Friday, April 18, 2014

The Punishment of Reconciling Fell on Jesus

Good Friday:


“By 3:00 p.m. today, Lord, you will have been put to death. Your returning to the Father will occur very soon. Your journey back to the Father will include being tortured, scourged, spit upon, slapped, crowned with thorns, kicked, shoved, stripped naked, nailed to a cross and “hung up" to die.  Isaiah described you as “inhumanly disfigured” (Is 52: 14), that you “no longer looked like a man—so many nations will be astonished and kings will stay tight-lipped before…[you], seeing what had never been told them, learning what they had not heard before. Who,” Isaiah asks, “has given credence to what we have heard?...[You] had no form or charm to attract us, no beauty to win our hearts; …[you were] despised, the lowest of men, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering, one from whom, as it were, we averted our gaze, despised, for whom we had no regard. Yet ours were the sufferings …[you] were bearing, ours the sorrows …[you were] carrying, while we thought of …[you] as someone being punished and struck with affliction by God; whereas …[you were] being wounded for our rebellion, crushed because of our guilt; the punishment reconciling us fell on…[you], and we have been healed by…[your]  bruises.”
My bones were not broken,  Dorothy Ann (insert your name). My heart was.  I saw and experienced the ugliness of sin and its torturous effect on all of creation, male and female, humans and animals, all of the earth. It was not pretty. It was repulsive to look at, as was I on the cross.”


No comments:

Post a Comment