The Vulnerable God

Posted on 29 March 201318 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

It was the Passover, the greatest and most important feast of the Jewish year. Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a donkey to the praise of the crowds, who laid cloaks and palm branches before him on the road. Before him stood the Temple—a magnificent structure of beautifully-carved cream-colored stone. The gates in its outer walls opened into the the Court of the Gentiles; a low wall separated that from the Court of the Women. Past that wall no Gentile could pass who had not been circumcised, on pain of death. Within that was the Court of Israel, from which women were barred, and then the Court of the Priests, forbidden most of the year to all but priests and Levites. Inside the Priests’ Court stood the great altar, and the Holy of Holies.

When Jesus entered the temple, he found that—as had happened before—the high priest, Caiaphas, had set up a market in the outer court, turning it from a place for Gentiles to worship God into an opportunity to make money off all the Jews coming to pay the tithe and offer their sacrifices. Once again, Jesus drove them out; more, he refused to let anyone carry anything through the temple. Apparently, given the disrespect the high priest had shown the temple, the people of Jerusalem had started using its outer court as a public street. Jesus put a stop to that—which must have meant taking control of the entire 35-acre complex, for at least a few hours.

Needless to say, the authorities were infuriated, and demanded to know by what authority he presumed to do such a thing. Instead of an answer, they got a parable about a man who planted a vineyard, then rented it out while he went off to a far country. The harvest came, and he sent a servant to collect the rent—a share of the crop—but instead of paying, the renters beat the servant and told him to go away. This was a grave insult to the owner, but he sent another servant; this time, they not only beat the servant, they publicly humiliated him. Yet a third servant was sent, whom they hurt even worse and then physically threw out of the vineyard.

This is all a huge public insult to the vineyard owner, who is no doubt rightly furious—less for the financial loss than for the dishonor done to him. Honor demands that he avenge the injustice to his servants and the insult to his name. He has every right to ask the authorities to send the army to retake the vineyard and punish the tenants for their wickedness; no one would expect anything else. But he doesn’t do that.

One night in the early 1980s, King Hussein of Jordan discovered that a group of army officers were meeting nearby to plot a military coup. His chief of security requested permission to seize the barracks and arrest the plotters, but the king refused; instead, he flew by helicopter to the roof of the barracks. He told the pilot, “If you hear gunshots, fly away without me,” then walked down two flights of stairs, unarmed.

He appeared without warning in the room where the officers were meeting and said, “Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that you are meeting here tonight to finalize your plans to overthrow the government, take over the country and install a military dictator. If you do this, the army will break apart and the country will be plunged into civil war. There is no need for this. Here I am! Kill me and proceed. That way, only one man will die.”

Kenneth Bailey tells this story, having confirmed it from an American intelligence officer; he reports that “after a moment of stunned silence, the rebels as one rushed forward to kiss the king’s hand and feet and pledge loyalty to him for life.” They had been planning to kill him, but the nobility of King Hussein’s act in making himself totally vulnerable, putting his life in their hands for the sake of their country, changed their hearts.

This is the approach the vineyard owner chooses. He sets his anger aside; rather than retaliate, he humbles himself and risks far greater loss at the hands of his tenants for the sake of one last attempt at reconciliation. He sends his beloved son to the vineyard in the hope that when they see him, their hearts will be moved to shame at their behavior, and they will regain their honor. Of course, it doesn’t happen, and judgment comes.

This is what God does. Jesus tells this parable against the chief priests and the Pharisees—Israel is the vineyard; they are the tenants who think they own the place—but we could just as well apply it to all of us. God created a beautiful world and gave it to us to care for, and what’s the first thing we did? We decided being tenants wasn’t good enough, we wanted to own the place. And really, we’ve been on about that ever since. God raised up Israel, and he sent the prophets, and there were some who listened, but most didn’t—even within Israel itself, there were often few who feared the Lord. God could have done as he said he would do in the parable in Isaiah—he could have loosed his wrath and wiped us out. Instead, he set his anger aside, and he set his glory aside, and he made himself vulnerable to our hatred. He sent his son down among us, unarmed.

That’s what God does. And we killed him, because that’s what we do. And his enemies on Earth celebrated, and maybe the Devil celebrated . . . but it only happened because God chose it.

Simon the Disciple

Posted on 22 April 201118 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay pots, to show that this all-surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. At all times and in every way, we are hard-pressed, but not crushed; at a loss, but not lost; hounded by enemies, but not deserted by God; thrown down, but not shattered. We are always carrying around in our bodies the killing of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for the sake of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.
So death is at work in us, but life in you.

—2 Corinthians 4:6-12

Thus writes the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 4, sounding one of his central themes: we have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, which means that when we suffer—not for sin, but for other reasons—we are somehow suffering with Christ; and more, that suffering with Christ is part of the way God works in us and uses us.

We have been given an incalculable treasure; we have been given new light by which to live, the light which is the knowledge of who God is and what he is like, which has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. But receiving that treasure hasn’t immediately made us perfect and perfectly beautiful; the light is brilliant and glorious, but we’re still just drab, workaday clay pots, cheap, easily broken, not worth repairing, common as the day is long. Sometimes, that’s intensely frustrating, and sometimes it seems to make no sense; but when we start to imagine ourselves more than that, we start to think that the beauty is really ours, not God’s, and we start to take the credit for it ourselves—and we don’t let his light shine through. Put a light in a whole, unbroken pot and put the lid on, and no light escapes; but if the pot is cracked, then the light can shine through.

And we are cracked, and life keeps cracking us. None of us here, I think, can come close to the catalogue of Paul’s trials, but we all suffer; and while some of it we know comes to us as the consequences of our own sin, there is much that we do not deserve. We suffer because we aren’t properly appreciated, because we don’t get the credit for what we do, because we make a convenient scapegoat, because things simply go wrong and we lack the money or the influence to fix them; we suffer because we’re too honest to pass the blame when the fault is ours, or because we take the blame in order to protect someone else, or because we keep our commitments when everything is going wrong or when others have broken faith with us, rather than seeking a loophole and getting out. We all know times when we are hard-pressed, when we are at a loss; some of us at least have known what it is to be persecuted by another, and most of us have felt the pain of being thoroughly defeated. We are cracked pots, and no mistake.

And through those cracks, the light of God shines, and within us, his power holds us together; and so though life presses us hard indeed, he bears us up under the pressure, and he makes a way out in his time. Though we are all too often bewildered, unsure, at a loss, we are never truly lost; we may not know where the next step is, but God does, and he’ll guide us, one step at a time. We may indeed find enemies hounding us, for who knows what reason, but even then, God is with us—we are not left alone; and though we are sometimes thrown down, we don’t shatter on the ground, because God keeps us in one piece, and so we bounce back.

And in that, we come to understand a little more, from the inside, what Jesus suffered for us—and as others see God bring us through the suffering that comes in this life, they come to understand that a little more, too, and they see his light shining in us. As people see the dying of Christ reflected in us, they can also see the life which overcomes and has overcome death, his resurrection life. We bear witness that we can in fact gain life by giving it away, that we can receive life by letting go of it, that we can find joy and peace even in the midst of pain and hardship, and that we have in truth been given a life which overcomes even death itself; and in so doing, we point people to Jesus, in whom they too can find life, eternal and overflowing.

In a sense, wherever else we might find ourselves in the story of the crucifixion, we are all Simon of Cyrene: called to carry his cross, and to find in that our witness to Jesus and our ministry to this world.

The Seven Last Words of Jesus from the Cross

Posted on 2 April 201018 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

The First Word: Luke 23:26, 32-34a

As they led Jesus away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus. . . . Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

“Them”? Who is “them”? The Roman soldiers? Pilate, who gave the order for his crucifixion? The crowd, which howled for his blood? Caiaphas and the priests, who egged on the crowd? His disciples, who scattered?

. . . Everybody? All of them?

. . . Us?

Surely he asked God to forgive all those who took part in his betrayal and death—Pilate, Caiaphas, the crowd which rejected him, the soldiers who flayed him, Judas who sold him, Peter who denied him, Thomas and James and the others who ran—for none of them understood, none knew what was really happening; but the circle of guilt doesn’t stop there, it wasn’t only Roman soldiers and Jewish priests who were responsible for his crucifixion. Rembrandt paints the raising of the cross, and paints himself as one of the soldiers—Mel Gibson films the passion, and it is his hand that drives the first nail—because they understand who killed the Son of God: we did. Our sin, our rebellion, our agony, our despair, our lostness led him to that cross, hung him on it, nailed him there, and broke his heart; and did he rage against us for the evil we do? No; instead, he asked God to forgive us. Forgive us for killing him, because we didn’t understand who he was, who we are, any of it. Forgive us, for in his death, even as we killed him, he paid the price for that sin, and every other.

The first candle extinguished

“The Power of the Cross” v. 1

The Second Word: Luke 23:39-43

One of the criminals hanging there kept mocking him and saying, “Aren’t you supposed to be the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other one rebuked him, saying, “Don’t you fear God, since you’re under the same sentence of condemnation? We’ve been justly condemned, for we’re getting what we deserve for what we’ve done—but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

The first one home is a thief.

Jesus warned his listeners, in his parable of the great banquet, that when the invited guests refused to come, he would throw the doors open to all who had never been invited anywhere—the poor, the lame, the crippled, the blind—but surely no one imagined that the gates of heaven would be open to people like this. This man was a career criminal, and certainly a serious one—or maybe a revolutionary to boot—for Rome to go to the trouble of crucifying him for his crimes. He had done great evil, of that we can be sure; and now, at the end, he had nothing but pain, and fear, and just enough good in him to recognize Jesus for who he was. And so he cries out, not a great confession of faith, but a cry of desperate hope against hope: “Jesus, remember me!” Jesus, please, whatever you can do for me, please . . .

And in response to this thief, this man who has done nothing in his life to merit mercy, whose faith barely deserves the word, is barely the size of a mustard seed, Jesus’ answer is staggering: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” The thief had no good reason for hope, no reason to expect mercy, and yet Jesus gave him everything. This is the love that says, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”; this is the wideness of God’s mercy, that reaches out even to the last-minute rescue of a worthless thief; this is the grace of Jesus, greater than all our limitations, greater than all our sin, great enough even to deliver us.

The second candle extinguished

“Hallelujah, What a Savior!” v. 2

The Third Word: John 19:25-27

Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple Jesus loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

As greatly as Jesus suffered on the cross, Mary’s pain must have been almost as great. Surely she would rather have traded places with her son than have to stand there watching as his enemies tortured him to death. Through his childhood she had cared for him, comforted him, held him, loved him, and tried to understand him; from the time he began his ministry, she had been his first disciple. Sometimes his actions must have baffled her, and his words must have hurt; when they were at the wedding in Cana and the wine ran out, she went to him to ask for help, and all he said was, “Woman, what does that have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” But she believed in him, and so she stepped out in faith and told the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” And now, she had to watch him die. She had to—others had run away, but she couldn’t; she had to be there for him, whatever it cost her.

And as great as Jesus’ pain was, he was there for her, too. He saw her pain and loss at the death of her first-born son, and he also saw John’s pain and loss—John, the disciple with whom he had been closest—at the loss of his Lord and dearest friend; and he gave them the greatest gift he could give: each other. To comfort each other, care for each other, share the burden of their loss, he gave John a new mother, and his mother a new son.

The third candle extinguished

“Were You There?” v. 1

The Fourth Word: Matthew 27:45-46

From the sixth hour until the ninth hour, there was darkness over all the land. About the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani”—which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry out by day, but you don’t answer,
and by night, but I find no rest.

Yet you are holy,
     enthroned on the praises of Israel.
Our ancestors trusted in you;
     they trusted, and you delivered them.
They cried out to you and were delivered;
     they trusted in you and weren’t disappointed.

But I am a worm, not a man,
     scorned by all humanity and despised by the people.
All who see me mock me;
     they shake their heads and sneer,
“He trusted in the LORD—let the LORD deliver him!
     Let the LORD rescue him, if he delights in him so much!”

Yet you are the one who brought me out of the womb;
     you made me trust you while I was still on my mother’s breast.
From birth I was cast upon you;
     from my mother’s womb you have been my God.
Don’t be far from me,
     for trouble is near
     and there is no one to help.

Many bulls have surrounded me;
     mighty bulls of Bashan have encircled me.
They have opened their mouths against me
     like lions about to rend and roar.
I am poured out like water,
     and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax—
     it has melted away within me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
     and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
     you lay me in the dust of death.

Dogs have surrounded me—
     a band of thugs has encircled me—
they have pierced my hands and feet.
     I can count all my bones;
they stare and gloat over me.
     They divide my garments among themselves
          and cast lots for my clothing.

But you, O LORD, don’t be far off!
     O my Help, come quickly to my aid!
Deliver my soul from the sword,
     my life from the dog’s paw;
     save me from the mouth of the lion, from the horns of the wild ox!

You have answered me!
     I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters;
     I will praise you in the midst of the congregation.
You who fear the Lord, praise him!
     All you descendants of Jacob, honor him,
     and all you descendants of Israel, stand in awe of him!
For he hasn’t despised or disdained
     the suffering of the afflicted;
he hasn’t hidden his face from them,
     but when they cried for help, he heard them.

From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
     I will fulfill my vows before those who fear you.
The afflicted will eat and be satisfied;
     those who seek him shall praise the LORD—
     may your hearts live forever!
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD,
     and all the families of the nations shall worship before him,
for kingship belongs to the LORD,
     and he rules over the nations.

Indeed, all those about to sleep in the earth shall bow down to him,
     all who go down to the dust will kneel before him.
He who did not keep himself alive—
     his descendants shall serve him.
It shall be told of the LORD to the coming generation,
     and they shall declare his righteousness to a generation yet unborn,
for he has done it.

The fourth candle extinguished

“The Power of the Cross” v. 2

The Fifth Word: John 19:28

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.”

It’s no surprise that he was thirsty; he’d lost half the blood in his body to the flogging, and his body was trying desperately to make up the fluid it had lost—but his last drink had been the wine at dinner the night before. He was fully human, even as he was fully God, and his sufferings were as real as any of ours. He lived our life fully, in every respect; he knows our weaknesses, our temptations, our pains, for he experienced them, and in no place more fully than on the cross, which was designed to kill people by driving them beyond their limits.

There’s also an irony here. Each day of the Feast of Tabernacles, a priest would lead a procession from the Temple to the Pool of Siloam, fill a golden pitcher with water, and then lead the procession back to the Temple, where he would pour the water into a funnel as an offering at the same time as the other priests were making the burnt offering and the drink offering; this was called the “Great Hosanna,” and was marked by the sing-ing of the Hallel, Psalms 113-18. On the last day of the feast, the great day, the priest would circle the altar seven times before pouring out the water. This was a moment of great joy, a remembrance and celebration of God’s provision of life-giving water; and John 7 tells us that on the last day of the feast, presumably as the last strains of the Hallel faded and a hush descended on the Temple, Jesus stood and shouted, “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of their heart will flow streams of living water.’” The promise of the feast would be fulfilled in a new way, for through Jesus, God would give his people living water, which is the Spirit of God. And yet, here on the cross, the one who is the source of the living water which quenches our thirsty souls, Jesus, thirsted. By his thirst he satisfied ours.

The fifth candle extinguished

“O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” v. 1

The Sixth Word: John 19:29-30a

A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.”

“It is finished.” Not, “It’s over,” not, “I give up,” not, “I’m finished,” but “It is completed,” the work is done. What Jesus came to do, he had done, and the effects would be felt throughout all time and space. This moment is “the still point of the turning world” without which, as T. S. Eliot says, “there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” This is the point around which all creation revolves, for in this moment the world is redeemed; in this moment we are saved, all of us through all space and time—we who know the story of Christ, our brothers who worshiped God at the Temple in the time of David, our sisters in the deepest jungles of Asia who know not the name of Christ but feel his Spirit moving in their hearts nonetheless, those rich and poor, powerful and powerless, intelligent and unintelligent, all of us who will gather before the throne of grace in the eternal kingdom: we were saved there, then. All the rest is simply God working out in our lives the victory Jesus had already won on the cross.

Thus Jesus’ cry is a cry of victory in the midst of death; his moment of greatest desolation was also his moment of glorification. It is a strange victory and a strange glory, this glory of the cross; yet because of it, we may say with the hymnwriter, “I boast not of works nor tell of good deeds,/For naught have I done to merit his grace;/All glory and praise shall rest upon him/So willing to die in my place.” Because of it, we affirm, “I will glory in the cross.”

The sixth candle extinguished

“In the Cross of Christ I Glory” v. 1

The Seventh Word: Luke 23:45b-46

But as the curtain of the temple was torn in two, Jesus called out in a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Having said this, he breathed his last.

Jesus said to them, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. . . . I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that don’t belong to this fold, and I must bring them as well, and they will listen to my voice. There will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”

This last word from the cross is the cry of one who asked, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And what a strange word that is, coming from the throat of God! How could God the Father forsake God the Son? And yet, with the weight of all our sin on his back, Jesus, who had ever been one with the Father and the Spirit, descended into the depths of our damnation, experiencing in full our alienation from the Father—God, “ever Three and ever One,” somehow divided, taking even our lostness, our separation, our isolation onto himself so that it too might be healed—so that we might be healed.

nd yet, despite the physical pain, despite the far greater spiritual pain, he went through with it. No one could have made him; he laid down his life, no one took it from him; and in such desolation, the temptation to call it all off must have been nearly overpowering. Yet God must be who he is, bound together by love, bound by his decision to love us—and so, in defiant trust in that love, trust that no matter how forsaken he may feel, the Father is still there, still faithful, Jesus screams out, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” And the Father was faithful: at that moment, the curtain in the Temple that separated the Holy of Holies, the small space where the presence of God was, tore in half—from top to bottom; no longer would the presence of God be confined to one small room to keep the rest of the world out. The price had been paid, the victory won.

The seventh candle extinguished

“O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” vv. 2-3

Note: in these reflections, I am indebted to the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’ book Death on a Friday Afternoon.

The Arm of the Lord Revealed

Posted on 10 April 200918 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Luke 22-23)

(Note: this sermon was delivered in sections over the course of our Good Friday service, as a series of brief reflections.)

Isaiah builds to this point with a crescendo of commands, like a mighty surge in the ocean building toward the shore, rising as the land rises: “Listen, look, listen, hear me, awake, awake.” “Listen, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord; hear me, you who have my law in your hearts. Awake, awake—rise up, O Jerusalem; awake, awake, and put on your strength.” Something has happened, something has changed—wake up, listen, and pay attention. But listen to what—look at what? What has happened? And then the crescendo reaches its climax, the great wave crashes on the shore: “See. See my servant.”

See my servant who was so disfigured, people were devastated at his appearance and wondered if he was even human; see my servant who sprinkled many nations with his blood to purify them from their sin. See my servant, who shall act wisely, and because of his wisdom shall prosper—despite everything that happens to him, through everything they do to him, he will accomplish his purpose, and for that he will be honored; he shall rise, he shall be carried up, and he shall be exalted most high. This is language which belongs to God himself—how does this make sense? Even the kings of the earth will be stopped in their tracks, dumbfounded and speechless, by this bizarre turn of fortune, confronted by a reality they never saw coming, and never could have seen coming. How can this be? How can this possibly be? What on Earth is God doing here?

And yet, they should have believed—they’d been told, they’d been warned, they should have seen it coming. But who did? Did anyone? . . . No, no one did—not even us; not even us.

The arm of the LORD? We’d heard the promises—“The LORD has bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God”—and his justice, too, don’t forget that. We knew what that would mean: God would reveal his power and glory and bring down his justice on the world to obliterate evil and sweep away the unrighteous. He would crush our enemies, and we would be vindicated in the eyes of the whole world.

But this . . . who saw this coming? When the arm of the LORD was revealed, who would ever have thought it would look like that? We expected his arm to be revealed in power, and instead it was revealed in weakness; we expected it to be impressive, and instead, we were unimpressed. The Lord himself came in all his power and authority—as nobody special, a mere ordinary man, nothing more. There wasn’t even anything impressive about him—he wasn’t handsome or imposing—no sense of majesty about him at all. He was just . . . ordinary. If he had won dazzling victories, achieved stunning successes, we could have respected that, but no—he had no great achievements, no great triumphs, only great suffering, which he took and bore with all the patient acceptance of a slave; he didn’t show us mighty strength, he showed us weakness. His life was meaningless, of no value, or so we thought—how could he be the Servant of God? How could we possibly have gotten it so wrong? How far from God must we be to look at his chosen one, whose life was worth everything, and think he was worth nothing? What does this say about us? If we could miss what God was doing that badly, there’s no hope for us. Not on our own, anyway.

What we didn’t realize is that his sorrows, his griefs, his pains, his weakness, weren’t his own—they were ours. We stood back and watched him suffer, we watched him die, and we didn’t lift a finger even to help, let alone to save him, nor did we utter even the smallest sound in protest, because we figured he must have had it coming. We left him alone in his agony, never even realizing that everything he suffered was for us; never realizing that we were the ones causing his suffering, for it was our sins crushing him under their weight. We just watched, and we let him die alone.

He took our sorrows, and he loaded our suffering on his back, and he carried them. He took all our guilt and all our shame, he took everything that’s wrong and twisted and distorted and broken in us, and he carried it all. Was he disfigured? Was he marred? Was he cracked and striped and scarred by our abuse, by the blows we gave him? Yes, and it was nothing more than our disfigurement, the marred state of our souls, visible on his face. He took all our darkness, and he paid the price for it. We didn’t have to bear the punishment for our sins—he did. We didn’t have to pay the penalty for all we’ve done wrong—he paid it. He dealt with everything that’s wrong in our lives so that we could have peace with God, and so that we could be healed.

All of us turned away from God, wandering off like sheep to seek our own paths; and by God’s will, he paid the price for all our wandering, for all our wrong thoughts and deeds. Each of our sins was like an arrow aimed at his heart; and they all found their mark, and he bore them all. He was the voluntary sacrifice for our sin—for all of it—so that we might be, truly, well.

It was all by his choice. It was all his decision. The authorities thought they were in control, the soldiers thought he was in their power, they all thought they were imposing their will on him, but they were all wrong. He did nothing, he said nothing, he made no protest and put up no resistance—but he could have; he could have stopped it, at any time, and he didn’t. He chose everything that happened to him, it happened only because he allowed it; he accepted the injustice, he willingly submitted to suffering and death, so that he might bring us life. The sacrifice of animals could never be enough because they couldn’t really substitute for a person; they couldn’t willingly choose to die on our behalf. Only another person, only someone like us, who was truly one of us, could do that.

Don’t you see? It’s the essence of our sin that it’s willful. It’s not just that we fail in what we try to do—we’re limited beings, God never made us able to do everything; even if we didn’t sin, we’d probably still fail at things. It’s not just that we’re flawed; we are, certainly, but we didn’t choose our flaws, and you could argue that we aren’t responsible for what weaknesses we have. But what we do about them—ah! that’s another matter. Granted our limitations, granted that we’re all tempted differently and in different ways, that we have different weaknesses, the bottom line is that we sin because, at some level, we want to. We wander away from God because we want to make our own way—just because he tells us that he leads us to the best pastures, beside quiet streams, doesn’t mean we believe it; like any sheep, we remain convinced that the grass must be greener on the other side of that hill over there. And that willfulness is the thing God can’t just overlook; it requires punishment.

Which means that either we have to bear that punishment ourselves, or someone has to bear it for us; and to bear it for us, it must be a completely voluntary self-sacrifice. What’s more, no ordinary human being could offer it; any of us would simply be voluntarily accepting the punishment we’re already due for our own sins. It had to be someone who didn’t deserve to die, but willingly accepted death anyway for us, without once objecting or resisting; but no one thought of this. He died for us, and no one understood.

But though he suffered for us freely, he didn’t do it on his own—he suffered as the Servant of the LORD; God did this through him. All of this happened because it was the LORD’s idea, because it was the LORD’s will. He gave up his life as an offering for sin, and God accepted it, because he was completely blameless, completely without sin, and because he offered his life freely for us. And so, despite his suffering—no, because of his suffering—he shall prosper, for he has accomplished his purpose; though he was of no value in human eyes, yet he shall rise, he shall be lifted up, and he shall be exalted as high as it is possible to be. Even kings, even the mighty of this earth, shall stand speechless in awe before him, as they see his glory; the one they thought they had crushed, they shall see rise up in triumph over them, taking them as the fruits of his conquest, and they will struggle to understand how this happened.

They will struggle because they don’t understand that God doesn’t do things the way they do, or they way they would have expected; he doesn’t do things the way we would have expected. He doesn’t use his power to crush the unrighteous—he reaches out in love to win them back. The Servant didn’t use his power to defeat anyone, but rather to surrender, to give himself up as an offering for our sin; in so doing, he made us right-eous, he gave us his righteousness, and so he won us as his children, as his people. He voluntarily identified himself with us and gave up his life for us so that we might live for him.