It’s “GOOD FRIDAY!”
Have you ever wondered why Christians call the day their rescuer was brutally slaughtered, as if he were the worst of all evil ones, a GOOD day? I’m sure a lot has been said and written about that. To me it is a vivid reminder of how completely paradoxical our “WAY” really is. The tragedies of this day are its triumphs.
We sing about it. I heard the song, “Above All,” for the first time, driving a borrowed car from Toronto, Canada, along the North shore of Lake Ontario, East to Kingston. The CD in the car’s stereo was a recording of one of Michael W. Smith’s concerts.. I was immediately moved by the song.
Above all powers; above all kings
Above all nature; and all created things.
Above all wisdom and all the ways of man,
You were here, before the world began
Above all kingdoms; above all thrones
Above all wonders the world has ever known.
Above all wealth and treasures of the earth,
There's no way to measure what You're worth.
Then came a dramatic change in tone and perspective.
Crucified, laid behind the stone.
You lived to die rejected and alone.
Like the rose trampled on the ground,
You took the fall and thought of me
Above all …
I wept that afternoon as the cosmic proportions of Christ’s death struck to the very core of my heart. The greatest man who ever lived was savagely brutalized and executed in a sinister way contrived to desecrate and completely humiliate its victim. “Like a rose trampled on the ground.”
What gripped me even more strongly, though, were the lines,
You took the fall and thought of me
Above all …
The “took the fall” part I got and worshipped. He was “wounded for (my) transgressions.” But, “thought of me, above all”? That sounded a bit like sentimental poetic license to me. And then I remembered Peter’s words in a letter to Christians in the 1st Century. (See 1. Peter 2: 24.) “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” The words of John (1. John 2:2) the Son of Thunder, in a similar letter written around the same time as Peter’s, came to me. “He is the atoning sacrifice – the one who ‘took the fall’ though it cost him everything … everything – for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”
This is not sentimental self-aggrandizement. He did think of me and all the me’s in the entire world on that “GOOD FRIDAY.” All the me’s who were then living. Of whom else was he thinking when he prayed “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” All the me’s who had ever lived were included. All the me’s who would ever live – me among them; you among them – were included. In the heart of the man on the center cross – the God-man – you and I were known intimately. You can say, I can say, every human being who has lived, now lives, or will ever live can say, He “thought of me above all.” Mysterious as it is, it powerfully declares the infinity of the heart of God and the immeasurable magnitude of the mercy poured out as his heart was broken for every “me.” The great, unfathomable heart of God contemplated and took to itself every sin; all the guilt; all the shame; the embarrassment; the ignoble, disgustingly humiliating details of all I have done wrong. No modern writer has understood and expressed what took place that day better than Walter Wangerin, Jr. In his book Reliving the Passion: Meditations on the Suffering, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus as recorded in Mark he creates a deeply moving word portrait of how Jesus was affected, seeing me, in his heart, that day.
“Guilty? Is this thinkable, that Jesus is guilty? No, it is not thinkable. It is as unthinkable as the pain such guilt must cause – but it is true! There are moments right now when Jesus looks down on the sick derision of the people at his feet and he agrees: It is right. I am worse than false priests and outright criminals.
Who can fathom the grief of the Holy one of God, when he must say in his soul: I deserve this. Yet that, exactly, is the sorrow before us now.
Maybe none shall see with more terrible clarity the sorrow of our Lord than the apostle Paul: ‘For our sake,’ he writes, ‘God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Corinthians 5: 21). … ‘God made him to be sin.’ Jesus has become a bad man, the worst of all men, the badness, in fact, of all men and all women together. … Jesus is sin! Jesus is the thing itself! … he has become the rebellion of humankind against its God.
He is, therefore, rightly crucified. He bows before his deserving. There is nothing to ease his sorrow – no, not even some sweet internal sense of innocence. However mistaken the motives of his enemies, Jesus belongs on the cross because sin deserves – sin requires – the complete, judicial damnation of the Deity.
And yet, and yet: this same Jesus is also the Holy One of God, now as much as ever before – because now he is completely obedient to the Father. Holy, he must hate sin with an unyielding hatred. Behold, then, and see the sorrow unlike any other sorrow in the universe: that right now Jesus hates himself with an unyielding hatred.
He is, in his own eyes, vile. He cannot console himself with the goodness of his sacrifice or the wickedness of his detractors, passers-by, priests, criminals – because they are right!”
Overwhelmed by all Jesus knowingly saw and assumed as his own, that day, Wangerin is moved to pray; a prayer I too, filled with remorse beyond words, must pray.
“This, Christ?
Is it from such anguished self-knowledge as this that you have saved me? – the deep knowing of my own sinfulness, a knowing from the vantage of the Judge, my unrighteousness in God’s most glorious eyes? Self-loathing for eternity? Hell, therefore?
Yes. Because in you I have become the righteousness of God.
Yes! Amen."
This is the paradox. He is damned. I am pardoned. He drinks the Cup of Redemption to its last sorrowfully bitter dreg, “… we … rejoice in God through … (Him) … by whom we now have been reconciled to God.” (Romans 5:11)
GOOD FRIDAY! to you all !
No comments:
Post a Comment