The Martyr’s Mirror: Living the Cross: Stephen

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They will make you outcasts from the synagogue, but an hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God. – John 16:2

Let’s rewind now to the first martyr. Acts 6-7 records the account of Stephen. Now the Book of the Acts of the Apostles was written by Luke, the doctor companion of Paul and also the writer of the Gospel that bears his name. He was a trained researcher, and so he knew how to write a judicious historical account (which I find amazing that so many secular scholars ignore when they call into question the Gospel’s history). This witness is trustworthy.

Anyways, when we reads Stephen’s story in Acts, we see that Stephen’s story parallels Jesus’ crucifixion story in the Gospel of Luke. Those that would insist that the cross is not a path we must take, that it is only something God did for us and not something we do as well, have to contend with the fact that Luke intended to show Stephen living out the cross of Christ. Luke intends for us to take up that cross, imitating Christ.

Stephen was chosen by the 12 disciples along with 6 others to be administrators for the growing movement of the Way, (that is one of the names Christianity was called originally). Stephen was known to be a person of outstanding character: “full of faith and spirit,” Luke tells us.

Stephen was known to even perform miraculous signs, gifts of the Spirit working in him just as it did with Jesus. And just like Jesus, when the Pharisees took notice they were offended. They were angry. They felt their power slipping away by a bunch of rag-tag followers of the so-called messiah, Jesus, whom they arranged his execution by deceptive means. But now, his followers were claiming that he rose from the grave. Blasphemous non-sense it was to their darkened minds. Dangerous blasphemous non-sense.

So they arrested Stephen for blasphemy, just like what they did to Jesus. Stephen was brought before the court of the religious teachers, the ones who had Jesus murdered. Stephen, it says, had the Holy Spirit move within him, and he gave a long speech defending how Jesus fulfills everything in the Old Testament.

As he concluded, Stephen turned to call the religious teachers on their corruption: “Do you even realize that you killed the messiah your religious books prophesy about? You obsess about the law, but don’t even realize you killed the one that came as the law-giver! You have the law, but you are so blind you don’t even know it when you are disobeying it completely.”

As one can expect, a counsel of the most rich, powerful personalities of religion did not take that well. Self-righteous religious types have a hard time being told they are the ones who are actually the ones doing the sinning.

So, the counsel dragged Stephen into the streets, growling in rage. They cornered him and picked up stones. The text says, that Stephen looked up and remarked that he saw the heaven’s open to greet him (like a Jesus’ baptism). He could see Jesus, standing with the Father, and he knew he was going home.

Before they threw the stones, Stephen prayed two things, “Lord, receive me spirit,” echoing Jesus’ words, “In your hands I commend my spirit.” And he prayed, “Father, do not hold their sin against them,” again, restating Jesus’ own words, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” As Jesus did, so did he.

If someone came against you to kill you, would your first thought be, “Father, forgive them for what they are doing?”

Luke wrote this narrative showing that the cross is something we are to take up. The cross is the ultimate act of obedience to Jesus’ way. It is the ultimate consequence when we live it truthfully to a world that does not want to hear truth. It is also a way that refuses to hold anger and hate.

Stephen’s act of witness was more than a tragedy. It effected change in his persecutors. We know that this love is persuasive in the face of terrible hate: Paul, originally called Saul, was one of the people throwing the stones. As he tells us, he was a zealous Pharisees, hell-bent on eradicating the Jesus heresy. Paul’s heart was hard and violent and bigoted. Some people say that you cannot reason with people like that. However, God is shows that the most awesome power in the world to undo evil is not force, not violence, not even miracles, but sacrificial love in the name of Jesus. Jesus used Stephen’s testimony and then encountered Paul, who soon after encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus; “Paul, why are yo persecuting me?”

Tertullian once said that “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” The seed of Stephen’s martyrdom flowered with Christ the ever-persisten gardener, transforming Paul.

We live in a world that treats Christians with increasing animosity. Do Christians need to ban together to impose our morals in public legislature? Do we need guns and bombs to suppress Islamic persecution of Christians?

Or do we need to commit ourselves to the way of the cross: Cannot the power of Christ turn hearts?  Just as it was withs the man that murdered Stephen, making him the greatest apostle of the Christian faith, so it may be today.

When

Father, thank you for the testimony of Stephen, how his life and death point back to our Lord. May we always be ready to give account of the hope within us as he was, always ready to speak truth, even when unpopular. Also, fill our hearts with peace in the face of hate. You forgave us, so may we forgive those who wrong us. We commend to you our spirits today. Always uphold us in your hands as you did Stephen.

Amen.

The Martyrs Mirror: Living the Cross (Intro)

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In the following meditations, we will go through what our church did for Good Friday this year. In past years, we have celebrated Good Friday with the lit candles being progressively extinguished, symbolizing the fading of Christ’ life on the cross, down to when he breathed his last, “into your hands I commend me spirit.”

This year I have been reading and rereading the Gospel of John. For John the cross is not the darkness of the world extinguishing Jesus.

In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. – John 1:4-5

This was the moment when the darkness could not overwhelm the light.

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you…” – John 17:1

This was the moment the Messiah was enthroned as king in all his glory, the glory of perfect love.

So, this year we are going to light candles to show that it was on this night that darkness did not win: Jesus shown in the darkness.

There is more than one way to understand what Jesus did on the cross. In the Bible the cross is understood as Jesus taking the punishment of sin; Jesus paying a ransom to the dark powers, buying us back; Jesus offering himself as a priestly sacrifice; as well as, Jesus conquering the powers of death.

Often when we do that, we see the cross as something God does for us that we cannot live out.

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. – Mark 8:34

Jesus did something for us at the cross that was unique, universal, unrepeatable, an outpouring of his divinity – yes. But he did something as a human, showing us something we must take up. He showed us a way of obedience. He showed us the way of reconciliation and forgiveness with our enemies. He showed us in a very real way what happens when we live fully committed to his will. We take up our cross.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven… You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.  In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. – Matt. 5: 10, 14-16

Sometimes we think that the cross was something Jesus did so that we could never experience something like that. Phew! But that is not what Jesus calls us to.

Those who are called to the light will be despised by those who cannot let go of their darkness.

Those who speak truth will be resented by those who believe their own lies.

Those who seek love will be mocked by those that just want to hate.

Those who seek peace will be attacked by those who love violence.

Those who follow Jesus will be persecuted by those who follow the ways of the world.

It will happen, and when it does, the Scriptures remind us in those moments of confusion – why does the world hate a message of love and peace? – that if we have Christ in our hearts, the world will treat us like they did Jesus.

And the opposite is true: If the world treats us like they did Jesus, those who are persecuted can be assured that Christ is dwelling in their hearts. We are not forgotten by God, we are actually called blessed.

As we trust the cross, we will live out the cross. As we live it out, we will draw near to Christ and Christ to us in profound, even mystical ways. This is what the martyrs have to teach us.

We all do that in our own way, as we are called by God, but some people in our history were called to do so in the most similar manner: they were tested with either denying Jesus or dying for him, and they chose death. They chose their crosses in the face of torture and execution.

Tonight we are going to hear some of those stories. We are going to hear the story of the cross, retraced by the blood of the martyrs.

Let’s open with prayer.

Father, we thank you for the work of the cross that forgave our sins. We come here tonight to remember the sacrifice of your son Jesus Christ. May we be inspired by the stories of your martyrs. May we be reminded in a new way of the cost of salvation you paid to liberate us. If we offer our very lives, our everything to you, we gain infinitely more: the opportunity to follow you, to know the sacrifice of the cross with our bodies, to draw close to you in the way you drew close to us. Guide our meditations and praises to you now, we pray. Amen.

Seven Final Words: Into Your Hands

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“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” Luke 23:46

Jesus at the cross began by praying; here he also ends by praying.

These are often words spoken on people’s deathbeds and at funerals. They are profoundly comforting words. They comfort because they remind us of the sobering but reassuring truth. One day, whether unexpectedly or at the end of a long life, we will die. Our physical lives will end. All that we are, had, and hold on to will cease.

This is sobering because we realize the truth that we cannot save ourselves. We cannot preserve ourselves. We cannot control the very foundation of our lives. Millionaires have died in car accidents and cancer just like the rest of us.

We cannot take this world with us. Celebrities pass away and their fame eventually with them. You can be buried with your money, if that is your will, but that is not you anymore in that casket anymore than that money is useful. What we are and have, ultimately and finally, is not up to us. It is up to whatever or more importantly whoever lies thereafter.

This is why it is reassuring, even liberating. It reminds us that at the end of the day, whoever we are, it is all in God’s hands.

Here, God in Jesus Christ is modeling for us the very essence of faithfulness: trusting God in the last moment of life, at uncertain threshold of eternity.

One way or another our lives are in God’s hands, the question is what will God do with us?

As Jesus said these words, we was dying on a Roman execution cross for the crime of blasphemy, while sinless, he made himself a sacrifice for sin. He gave himself up for us. I would emphasize that he did so, completely. We do not have to fear death because Jesus faced that fear for us.

He had the promise that God is in him and the Father will resurrect him, however Jesus was fully divine and fully human: prone to doubt, prone to uncertainty, prone to anxiety and fear. You can imagine the question is his human, all too human, head: Will my Father be faithful? Will he come through? We have already meditating on his cry feeling forsaken.

So, the comfort of these words must also be kept side by side with the pain of the cross, the willingness of the cross. It is a willingness that seems to admit that Jesus was willing to not only die trusting the Father but also embrace the possibility of the ice-cold silence and darkness of death and hell.

Understanding this fear perhaps explains why he pleaded that this cup may pass, sweating out drops of blood. “But not my will but yours be done,” he prayed. And so again, into your hands, I commend my spirit, as into your hands, all our spirits. It is always in God’s hands, not ours.

Just as he says this, Jesus breathes his last. Jesus dies. The Son of God died. God was found in death. God bound himself to the fate of death. God of infinite joy and life came into the finite space of wretched mortality.

When we think we are sinful and unclean, when we suspect that in our final breath we will disappear in judgment before an exacting God of judgment, we must remember that God died our death penalty. God entered our mortality. God became a rotten corpse, the very object of the consequences of sin, the very object of uncleanliness according to the law. The incarnation was complete, completed in the act of perfect atonement.

No piece of artwork shows this better than Holbein’s the Body of Dead Christ in the Tomb from 1520. Holbein depicts the remnants of the crucifixion on Jesus’ boy: the mangled, pieced, blacked hands, the stretched tortured body, the limp and lifeless face.

At the cross that mission was accomplished. Sin, death, corruption was defeated, but it was through Christ’ willingness to die.

Luke’s gospel reads, “Having said that, he breathed his last. When the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, ‘Certainly this man was innocent.’ And when all the crowds who had gathered there or this spectacle had saw what had happened, the returned home and lamented.”

Matthew records that at that very moment, the curtain of the temple, the divide between God and man, was torn asunder.

If God is in Jesus Christ, he will not leave Christ to rot in the grave. And the Father didn’t. He rose to new life on the third day. God is love and hope and healing. As we are in Christ, we have the hope that, as everything is in God’s hands, one way or another, we can rest assured they are in good hands, the hands that are mighty to save us.

Final prayer:

Father, we pray recognizing the cost of the cross. We pray trying to understand its pain and shame. We will never understand its full weight, but give us enough understanding to receive it into our hearts. We pray that we would not just hear about the work Christ did, but receive it. We pray would not just look upon the cross, but take it up ourselves. That is taking up the life the cross demands of us, the love it embodies, the truth is sacrificed for. Do not let us leave this place without our heart changed with a new commitment to living out the way of our Lord Christ. Thank-you for your justice, mercy, and love. Thank-you that your cross comes with the promise of the resurrection. Amen.

Seven Final Words: Finished

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“It is finished” John 19:30

Imagine watching a hockey game, a pivotal match in the pay-offs, where the refs oddly announce before the game that this game would be judged a bit differently than others, but did not say how.

You continue to watch the game. One team, more physical and underhanded, begin bashing the other team. No penalties are being called. This must be what the refs alluded to. In the process, they take a commanding lead and the other team gets pounded.

The other team refuses to sink to the others’ level, even after players get taken off the ice with injuries. “Why aren’t they fighting back?” you wonder. “This is getting pathetic. They should just call the game quits at this point.”

Finally, it comes down to the last few seconds. Time is up and the buzzer sounds. It is finished. The less physical team has lost by quite a number of points. They are finished.

But then, the refs come to the center of the ice, and announce that they other team, the team with fewer goals, actually won. How? You see, the new criteria for which team would win was which team harmed the other team the least.

The more violent team did not take the refs instructions seriously. Now that the game is finished, they are finished too.

When Jesus says, “It is finished.” It is like saying that the game clock has run out. The game is over. However, it does not mean “We’re finished; I am done for; it’s over.” It is that dark moment at the cross that Jesus appears defeated, broken and dying, that actually his mission is accomplished. He is actually victorious.

Jesus is a servant king and he rules a kingdom where those who are great are the ones who make themselves least. He taught things like blessed are the spiritually poor not the spiritually rich, those mourning and broken not the tranquil happy-go-lucky types, the meek not the assertive, the thirsty not the satisfied, the merciful not the exacting, the pure not the political, the peacemakers not the warlords, the persecuted prophets not the powerful potentates. Jesus’ rules for winning flip the game of reality upside down, declaring the losers to be the true winners. And it is at this moment that Jesus demonstrates that his kingdom has come: it has come in him by his faithfulness even onto death.

Saying, “it is finished,” is a victory statement: the kingdoms of evil and darkness have not won. The time is up for them not Jesus. They have been beaten, but not with more evil but with goodness; not with violence but with peace; not with compromise but with integrity; not with wrath but with mercy; not with comfort but with sacrifice.

Within the context of the Gospel of John, this statement – “It is accomplished” – co-insides with Jesus’ prayer of exaltation and glory. Consider John 17: 1-5:

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.

Crucifixion was the most brutal and disgusting way to die in the ancient world, but Jesus has turned it into a way of healing.

No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:13-17)

Jesus tells Nicodemus that he will be “lifted up” in the same way the bronze snake was by Moses in order to heal the people and, simultaneously, he will ascend to heaven. Jesus tells Nicodemus this, and Nicodemus, like many others, really does not get it.

Jesus states later that, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he” (John 8:28).  The cross is the fulfillment of Daniel 7: the Son of Man is on his thrown, the nations are his. The end of the age happened at this cry as the way of the kingdom is perfectly displayed in Christ’s obedience. It is at the cross that Jesus will be fully realized to be who he says he is, like a cosmic buzzer ringing out, “Ding, ding, ding ding!” Jesus here is announced to be the Son of Man and Son of God, the true King, the Messiah, the world’s Savior.

For years, as I read these passages (specifically John 17), I thought the cross got in the way of Jesus’ glorification or that the glorification was actually after the cross in the resurrection. Not so. Jesus’ hour has indeed come, not despite the cross, but through it.

The cross is kingdom come. The cross is the victory of God. The cross is eschaton. The cross is life, paradise, salvation, heaven.

The cross is where Jesus is truly king,  in glory and majesty –  not in a glory and majesty we expect, but in the kind that displays what kind of king God is: a king of suffering love. The Father has given his glory to Christ (cf. John 17), not despite the cross but through it. THe only thing that is truly defeated that day was the ways of this corrupt world. All who look at the cross know that that the disciples of Christ, those who take up their crosses to follow him, will reign with him.

Seven Last Words: Thirst

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“I thirst” (John 19:28)

In the beginning as Genesis two tells us, there was a stream that bubbled up and watered the earth. From the clay of this stream the first man was molded, from its water Eden was irrigated, and from there, the text says, out of the garden the stream became four great rivers. Here is the archetypal river of life, fountain of salvation.

The human body is about 50-80% water, and doctors recommend that a person drink about 2 litres of water a day to be healthy. It is no stretch of the imagination that we can say that water is life.

Not surprisingly, there is a persistent image of water in Scripture as a source of cleansing, purifying, and revitalizing.

John, a master story-teller, makes use of the theme of water and thirst throughout his Gospel. Disciples are baptized in water. Those entering the kingdom of heaven are born of “water and spirit” (Jn. 3:5). Jesus poured out water to wash the disciples feet, the quintessential act of servanthood.

One instance is particularly applicable. Near the beginning, a woman comes to the well in Samaria, who has been married five times and is living with a man not her husband. Jesus meets her there, and asks her for a drink. She protests, saying the well is deep. Jesus uses this to tell her that there is water that will make her thirsty again, and than there is living water form which she will never be thirsty again. While naïve and uninitiated, she tells Jesus that whatever this is, she wants this water.

She does not understand what this water is, but she is thirsty for it. She is thirsty for water that is more than water. She is thirsty for compassion, for love, for forgiveness, for truth.

Of course, this water is eternal life, and this water is found in Jesus.

The Samaritan woman is, as we all are, thirsty for salvation.

Psalm 42:1: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.”

Yet, here on the cross, Jesus, the God-man, the one who is life, who is living water, is now thirsty. In this beautiful use of irony, water does not mean water, and thirst does not merely mean thirst: Thirst is the thirst of the soul. Jesus becomes thirsty.

As Jesus cried out in thirst, they gave him sour wine. The offering was not a malicious gesture as sour wine was considered better for quenching thirst, often used by soldiers like modern-day Gatorade. But Jesus’ thirst here is more than just thirst.

Psalm 63:1: “God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.”

The Scriptures say, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.” (2 Cor. 5:21). Christ, the son of God, the son of man, died representing all humanity before God and representing God to all sinners. He died in our place. He took on our pain. He took on our thirst.

His parched throat mirrors the desert wasteland of our souls.

In John’s gospel, as he died, after crying out “I am thirsty,” a soldier pieced Jesus’ side and it says water flowed out. Here we see another allusion to Psalm 22: “I am poured out like water.” Water flowed out of the one whom was thirsty. Through Jesus’ death, water flows. Through Jesus taking our place, God dying as a sinner, our souls will one day drink of the river of life.

So the vision in Revelation 22:1-3 says,

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse…

In this passage thirst, water, and the overcoming of the curse are intimately connected. We are all thirsty. We thirst for Jesus. Jesus is that water that restores us to vitality perfectly. We know this because Christ bore our curse. Jesus is the only thing that refreshes our parched, dry souls.

Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are those that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Jesus made this promise, and here on the cross, he cries out thirsting for justice himself, dying from the oppression of a corrupt religious and political system. Yet his thirst was not for vengeance, but for the healing of sick, sinful souls. So Revelation depicts a day here water flows from the New Jerusalem “for the healing of the nations.”

Jesus is righteousness. Jesus is truth. Jesus is forgiveness. Jesus is living water.

And because of the cross, because Jesus chose to be at one with the thirsty, to thirst in our place, we are free to drink of the water of life; We are free to drink of the resurrection reconciliation.

So Revelation 22:17 says, “The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.”

Father,

We realize that we thirst for you.

We may think that we thirst for other things – money, safety, popularity, health – but it is you that we ultimately thirst for.

Thank you for becoming thirsty, taking on our thirst.

May we drink of the water of the river of life that flows from Christ who died in our place.

May the day come quickly that we see all nations gathered to be healed by the water of the river of life.

Let all who are thirsty come to you, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

Seven Last Words: Forsaken

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“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)

In his book, Night, Elie Weisel gives his bitter account of the Holocaust, an event so horrifically evil it unsettled the very core of his Jewish faith. He was only a boy when he saw  the execution of an innocent man, starved, emaciated, beaten, broken – broken of his very humanity. He was robbed of his dignity by people devoid of their own humanity, the Nazis.

This man was hanged in front of all the other prisoners: the poor man was made into a spectacle of the Nazi’s brutality as the audience was made to watch, feeling the full measure of their own powerlessness. Weisel, a boy, was made to watch.

As this happened, someone called out, “Where is God?” That man had had enough, the injustice caused him to cry out at the risk of his own execution. “Where is God?!” As if to say: How can he not be here? How could he not intervene in a moment like this? The crowd could give no answer as he indicted God in a crime of cosmic proportions.

“Where is God?” the voice rang out again, again and again.

Elie Weisel, a young man at the time, felt in his heart the only possible explanation: Where is God? God is dead. He died there in those gallows.

Weisel saw this admission as the very moment his faith collapsed into a bitter semi-atheism. His hope in God was shaken.

But as Weisel reports, he did not lose faith, for while he felt hurt by God, the prospect that there was no God at all rendered the events of the Holocaust even more tragic: no God to denounce the evil as fundamentally wrong, no God to command compassion rather than indifference, no God to offer the promise of restoration.

Weisel’s shaken faith, I think, is an honest faith. Faith calls for nothing less than honesty about ourselves and our world, and that honestly about our world calls for nothing less than the honesty of being deeply upset over the tragic injustices of this life.

But to have that honesty in faith means addressing that frustration and lament before God as Jesus did: “My God, my God why have you forsaken us?”

This phrase comes from Psalm 22, a psalm written by David, who was a righteous man that was attacked by his king, his friends, and later, even his own family. He spent much of his life on the run, hunted like an animal.

One way to understand the cross – perhaps the most basic way – is to understand that Christ died, “according to the Scriptures” (cf. 1 Cor. 15:3-4). Jesus embodies the story of Scripture. He is the word of God.

He is the suffering servant of Isaiah 53: “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” He is the “stone that was rejected that is now the corner stone” (Psalm 118:22 cf. 1 Peter 2:7). He is the perfect Passover lamb, slain as a sin offering for us, etc.

Jesus fulfills this scripture as the rest of the psalm shows:

Dogs surround me,

    a pack of villains encircles me;

    they pierce my hands and my feet.

All my bones are on display;

    people stare and gloat over me.

They divide my clothes among them

         and cast lots for my garment. (vv. 16-18)

In claiming these words as his own, he is not merely fulfilling the Scriptures. He is showing God’s solidarity, his oneness, with all the forgotten of this world. Jesus in crying out in forsakenness, embodying the cry of the oppressed, the abused, the victimized, the neglected, the humiliated – all who feel that God was not there when they needed him. Listen to the rest of the Psalm:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

    Why are you so far from saving me,

    so far from my cries of anguish?

My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,

    by night, but I find no rest (vv. 1-2)

But I am a worm and not a man,

    scorned by everyone, despised by the people.

All who see me mock me;

    they hurl insults, shaking their heads.

“He trusts in the Lord,” they say,

    “let the Lord rescue him. (vv. 6-8)

I am poured out like water,

    and all my bones are out of joint.

My heart has turned to wax;

    it has melted within me. (v. 14)

This is the lament song of a soul in despair. This is also the words of God in Christ.

In Christ, God knows what it is like to be abandoned, betrayed, tortured, humiliated, blamed, and executed.

Jesus, in his trial and crucifixion, was the subject of personal betrayal: his best friends and students ran, denied him, and even received money to betray him.

Jesus, in his trial and crucifixion, was the victim of religious corruption and abuse. He was accused of blasphemy for his message of forgiveness: that God is with us, sinners. He was tried falsely by corrupt priests who didn’t want their sins exposed or their power taken away. As John 8 tells us, Caiaphas, the high priest, ironically saw Jesus as his sacrifice to save their religion.

Jesus, in his trial and crucifixion, was the target of political oppression. He was brought before the magistrate, Pilate, who ultimately cared only for order at any cost. So, he gave Jesus over to his psychotic soldiers for torture, humiliation, and finally execution by the slow death of the cross.

The cross is a rare kind of anguish. It is the slow death by bleeding out from the torture and nails. Hanging on the nails meant one’s diaphragm would be stressed, causing the person to gasp for air. The subject would hang there starving to death, slowing hallucinating in a delirium of despair as people stand there and mock. Nailed there, few pictures of the atonement render it accurately: few picture the victims unclothed and naked, exposed to desert sun that would blister exposed skin. (Ironically, no crucifix renders Jesus naked – an accurate depiction of the cross is still too scandalous, even Christians!) And the nakedness of exposure was more than physical: hanging there naked, the victim was exposed to the scoffers, jeering, removing whatever dignity remained. Jesus had the added pain and humiliation of a thorn crown pressing into his head and a sign above, mocking his claim to the throne of David.

How could God let this happen to Jesus? How could he have forsaken him? Where is God?

The answer is right there. God was right there. God was in the man who was godforsaken. God revealed that he is with those who feel forsaken by God.

Jesus, Immanuel, “God is with us,” is here as God bound to our fate, our death, our despair, our pain, our sense of the absence of God. He loves us so much he stands with us in our darkest moments.

This does not make sense by our worldly logic, but this is the logic of God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it well when he said, “Only a suffering God can save us.” Only love that is willing to suffer with a victim, feeling their pain, willing to take their pain as his own, can disarm the anguish of suffering.

Jesus cried out, “My God why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus deserved justice’s vindication, but he gave it up to live in solidarity with those whom justice has forgotten.

Jesus deserved the throne room of heaven, but chose a crown of thorns.

Jesus deserved to inhabit heaven, but instead he chose to harrow hell.

So, we return to our Holocaust anecdote: Where was God as an innocent man died in the gallows of the Holocaust?

God was with that dying man. He was in that dying man. He was dying for that dying man. God is that dying man, “slain before the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).

God did die that day, but not in the sense that would lead us to atheism.

God did die that day, because he is love; he is suffering love; he is a God that refuses be far away from those who feel forsaken.

God refused to stand far off as his beloved children suffered. It is that same refusal of a God that chooses to suffer with us that refuses to leave suffering forever forsaken in our broken world. If God suffers with us, we know that God did not cause our suffering. If God suffers with us, we also know that he would not will this suffering to be without end. A God of love is a God of hope for us.

We know this because three days after the cross, Christ rose from the grave. Suffering will stop because the cross leads to resurrection.

So the Psalmist affirms in his suffering that one day…

The poor [i.e. the oppressed, the abused, the abandoned] will eat and be satisfied;

    those who seek the Lord will praise him—

    may your hearts live forever!

All the ends of the earth

    will remember and turn to the Lord,

and all the families of the nations

    will bow down before him,

for dominion belongs to the Lord

    and he rules over the nations. (vv. 26-28)

There will be a day when suffering stops, when tears are wiped away, when hunger is satisfied, when wounds are healed, when pain turns to praise, when repentance and reconciliation reigns.

There will be a day of perfect justice, perfect mercy, and perfect peace.

That day is coming because the God who died on the cross, rose from the grave. Death could not change the impassible character of a God who is boundless life.

The cry of the cross was answered with the triumphant joy of resurrection. Let’s pray…

Father,

We ask with Jesus sometimes, “Why have you forsaken us? Why all the injustice? Why all the destruction? Where are you?”

God, remind our broken souls that you were with us in the times that seems like you were absent. Help us to look to Jesus and trust that you are not far off. You are with us. You are for us. You bear our pain.

You did not abandon us as you did not abandon Christ. Soften our hearts to let go of that pain and anguish, knowing that you have already taken on that pain in the cross.

Lord, allow the wounds of our past to heal in the same way the cries of Golgotha were answered with the resurrection.

Allow the cross and resurrection to inspire us. Give us the grace to live out what your promises demands. Convict us of the courage to confront the injustice of life with Jesus’ innocence. Convict us of the empathy to confront the suffering of this world with Jesus’ solidarity. We pledge to act in trust, compassion, and hope, knowing that you will restore all things.

Amen.

Seven Last Words: Mother Mary, Brother John

 

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“Woman, behold your son” … “Behold, your mother!”  (John 19:26)

While it is easy to see this passage of Christ looking to his mother, Mary, and instructing her to embrace John, the beloved disciple, and John vice versa, as a simply provision undertaken by our Lord to ensure his mother is cared for, these passages offers us glimpses of something deeper. Let’s look at both John and Mary here.

Why is Mary told to refer to John as a “son” and John to refer to Mary as his “mother”? The provisions of care do not necessitate this, yet Jesus insisted. He could have just said, “John, take care of her.”

Some have seen this as Jesus recommending a relationship between Mary and the disciples.In Christ, there is a new family, a global family, of the redeemed that all began at the cross. Mark 3:35 says, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Here we see the constitution of that family, gathered around the crucified Jesus, listening to his instructions, and so, compelled to treat one another as family.

But it surely meant more than that for John. Mary and John are among the few that actually stayed close to Jesus. They did not flee like the rest of the disciples. John was allowed near the crucifixion site, perhaps because he was so young.  We know this because only boys too young to serve in the military could come near the execution site for fear of uprising to save the crucified.

This helps us understand why John sometimes refers to himself as the “beloved disciple,” who “reclined at Jesus’ side.” Peter would have been much older, the eldest of the disciples, possibly. It is also possible that John was the youngest. He was only a boy, small enough to need hugs from Jesus. He may have seen Jesus has a father figure.

Jesus taught us to call God, “Abba” (Daddy). John may well have called Jesus, “Abba.”

John is standing there, watching his father figure die. So, this was more than provision of care to Mary, it was recognition of mutual support. They would need each other. You can understand Jesus’ words now as commissioning the young John. “It is time to be a man, now John, take care of Mary, treat her like your mother.”

As we see John’s writings through the New Testament, particularly in his epistles, John took up this commission well. He was an apostles of family and love through and through. He constantly refers to his congregation as his “little children,” not unlike what he was when he learned his essential instructions from his master.

We know from church tradition that John’s dying words to his church was, “Little children, love one another!” Love shun through John’s writings at all points, especially in passages like 1 John 4:7-12:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

His church was his family, and love was his ministry because Jesus was his hero.

Can we look to Jesus like John did?

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Now, Mary: Protestants have often forgotten the importance of Mary. We have done this out of understandable reasons: it is out of discomfort with how high Mary is elevated in Catholicism. But as Catholicism raise Mary too high; Protestants are guilty of not raising her high enough.

In church history, veneration of Mary began because of how Mary pointed to a proper understand of Jesus. Jesus died in the flesh (contra some who denied his humanity) because Jesus was born to a human mother: Mary was the guardian of Jesus’ humanity, the theotokos, “God-bearer” in Greek.

But, sadly, Mary was elevated to a kind of co-operator with Christ in some Catholic theology, which Protestants simply feel makes her into an idol. But we should ask is how do we properly adorn Jesus’ mother so that she once again safeguards her son’s high place? We might phrase this better by asking, how does respecting Mary as a mother – us looking to her motherly qualities – how does that bring us deeper into appreciation of Jesus? Or, how does understanding Mary as mother deepen our understanding of Jesus as our brother?

The picture displayed above renders this clearly: eyes too sorrowful to see clearly, but too concerned to look away; hands, clenched praying perhaps both that her son would be faithful to the onerous task she bore him for, but because she bore him, praying pleading with God to relent of the suffering her son is feeling.

To look to Mary as our mother is to look at Jesus’ hanging on the cross, not as an abstract idea, a stale doctrine, a historic account, or an expression of our own sentiments, it is an attempt to see the cross for what it is, and not bypassing it too quickly.

Seeing the cross as our salvation can too readily jump from its tragedy to the benefit we get out of it. We can easily see Christ as suffering on our behalf and we can say, “thanks,” and continue on our merry way. We can selfishly forget the cost of the cross. We can easily look at the cross for what we get out of it, not what God put into it.

When we look to Mary as the mother of Christ, we also look at the cross through the eyes of a mother. Someone’s son died on that cross. Someone’s little boy, her pride and joy, everything she lived for, is being murdered mercilessly, dying that miserable death.

And do you not think that it may have occurred to her that while she knew Jesus was dying for her sins, she would have gladly died in her sons place just to save him from the pain? Don’t you think even that she would have gladly refused her own salvation if it meant saving her little boy’s life?

It is only when we look at the cross through Mary’s eyes do we appreciate the cost of the cross for us. It is the cost of a life more precious than our own.

It is only when we lament the cross through Mary’s tears are we ready to say thank-you to a God that gave so much we will never understand.

It is only through the love of Mary for her Son that we ready to love the world as Jesus loved it.

Lord,

May we love as John loved. May we look to you as our daddy, our father figure. So close to us that we can “recline at your side.” Help us to remember that we are beloved disciples, not just disciples. Draw us closer into the family of God. May we treat your sons and daughters as brothers and sisters. Give us opportunities to be big brothers and sisters to others.

May we mourn for you as Mary mourned. And in our mourning, let us remember the provision that Jesus gave at that very moment, the only true provision against the tragedy of this age: You gave us the church, the family of God. Help us to take care of one another. Help us to love one another.

Amen.

Seven Last Words: Paradise

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“Truly, I tell you, today, you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43)

Our world is a world that has closed itself off from the transcendent. We have bought into the discourses of science that tells us the immediately tangible is all there is, everything else is suspected as superstition.

Do not get me wrong, science has earned its place in the world, and many need to listen to its voice more. Science has offered enormous explanatory power for our worldview. In the great feuds between scriptural literalism and science, science will usually win. We have found the sun does not revolve around the earth, that the earth is much older than chronicled, that rain comes from weather systems, illness from poor hygiene, etc.

The world has pushed God out of its purview. God has been viewed as too burdensome a notion to trust.

The events of the primordial church fade into the distance of history. History, itself, seems to crocked a path to see providence. Divine intervention seems like misconstrued co-incidence. Many of the great political advances have been done despite religious influences.

We immerse ourselves in the comforting hum of media noise. Talk of God becomes as rare as genuine conversation itself. Hearing from God becomes as rare as genuine listening itself. An atheism falls over us because we feel the blunt force of divine absence.

Our daily lives, even for many Christians, are often practically atheist. Church becomes an cumbersome ritual. Work is more important than worship. Singing praise to God does not feed a family. Prayer and Scripture reading get sidelined to more relaxing practices: Television, sports, etc. So, we say to ourselves, why bother believe?

However, we deceive ourselves into thinking the modern world was the first to discover doubt, as if doubt was an invention by the same brilliance that discovered flight, electricity, or the theory of relativity. Yet, doubt is not a modern novelty.

The cross was a scary time for Jesus and his followers. The cosmos, let alone their little band of disciples, hung in the balance. The circumstances had become so chancy that most of the disciples deserted Jesus: belief in this man as the messiah was simply too insecure at that moment. Peter initially drew his weapon to defend his lord, but upon realization that violence was not going to resolve the conflict between Christ and the priests, upon seeing his master taken rather than fighting back, unleashing the kingdom of power that he was expecting him to unleash, Peter himself turned to deny Christ, three times in fact. Other disciples deserted him far sooner, unfortunately.

Thus, there Christ hung, condemned, and by all accounts at that very moment, defeated and disproved. Jesus as messiah was no longer a tenable conviction anymore. He did not seem to be bringing in a new kingdom, as prophesied. He did not defeat the Roman occupation, as prophesied. Far from! There he was pathetic, disheveled, beaten into irrevocable submission to the powers he should have pulverized with legions of the faithful, perhaps having even angel armies come to assist. Thus, Pilate, either out of mockery to the Jewish people or out of some deep seated pious guilt over killing a truly innocent man, wrote “King of the Jews” and hung it over Jesus’ head.

If one was to look for a reason to believe in Christ at that moment, one would have looked in vain. The man on the cross was exposed many times over as just a man, flesh and blood, ashes and dust, rejected by his people, betrayed by his closest followers and friends, accused of blasphemy by his own religion’s authorities, tortured and in the midst of his execution by his people’s most hated enemies, the most idolatrous power in existence, hanging there, slowly bleeding out, slowly succumbing to his wounds, to thirst, and to death.

Atheism’s objections pale in comparison to the scandal of Good Friday.

As onlookers mocked and jeered, even a man, a wretched thief, dying the same death as Christ next to him, felt no solidarity with the co-condemned, no compassion for his neighbor in this death, only cynicism and despair. Even the thief on Jesus’ one side mocked him.

At this moment, there seems to be no good reason to trust Jesus. Jesus hung there, discredited.

Would you have believed that Jesus was the messiah then? I know I probably would not have. Sadly, that is because I am a “reasonable” person.

More sadly, is that the only reasonable people in this story are monsters: Judas, who calculates how to profit from Jesus’ arrest; the Pharisees, who have the foresight to plan against possible agitators; the Romans, who brilliantly invented means of rebellion suppression.

And yet, in this moment of darkness and doubt, despair and destruction, one person believed! One person dared to see something more. One person had faith. The other thief, what tradition refers to as the “penitent thief,” dying at Jesus’ side. He believed. He had nothing left to hold back. He could have mocked like the other thief, but he didn’t.

We know next to nothing about this person. The Gospels left him unnamed. Having no hope left in this world, he still says to the other thief, “Do you not fear God? You are under the same punishment.” He admits that his punishment is just, yet Christ’s is not. Christ is innocent and he is not.

At the very end of his life, he is moved with humility and honesty.

But his confession is more radical than that. If one was worried about self-preservation, they would have petitioned far more prestigious powers than a dying messiah.

When no one else believed in Jesus, this man did. And so he simply requests that Jesus would remember him when he comes into his kingdom. He, in the darkness moment of his life, in the darkness moment in history, chose to trust the kingdom is still coming.

This man had perhaps the greatest faith in all history, and yet we do not know his name! But God does. God is not dead because God did not stay dead.

Jesus did promise to remember him. In fact, this man, in his final moments of life, was given the most definitive assurance anyone had before the resurrection: Jesus turned to the man and said, “Today, I truly tell you, you will be with me in paradise.”

Sadly, it is only when we realize that our lives stand on the edge of oblivion that we can feel assured that our lives are in the hands of something more absolute than what this world offers.

Father,

Help us to have even just a fraction of the faith this man had.

We complain about our lot in life, yet we are unwilling to admit our faults.

We so often mock and mistrust your salvation. When we do that, we must acknowledge that our punishment, like his is just.

But we must also cling to the hope of your kingdom of forgiveness.

Remember us Lord Jesus, as you remembered him.

May your kingdom come.

Amen

Seven Last Words: Forgive Them

forgive

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34)

The world is exploding with differences.

In the news, we see the clash of classes, civilizations, races, religions, and sexes. We, as Westerners, are taught to fear the Muslim world, buying into a narrative of a war between the way of liberty and enlightenment versus bigotry and terrorism.

Yet, in on our own soil we see wars of other kinds: white versus black, citizens versus immigrants, straight versus LGTBQ, Christian versus  secularization, Republican versus Democrat, right versus left, so on and so forth.

The church, particularly conservative churches, has been particularly productive at reinforcing these differences. Christians have been taught to fear the scientific establishment because of evolution, to be militant against same-sex marriage as it is perceived as a threat to the lives of our children, against Muslims for terrorist actions against the West, against Democrats/liberals for insisting on secularized human rights, so on and so forth. We are quick to cast blame for our dwindling cultural power.

The binaries are endless, and there is a less than obvious reason why: we tell ourselves we are unique. I am special, therefore I am different. I am special, therefore I take priority over another. In a world that preaches the gospel of individualism, everything becomes the war of differences: us versus them.

I am more important than you. If you don’t agree, you have done me violence. If I don’t act against this, I do violence to my own uniqueness.

In this scheme the world is at war, not always with guns, but with ideologies. This is a great feud over not necessarily land, but identities, places of privilege of any sort, from political power to hold the presidency to merely having the right to have a cake made for your wedding.

There is a reason why we begin contemplating through the cross by beginning with these words. It is because if we don’t come to the cross realizing it is God showing us that he is forgiving them, not remembering sins against them, that he is reconciliation itself, that he is doing everything possible to tangibly show them this, then we get it all wrong.

We often come to the cross with the same us versus them mentality, only God is the “us” and we are the “them”: God is against us, and we are filled with fear at the prospect of an enemy who is more special than us, more powerful than us. If God is primarily wrath, and  we are firstly filled with fear in the thought of him. In some accounts the cross becomes the product of a wrathful God, fixing his wrath in order for God to now love sinners. This does not really help the binary: a holy God cannot stand to be with sinners. God remains this God and we remain sinners.

Of course, if God is infinite liberty, however, God could have just waved his hand and forgave all humanity from Adam to the end of time right there in the garden. There is no necessity in God for him to have to die at the cross in order to forgive us. The very fact that he wanted to go to the cross shows his mind was made up, that his first intention towards sinners was forgiveness and love. His holy power could have been demonstrated by saying, as Jesus did to the paralyzed man, “Your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:9) at the first sin, but he didn’t.  Jesus through the cross wanted to show us forgiveness, not merely tell us we were forgiven.

Here Jesus is suffering the cross because of the hard-heartedness of people. Jesus was God’s representative. Jesus was the embodiment of God, the Son of God. What Jesus says, God says. What you do to Jesus, you do to God. And so by crucifying Jesus, the people are committing the worst act in all history: they are executing the Son of God, God himself, for coming and preaching that God was now with us.

God did not set us the binary “us versus them.” We did.

Such an unthinkable evil demands the most exacting punishment. Or one would think. But here we see God’s representation request something: Christ said, “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” At the most unthinkable evil in the world, we see God’s unimaginable grace. Jesus praying for his oppressors as they murder him.

Of course, we might ask, “them, who?” Who did he mean? I cannot be us, for our own instinct of self-justification causes us to excuses ourselves from something the seems obviously unbecoming of our natural goodness. It must obviously be the disciples that betrayed and abandoned him. Or did he mean the Pharisees that sat there mocking, saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself”? Or the Romans in their innovative yet senseless brutality? Or is it the mindless masses that gave up on him?

These are all good answers, and we would like to think that these are it. We would like to think that we are like Pilate who thought he could wash his hands of the blood he was about to unjustly spill, but to be a son of Adam or a daughter of Eve is to know that we all could have participated and did perpetrate the crime of the cross. All humanity stands condemned with the “them.”

We have the same weak and corruptible hearts that shouted “Crucify! Crucify!” so shortly after proclaiming “Hosanna! Hosanna!”

We have the same mocking voices that question that if he was the messiah, why didn’t he get off that cross?

We have the same cowardliness that caused Peter to deny his Lord three times, where he previously pledged to die for him.

We have same cruel minds in our heads that devised terrible forms of execution like the cross.  The same heart that beats in human chests hammers the nails into Jesus’ hands.

We are them.

In all the wars of differences, in this first and foremost paradigmatic instance, we are the them; we are no different.

We set up the differences and we causes the hurt, or we claim someone else did it and someone else did the crime, who, nevertheless, is just like us. We claim superiority, which in turn leads to violence of other kinds. In the long run, whatever claim to moral superiority we might set up, sooner or later, we will forsake that standard. If we create a binary of us (good) versus them (evil) we will find ourselves sooner or later implicated in our own hypocrisy.

To be human is to be implicated in the great fall into ignorance, exclusion, and violence that characterizes our present existence.

We know this every time we see a poor person on the street, who is there purely because he was born into a place of abuse, where we to stable homes.

We know this every second we look at the TV screen, condemning the actions of terrors by saying, “I hope they blow them all away.”

We know this every time we see a starving family in the third world, and ignore them to go home to warm homes with satellite TV, smart phones, designer clothes, etc.

We know this every time we take more than what we need, say more than what we should, or care less than what we could.

We, especially as Westerners, exist because of a violent oppressive system we and generations before us, created and perpetuate, refusing to dismantle because of the fear of loosing our modern comforts.

We could keep Christ on the cross if it meant keeping our IPhones. We know this because we starve innocent children for our clothes, kill middle-easterners for our oil, oppress and scapegoat minorities to protect our SUV’s.

We are the “them.” Ours is a depravity of omission, negligence, and decadence.

And yet we encounter not just the depravity of our hearts at the moments of the cross, but more importantly, the heart of Jesus, true heart of God, the heart of forgiveness. “Father,” he prayed, “forgive them, they know not what they do.”

Whoever the “them” is, he forgives: an all-knowing God, knows that they did not know. A God capable of infinite wrath, chooses to expend empathy in the moments of human apathy.

It seems obvious that the people did know that they were committing a terrible crime, but the heart of God is one not of exacting judgment, but gracious benefit.

We so often come to church assuming God is our enemy. We assume he is our enemy because we tell ourselves we have done unthinkable evil, wrong choices the we cannot even believe we have done ourselves. We are limited, so we assume God’s grace is limited. And yet when we look at the cross, we see a God with a heart full of understanding and compassion, a God so unthinkably good that while we do the worst, he is always trying to offer us better.

If we have the humility to accept his goodness, he calls us to the freedom to forgive those around us that have done us wrong.

Father,

As we come here, we recognize our continual need for forgiveness.

We recognize we are the “them,” all of us, everywhere, citizens of a world in darkness that showed its vicious hostility to the light.

Yet you prayed for us, when we were still your enemy.

You prayed for the salvation of every person whose heart was in darkness.

And so the Light came into the Darkness and the Darkness could not overcome, Hatred could not overpower Forgiveness.

So, we also confess that we know that you taught us that it is by forgiving they we are forgiven, that we are in the light to bring the light to all darkness.

Lord, you showed us the essence of humility and selflessness as you prayed for your enemies while hanging there dying.

Jesus, teach us to pray for our enemies, for all the “them’s” we encounter.

Amen.

Seven Last Words: Lent Reflection Introduction

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What follows, each week leading up to Good Friday is a meditation on one of the seven final statements of our Lord.

Lent is commonly not observed by many Protestants, but it is often because the practice is misunderstood. Lent is an ancient practice of the church mentioned by St. Irenaeus, a second-century Christian, where fasting was regularly practiced in various ways leading up to Good Friday and Easter. He mentioned that this practice was being done before he was born, so that places Lent within a generation of the Apostles. Eventually the practiced solidified into 40 days of fasting, coinciding with 40 days of fasting the Jesus and Moses did. Lent typically involves a fast to draw the person closer to Christ in empathizing with his sacrifice and using the fast to intensify prayer. Christ himself expected his followers to fast, so all the elements of Lent, while Lent is not mentioned in the New Testament, is nevertheless biblical. As a general rule of thumb, any tradition that helps bring a person closer to Christ need not be viewed with suspicion.

Lent is designed to focus us on the cross. The event of the cross was the greatest event in human history. It shattered all notions of the universe, God, what it means to be human, right and wrong – everything. This is why we fast and meditate: in order to draw closer to just how profound and important the cross is.

The Scriptures record the disciples’ memoirs of the event and their reflections trying to understand its meaning. Some saw Jesus as paying a ransom to buy back humanity from the darkness that had enslaved it. Others saw Jesus as our substitution, our priestly sacrifice showing God’s peace to us, cleansing from sin. Some saw Jesus as providing a way to confront death and evil in resolute non-violent righteousness. Others saw his death as taking on our cursedness, removing the separation between God and people. Still, others saw the cross with the resurrection as a kind of military victory over death and darkness.

Whatever way we understand the cross – and there are several ways Christians have read its meaning – we come to the point of admitting something: the meaning of the Cross is beyond words. Its capturing power renders us speechless.

So, over the next few weeks of Lent, we are going to meditate on the cross using the words Christ spoke as he hung there. We are going to leave talk of atonement theories behind and talk about the atonement person: Jesus.

We will cling to the words Jesus used because we admit our words fail to capture the full meaning of the Cross. As we cling to his words, we enter his presence, his anguish, his love.

May these reflections bless you as draw close to Christ this lent season.