good friday:
I read something interesting this morning in my study Bible.
Events in Jesus' life -- the birth in a manger, the death on a cross -- can become so familiar that we miss the point. They're too close to us. In thinking about them, it sometimes helps if we let our mind wander & search out whole new images.
A Bible study group was asked to suggest word images that might apply to Jesus. Common ones surfaced first: a shepherd, a lamb, a door. Then out of nowhere came a wildly different metaphor: "fireworks in reverse". Everyone turned, puzzled, to the middle-aged woman who had spoken.
"Think about it," she said. "Fireworks explode with brilliant, dazzling colours and loud noises...yet they start out in an ordinary-looking paper package. When God became a man, the opposite happened. The Creator of everything in the universe confined himself to an unimpressive human package."
No other event in the life of Jesus fits the woman's metaphor better than his execution in Jerusalem. The idea was inconceivable, even to Jesus' closest followers. The Son of God die? How could this be? Could the Creator of all things succumb to his creation? Disciples who had slogged through every other confrontation by his side now forsook him. It made no sense for Jesus, the Messiah, to die. Not until later would other thoughts click into place: memories of Old Testamant customs that hauntingly pointed to a cross, prophecies of a Messiah who was King but also a Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53).
To die was, after all, the central reason Jesus had come to earth; he had insisted on that from the beginning.
Events in Jesus' life -- the birth in a manger, the death on a cross -- can become so familiar that we miss the point. They're too close to us. In thinking about them, it sometimes helps if we let our mind wander & search out whole new images.
A Bible study group was asked to suggest word images that might apply to Jesus. Common ones surfaced first: a shepherd, a lamb, a door. Then out of nowhere came a wildly different metaphor: "fireworks in reverse". Everyone turned, puzzled, to the middle-aged woman who had spoken.
"Think about it," she said. "Fireworks explode with brilliant, dazzling colours and loud noises...yet they start out in an ordinary-looking paper package. When God became a man, the opposite happened. The Creator of everything in the universe confined himself to an unimpressive human package."
No other event in the life of Jesus fits the woman's metaphor better than his execution in Jerusalem. The idea was inconceivable, even to Jesus' closest followers. The Son of God die? How could this be? Could the Creator of all things succumb to his creation? Disciples who had slogged through every other confrontation by his side now forsook him. It made no sense for Jesus, the Messiah, to die. Not until later would other thoughts click into place: memories of Old Testamant customs that hauntingly pointed to a cross, prophecies of a Messiah who was King but also a Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53).
To die was, after all, the central reason Jesus had come to earth; he had insisted on that from the beginning.