Even though it's Easter time, when pastels are painted everywhere and children pluck prizes from clumps grass, there's an element of this story that we seem to gloss over.
And it begins not just here with Christ's death and resurrection but at his birth, which we celebrate when the world has turned cold and icy.
It's good to be reminded of this: how the story starts, as well as how it ends.
Philip Yancey presents this beginning poignantly in his book "The Jesus I Never Knew," as he talked about the scandalousness of Christ's birth--an unwed teenager who is told by an angel that she's going to have a baby who will be the Messiah:
[Mary replied to the angel], "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said." Often a work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain...Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on his own terms, regardless of the personal cost.
Today as I read the accounts of Jesus' birth I tremble to think of the fate of the world resting on the response of two rural teenagers....it seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for his entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism.
(from Yancey's "The Jesus I Never Knew")
And to think that this humiliation was only beginning...it followed him from birth all the way through death.
Today is Good Friday, the day of that death, when the curtain ripped from top to bottom and hope--of all things--flooded the earth.
It is from that death, that humiliation that we find hope, redemption, freedom.
-- Carmen from Life Blessons (http://lifeblessons.blogspot.com)
No comments :
Post a Comment