truth instead of following it.  When there is no danger, when there is a dead calm, when everything is favorable to our Christianity, then it is all too easy to confuse an admirer with a follower.  And this can happen very quietly.  The admirer can be under the delusion that the position he takes is the true one, when all he is doing is playing it safe.  Give heed, therefore, to the call of discipleship!

from Søren Kierkegaard

The cross is not adversity, nor the harshness of fate, but suffering coming solely from our commitment to Jesus Christ.  The suffering of the cross is not fortuitous, but necessary.  The cross is not the suffering tied to natural existence, but the suffering tied to being Christians.  The cross is never simply a matter of suffering, but a matter of suffering and rejection, and even, strictly speaking, rejection for the sake of Jesus Christ, not for the sake of some other arbitrary behavior or confession.  The cross always simultaneously means rejection, and that the disgrace of suffering is part of the cross.  Being expelled, despised, and abandoned by people in one's suffering, as we find in the unending lament of the psalmist, is an essential feature of the suffering of the cross, yet one no longer comprehensible to a form of Christian life unable to distinguish between bourgeois and Christian existence.

The first suffering we must experience is the call sundering our ties to this world.  This is the death of the old human being in the encounter with Jesus Christ.  Whoever enters discipleship enters Jesus' death, and puts his or her own life into death; this has been so from the beginning.  The cross is not the horrible end of a pious, happy life, but stands rather at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ.  Every call of Christ leads to death.  Whether with the first disciples we leave home and occupation in order to follow him, or whether with Luther we leave the monastery to enter a secular profession, in either case, the one death awaits us, namely, death in Jesus Christ, the dying away of our old form of being human in Jesus' call.

But there is yet another suffering and yet another disgrace that no Christian escapes.  Only Christ's own suffering is the suffering of reconciliation.  Yet because Christ did suffer for the sake of the world's sins, because the entire burden of sin fell upon him, and because Jesus Christ bequeaths to the disciples the fruit of his suffering – because of all this, temptation and sin also fall upon the disciples.  It covers them with pure shame, and expels them from the gates of the city like the scapegoat.  Thus does the Christian come to bear sin and guilt for others...

Those who are not prepared to take up the cross, those who are not prepared to give their life to suffering and rejection by others, lose community with Christ, and are not disciples.  Discipleship is commitment to the suffering of Christ.  Whether we really have found God's peace will be shown by how we deal with the sufferings that will come upon us.

from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Take up your cross, therefore, and follow Jesus, and you will inherit everlasting life.  Behold, in the cross is everything, and upon your dying on the cross everything depends.  There is no other way to life and to true inward peace than the way and discipline of the cross.  Go where you will, seek what you want, you will not find a higher way, nor a less exhalted but safer way, than the way of the cross.  Arrange and order everything to suit your desires and you will still have to bear some kind of suffering, willingly or unwillingly.

There is no escaping the cross.  Either you will experience physical hardship or tribulation of spirit in your soul.  At times you will be forsaken by God, at times troubled by those about you and, what is worse, you will often grow weary of yourself.  You cannot escape, you cannot be relieved by any remedy or comfort but must bear with it as long as God wills.  For he wishes you to learn to bear trial without consolation, to submit yourself wholly to him that you may become more humble through suffering.  No one understands the passion of Christ so thoroughly or heartily as the one who has suffered similarly.

The cross, therefore, is unavoidable.  It waits for you everywhere.  No matter where you may go, you cannot escape it, for wherever you go you take yourself along.  Turn where you will – above, below, without, or within – you will find the cross.

If you willingly carry the cross, it will carry you.  It will take you to where suffering comes to an end, a place other than here.  If you carry it unwillingly, you create a burden for yourself and increase the load, though you still have to bear it.  If you try to do away with one cross, you will find another and perhaps a heavier one.  How do you expect to escape what no one else can avoid?  Which saint was exempt?  Not even Jesus Christ was spared.  Why is it that you look for another way other than the royal way of the holy cross?

The whole life of Christ was a cross.  And the more spiritual progress you strive for, the heavier will your cross become, for as your love for God increases so will the pain of your exile.

When you willingly carry your cross, every pang of tribulation is changed into hope of solace from God.  Besides, with every affliction the spirit is strengthened by grace.  For it is the grace of Christ, and not our own virtue, that gives us the power to overcome the flesh and the world.  You will not even fear your enemy, the devil, if you arm yourself with faith and are signed with the cross of Christ.

Decide then, like a good and faithful servant of Christ, to bear bravely the cross of your Lord.  It was out of love that he was crucified for you.  Drink freely from the Lord's cup if you wish to be his friend.  Leave your need for consolation to God.  Let him do as he wills.  On your part, be ready to bear sufferings and consider how in these sufferings lies your greatest consolation.  The sufferings of this life are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come.

When you get to the point where for Christ's sake suffering becomes sweet, consider yourself fortunate, for you have found paradise on earth.  But as long as adversity irks you, as long as you try to avoid suffering, you will be discontent and ill at ease.

Realize that to know Christ you must lead a dying life.  The more you die to yourself, the more you will live unto God.  You will never enjoy heavenly things unless you are ready to suffer hardship for Christ.  Nothing is more acceptable to God, nothing more helpful for you on this earth.  When there is a choice to be made, take the narrow way.  This alone will make you more like Christ.

from Thomas à Kempis

There will always be many who love Christ's heavenly kingdom, but few who will bear his cross.  Jesus has many who desire consolation, but few who care for adversity.  He finds many to share his table, but few who will join him in fasting.  Many are eager to be happy with him; few wish to suffer anything for him.  Many will follow him as far as the breaking of bread, but few will remain to drink from his passion.  Many are awed by his miracles, few accept the shame of his cross.

Many love Christ as long as they encounter no hardship; many praise and bless him as long as they receive some comfort from him.  But if Jesus hides himself and leaves them for a while, they either start complaining or become dejected.  Those, on the contrary, who love him for his own sake and not for any comfort of their own, praise him both in trial and anguish of heart as well as in the bliss of consolation.  Even if Jesus should never comfort them, they would continue to praise and thank him.  What power there is in a pure love for Jesus – love that is free from all self-interest and self-love!

Do not those who always seek consolation deserve to be called mercenaries?  Do not those who always contemplate their own profit and gain prove that they love themselves rather than Christ?  Where can we find anyone who is willing to serve God for nothing?  It is surely rare to find a person spiritual enough to strip himself of all earthly things.  And where can we find anyone so truly poor in spirit that he is free from being dependent on created things?  Such a person is worth far more than the jewels brought from the most distant lands.

If one were to give all his wealth, it is nothing.  If he were to try and make amends for all his sins, it is worth little.  If he excelled in learning and knowledge, he is still far afield.  If he had great virtue and much ardent devotion, he still would lack a great deal, and especially the one thing that is most necessary to him.  What is the one thing?  He must give up everything, especially himself, retaining no private store of selfish desires.  Then, when he has done all that he knows ought to be done, let him consider it as nothing.  He should not bask in any applause he may receive, but consider himself an ordinary servant.  As it says in the Gospel, "When you have done everything you were told to do, you should say, 'I am an unworthy servant; I have only done my duty' " (Luke 17:10).

Many find the command, "Deny thyself, take up your cross and follow Me" (Matt. 16:24) too hard.  But it will be much harder to hear the final word: "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the everlasting fire" (Matt. 25:41).  Those who hear the word of the cross and follow it willingly now, need not fear judgment.  This sign of the cross will be in the heavens when the Lord comes to judge.  Then everyone who serves the cross, who in this life made themselves one with the Crucified, will draw near with confidence to Christ, the judge.

Why, then, do you fear to take up the cross when through it you can win the kingdom?  There is no salvation or hope of everlasting life but in the cross.

from Thomas à Kempis

Have I made this decision about sin – that it must be killed right out in me?  It takes a long time to come to a moral decision about sin, but it is the great moment in my life when I do decide that just as Jesus Christ died for the sin of the world, so sin must die out in me, not to be curbed or suppressed or counteracted, but crucified.  No one can bring anyone else to this decision.  We may be earnestly convinced, and religiously convinced, but what we need to do is to come to the decision once and for all.

Haul yourself up, take a time alone with God, make the moral decision and say, "Lord, identify me with your death until I know that sin is dead in me."  Make the moral decision that sin in you must be put to death.

Ask yourself: Am I prepared to let the Spirit of God search me until I know what the disposition of sin is – the thing that lusts against the Spirit of God in me?  If so, will I agree with God's verdict on that disposition of sin – that it should be identified with the death of Jesus?  I cannot reckon myself "dead indeed unto sin" unless I have been through this radical issue of will before God.

Have I entered into the glorious privilege of being crucified with Christ until all that is left is the life of Christ in my flesh and blood?  "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20).

These words mean the breaking of my own independence with my own hand and surrendering to the supremacy of the Lord Jesus.  No one can do this for me, I must do it myself.  God may bring me up to the point three hundred and sixty-five times a year, but he cannot put me through it.  It means breaking the husk of my individual independence of God, and the emancipating of my personality into oneness with himself, not for my own ideas, but for absolute loyalty to Jesus.  There is no possibility of dispute when once I am there.  Very few of us know anything about loyalty to Christ – "For My sake."  It is that which makes the iron saint.

Has that break come?  All the rest is pious fraud.  The one point to decide is: Will I give up, will I surrender to Jesus Christ, and make no conditions whatever as to how the break comes?  I must be broken from my self-realization, and immediately that point is reached, the reality of the supernatural identification takes place at once, and the witness of the Spirit of God is unmistakable.

It is not just a question of giving up sin, but of giving up my natural independence and self-assertiveness, and this is where the battle has to be fought.  It is the things that are right and noble and good from the natural standpoint that keep us back from God's best.  To discern that natural virtues antagonize surrender to God is to bring our soul into the center of its greatest battle.  Very few of us debate with the sordid and evil and wrong, but we do debate with the good.  It is the good that hates the best, and the higher up you get in the scale of natural virtues, the more intense is the opposition to Jesus Christ.  "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh" (Gal. 5:24).  It is going to cost the natural in you everything, not something.  Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself," and a person has to realize who Jesus Christ is before he will do it.  Beware of refusing to go to the funeral of your own independence.

from Oswald Chambers

No one is ever united with Jesus Christ until he is willing to relinquish not sin only, but his whole way of looking at things.  To be born from above of the Spirit of God means that we must let go before we lay hold, and in the first stages it is the relinquishing of all pretense.  What our Lord wants us to present to him is not goodness, nor honesty, nor endeavor, but real, solid sin; that is all he can take from us.  And what does he give in exchange for our sin?  Real, solid righteousness.  But we must relinquish all pretense of being anything, all claim of being worthy of God's consideration.

Then the Spirit of God will show us what further there is to relinquish.  There will have to be relinquishing of my claim to my right to myself in every phase.  Am I willing to relinquish my hold on all I possess, my hold on my affections, and on everything, and to be identified with the death of Jesus Christ?

There is always a sharp, painful disillusionment to go through before we do relinquish.  When one really sees himself as the Lord sees him, it is not the abominable sins of the flesh that shock him, but the awful nature of the pride of his own heart against Jesus Christ.  When he sees himself in the light of the Lord, the shame and the horror and the desperate conviction come home.  If you are up against the question of relinquishing, go through the crisis, relinquish all, and God will make you fit for all He requires of you.

The imperative need spiritually is to sign the death warrant of the disposition of sin, to turn all emotional impressions and intellectual beliefs into a moral verdict against the disposition of sin, viz, my claim to my right to myself.  Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ"; he does not say, "I have been determined to imitate Jesus Christ" or, "I will endeavor to follow Him" but, "I have been identified with Him in His death."  When I come to such a moral decision and act upon it, then all that Christ wrought for me on the Cross is wrought in me.  The free committal of myself to God gives the Holy Spirit the chance to impart to me the holiness of Jesus Christ.

from Oswald Chambers

In mirrors I see myself.  But in mirrors made of glass and silver I never see the whole of myself.  I see the me I want to see, and I ignore the rest.

Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me.  They reveal an ugliness I'd rather deny.  Yow!  Avoid these mirrors of veracity!

My wife is such a mirror.  When I have sinned against her, my sin appears in the suffering of her face.  Her tears reflect with terrible accuracy my selfishness.  My self!  But I hate the sight, and the same selfishness I see now makes me look away.

"Stop crying!" I command, as though the mirror were at fault.  Or else I just leave the room.  Walk away.

Oh, what a coward I am, and what a fool!  Only when I have the courage fully to look, clearly to know myself – even the evil of myself – will I admit my need for healing.  But if I look away from her whom I have hurt, I have also turned away from her who might forgive me.  I reject the very source of my healing.

My denial of my sin protects, preserves, perpetuates that sin!  Ugliness in me, while I live in illusions, can only grow the uglier.

Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me.  But this is the hurt of purging and precious renewal – and these are the mirrors of dangerous grace.

The passion of Christ, his suffering and his death, is such a mirror.  Are the tears of my dear wife hard to look at?  Well, the pain in the face of Jesus is harder.  It is my self in extremest truth.  My sinful self.  The death he died reflects a selfishness so extreme that by it I was divorced from God and life and light completely: I raised my self higher than God!  But because the Lord God is the only true God, my pride did no more, in the end, than to condemn this false god of my self to death.  For God will be God, and all the false gods will fall before him.

So that's what I see reflected in the mirror of Christ's crucifixion: my death.  My rightful punishment.  My sin and its just consequence.  Me.  And precisely because it is so accurate, the sight is nearly intolerable.

Nevertheless I will not avoid this mirror!  No, I will carefully rehearse, again this year, the passion of my Jesus – with courage, with clarity and faith; for this is the mirror of dangerous grace, purging more purely than any other.

For this one is not made of glass and silver, nor of fallen flesh only.  This mirror is made of righteous flesh and of divinity, both – and this one loves me absolutely.  My wife did not choose to take my sin and so to reflect my truth to me.  She was driven, poor woman.  But Jesus did choose – not only to take the sin within himself, not only to reflect the squalid truth of my personal need, but also to reveal the tremendous truth of his grace and forgiveness.  He took that sin away.

This mirror is not passive only, showing what is; it is active, creating new things to be.  It shows me a new me behind the shadow of a sinner.  For when I gaze at his crucifixion, I see my death indeed – but my death done!  His death is the death of the selfish one, whom I called ugly and hated to look upon.

And resurrection is another me.

from Walter Wangerin

The church of today lives in an ethically debilitating climate.  Where did we go wrong?  Was it the urbane self-centeredness of Peale's Power of Positive Thinking and its therapeutic successors?  Was it the liberal, civic-club mentality of the heirs to the Social Gospel?  Now we waver between evangelical TV triumphalism with its Madison Avenue values or live-and-let-live pluralism which urges open-mindedness as the supreme virtue.  And so a recent series of radio sermons on "The Protestant Hour" urged us to "Be Good to Yourself."  This was followed by an even more innocuous series on "Christianity as Conflict Management."  Whatever the gospel means, we tell ourselves, it could not mean death.  Love, divine or human, could never exact something so costly.  After all, our culture is at least vestigially Christian and isn't that enough?

The first week of Lent begins with old John the Baptist.  His sermons could not be entitled, "Be Good to Yourself."  This prophetic "voice crying in the wilderness" appears "preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (Mark 1:4).  He is not the Christ.  John is the one who gets us ready.  How does one prepare for this new age?  Repent, change your ways, and get washed.

Like the prophets of old, John's word strikes abrasively against the easy certainties of the religious Establishment.  He will let us take no comfort in our rites, tradition, or ancestry.  Everybody must submit to be made over.  Everybody must descend into the waters, especially the religiously secure and the morally sophisticated.  God is able to raise up children even from stones if the Chosen fail to turn and repent.

How shocked was the church to see its Lord appear on the banks of the Jordan asking John to wash him too (Matt. 3:14-15).  How can it be that the Holy One of God should be rubbing shoulders with naked sinners on their way into the waters?  The church struggled with this truth.  Why must our Lord be in this repenting bath?

When Jesus was baptized, his baptism was not only the inauguration of his mission, but also a revelation of the shockingly unexpected nature of his mission.  His baptism becomes a vignette of his own ministry.  Why so shocking?  On two occasions, Jesus uses "baptism" to refer to his own impending death.  He asks his halfhearted disciples, "Can you drink the cup that I must drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I must be baptized?" (Mark 10:38).

As he submits to John's bath of repentance, Jesus shows the radical way he will confront the sin that enslaves humanity.  Jesus' "baptism," begun in the Jordan and completed on Golgotha, is repentance, self-denial, metanoia to the fullest.  John presents his baptism as a washing from sin, a turning from self to God.  Jesus seeks even more radical metanoia.

His message is not the simple one of the Baptist, "Be clean."  Jesus' word is more painful – "Be killed."  The washing of this prophetic baptism is not cheap.  "You also must consider yourselves dead," Paul tells the Romans (Rom. 6:11).  In baptism, the "old Adam" is drowned.  "For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3).

To be baptized "into Christ" and "in the name of Christ" means to be incorporated into the way of life which characterized his life, the life of the empty one, the servant, the humble one, the obedient one, obedient even unto death (Phil. 2:6-11).

That day at the Jordan, knee deep in cold water, with old John drenching him, the Anointed One began his journey down the via crucis.  His baptism intimated where he would finally end.  His whole life was caught up in this single sign.  Our baptism does the same.

The chief biblical analogy for baptism is not the water that washes but the flood that drowns.  Discipleship is more than turning over a new leaf.  It is more fitful and disorderly than gradual moral formation.  Nothing less than daily, often painful, lifelong death will do.  So Paul seems to know not whether to call what happened to him on the Damascus Road "birth" or "death" – it felt like both at the same time.

In all this I hear the simple assertion that we must submit to change if we would be formed into this cruciform faith.  We may come singing "Just as I Am," but we will not stay by being our same old selves.  The needs of the world are too great, the suffering and pain too extensive, the lures of the world too seductive for us to begin to change the world unless we are changed, unless conversion of life and morals becomes our pattern.  The status quo is too alluring.  It is the air we breathe, the food we eat, the six-thirty news, our institutions, theologies, and politics.  The only way we shall break its hold on us is to be transferred to another dominion, to be cut loose from our old certainties, to be thrust under the flood and then pulled forth fresh and newborn.  Baptism takes us there.

On the bank of some dark river, as we are thrust backward, onlookers will remark, "They could kill somebody like that."  To which old John might say, "Good, you're finally catching on."

from William Willimon