Tag Archives: crucifixion

the way love moves

Southern Ocean

Love is an ocean of a word. Big and wide and deep and too much to look at all at once and you can’t see its’ boundaries from standing in one place. Oceans and love are both hard to describe from the shoreline.

I will not plummet its’ depths in one lifetime, but I can stand in the waves and watch the way it moved on the earth that time when Love came down.

 

He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?”
Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. “ (Matthew 8:24-26)

 It was a furious storm, but even though fear was great and faith was small, the storm was calmed.  Love does not demand more faith than fear before He steps into my storm. I like that Love moves that way. I need Him to move like that for me because fear and faith take turns being king of the hill in my heart.

{I need to know that Love is more furious than the storm}

“While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with Him and His disciples, for there were many who followed Him.” (Mark 2:15)

 Love didn’t tiptoe through dark places. He didn’t go out of His way to go around the worst part of town. Jesus ate dinner on the other side of the tracks. He walked through every place like He had the authority to be there because He did. He went across the lake to confront a legion of demons and had dinner with the sinner people the same way He went to the synagogue to preach. In Church or out, Love moved the same way and refused to avoid the worst of us.

sinners gathered

{When the sinners and the outcasts are gathered, there’s a good chance Love is their dinner guest. Try not to be offended. That’s just the way Love moves.}

 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.  Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)
 

To her credit, she wanted to serve Jesus and maybe she wanted everything to be “just so”. He had come and there were preparations to be made and work to be done. No time for listening. Martha’s home had become her stage and she was distracted by her need to perform well.

Mary chose and no matter how much the performer complained, what Mary had chosen would not be taken from her. The place at His feet was hers because she chose the sound of His voice over her own performance.

{When Love walks in the room, there is a place at His feet that is so much better than the stage of our performance.}

 

crucified hand

“Carrying His own cross, He went out to the place of the Skull (…Golgotha). There they crucified Him…” (John 19:17-18)

 This is how love moved.

 {Love is an ocean big and wide and deep and too much to look at all at once. But I am moved by the waves.}

blood is in the air

Matthew 27

I stood at a distance with the other women, watching Jesus die. The smell of blood is in the air. Passover lambs being slaughtered and the Lamb of God dying. The law being kept in the shadow of grace flowing from the veins of God.

Blood is in the air and it means something to everyone.

Pilate, you washed your hands of the guilt of killing the innocent. How ironic that the very blood you washed your hands of was the only thing that could have washed away your guilt.

Pharisee, you killed the Lamb of God and then sacrificed your own lamb. You thought that the death of the One secured your prideful position before men, and the death of the other secured your humble position before God. How ironic, Pharisee, that the opposite was true.

Disciples, you left everything to follow, to be with Him. He was Messiah and His coming gave you hope and now He has died and your hope along with Him. Do you see the irony now, disciples? He left everything to be with you and your only hope is in His death.

Blood is in the air and isn’t it ironic? We wash our hands and kill a lamb and find hope in what we can see and touch. Our hands look clean but we ignore our hearts and we make our sacrifice while refusing His. We put our trust in what we see but we are blind.

I watch the rich man put His body in a tomb. Dead. Buried. Those who hated Him sighed relief, those who loved Him wept grief. The lambs were dead and the Lamb was buried. Sins had been taken and punishment given. Pilate sealed the tomb and posted guards and now the Pharisees could rest easy. While Mary weeps at the grave of the One she loves.

Her heart breaks in despair over the same death that makes mine beat with joy. Mary, don’t you know? What good is forgiveness if the grave keeps the Forgiver? Or the forgiven? Stay here, Mary. Watch with me. Because I know that today, blood is in the air.

But soon, that stone will roll out of His way.

And then we will sing…

He took my mourning and turned it into dancing;

He took my weeping and turned it into laughing;

He took my mourning and turned it into dancing;

He took my sadness and turned it into joy!

feeling the pain

“I would like some morphine, please”. The dentist laughed, oblivious to the seriousness of my request. I managed to talk him into a few extra shots to the mouth and kickin’ up the dial on the laughing gas (which, by the way, has yet to make me laugh). He had no idea the lengths I would go to in order to avoid pain.

Years of drugs and alcohol and constant running, all in my endless pursuit to numb what is, in my opinion, the worst kind of pain. I buried my heart and then built an impenetrable wall around it to keep emotional pain at bay. It worked pretty well, until God pointed out that while I couldn’t feel pain, I also couldn’t feel anything else, including love. Especially His love. So began the difficult journey of dismantling my wall and digging up my heart, of learning to let pain in, and then bringing it to God for healing. It sounds simple on paper, but in real life it was…a painful process.

But this post really isn’t just about me and my pain.

“And when they had mocked Him, they took off the purple robe and put His own clothes on Him. Then they led Him out to crucify Him…They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull). Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it.” Mark 15:20-23

Wine mixed with myrrh was a painkiller. Matthew says they offered him wine mixed with gall (Matthew 27:34). My study notes state that “Tradition says that the women of Jerusalem customarily furnished this pain-killing narcotic to prisoners who were crucified.”

“Crucifixion was usually intended to provide a death that was particularly slow, painful (hence the term excruciating, literally “out of crucifying”), gruesome, humiliating, and public…” (Wikipedia)

Jesus was given the chance to avoid, or at least lessen, the pain of His crucifixion, but He refused. He was fully awake and fully aware of what He was enduring. For you. For me. He refused to spare Himself even one moment of the pain and humiliation of dying for us.

We speak of His death on the cross, and what it means to us, to the world. But today, I am considering the dying that He did. The pain He took for me. The humiliation He paid for me. The hours He spent suspended between me and His Father, feeling every ounce of what separated us.

And then something hits my heart.

Jesus endured the scourging, the whips that tore His flesh, the crown of thorns upon His head, the great wounding of His body. He intentionally felt the nails pounded into His flesh, the burning with each breath He tried to take as He hung in mid-air. On purpose, He went through the torturous death of asphixiation, with nothing to make it less difficult, less painful. And along with the physical pain ravaging His body, He endured the emotional pain of separation from His Father. The separation that came from my sin being heaped upon Him, causing Him to cry out, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me!”

As I consider His dying, I am left weeping. Weeping and remembering. Remembering my own frailty and the great lengths to which I have gone to numb my pain.

Weeping, as I realize that Jesus went to great lengths to feel my pain.