GOOD FRIDAY 18th April 2025
Amazing love! Oh what sacrifice! The Son of God given for me!
We know the story
because we hear about it all the time, but have we heard it personally? Have we heard Jesus whispering quietly to us,
“I do this for you” ?
I dearly want to tell
you some of the theology and draw out just some of the meaning in this event,
but all the most eloquent words in the world are meaningless, unless we are
willing to sit in silence waiting to hear the whisper of God’s love personally.
Today, we are called to listen.
Listen to the silence
of Jesus as he accepts a punishment he doesn’t deserve. Listen to feel the beat of God’s heart as he
shows the world that they not only have reject him, in rejecting God the son,
but they so vehemently reject him, that they cruelly crucified him.
This is the story of
mankind. We, like the Pharisees, say if
we were there, we would not have done this….. but is that true? Over and over again, throughout all of
history, God sent his messengers and the people rejected them, mocked them and
killed them. They still do. God sent his son, not only to reveal the
truth – that mankind would again reject and kill, but also to save any who turn
to him. He is the pure and holy Lamb of
God, whose shed blood saves us…. makes restitution for us, redeems us and
brings us back, reconciled us with God and truly bringing peace.
We call it Good
Friday. But why is it GOOD? Jesus suffered, not just the humiliation of
the mocking, but severe flogging and the injustice of being punished for being
exactly who he was - God! and then
being crucified. We can say those words
without emotion. The truth is not easy
to convey. It hurts.
The closest friends
of Jesus ran away, betrayed him with a kiss and denied him. These were his supporters! His own people insisted that he be crucified,
and the Romans enjoyed taunting and mocking him.
There are three
different kinds of whipping that the Romans did when ordered to punish
someone. The most severe form was done to
those sentenced to be crucified, using whips with bits of bone attached, which
ripped into the recipient’s flesh.
Sometimes the recipient didn’t survive the whipping, saving them from the
work of crucifying perhaps. This is
what Jesus received. ……..
This is just one
aspect of the pain that Jesus went through.
Should we talk about them all? Isaiah,
roughly 700 years before Christ, tells us about him; “See, my servant shall
prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. Just as
there were many who were astonished at him
—so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form
beyond that of mortals”. This tells
me that the pictures we have of Jesus on the cross are the “Nice” versions and
not a true depiction.
Then there was the
emotional pain. When Jesus was on the
cross and cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he was experiencing the separation from God,
which is a reality of humankind due to sin.
Jesus, on the cross, was baptized into the sin of the world and
experienced acutely that separation. He
hadn’t sinned, but he took the punishment that was due to us.
When Jesus cried out
that statement, he was also quoting Psalm 22.
It should have been a wake-up call to the people who insisted on his
death, namely the religious leaders.
That Psalm describes the scene in front of them, right down to the
casting lots for his clothes.
In the Gospel
accounts of the crucifixion they tell of spiced wine offered to Jesus. One he refuses, the other he accepts. The one he refused was offered in mocking by
the Romans, the one he accepted was offered by a bystander… but there is more
to it than that.
“They put the
sponge on the stem of a hyssop plant. Then they lifted it up to Jesus’
lips. After Jesus drank he said, “It is
finished.”” The mentioning of
the hyssop plant is significant.
The first sponge is
believed by experts to be one of the tools of the Romans. It was used for hygiene and was most likely
full of filth. The second was different,
an act of mercy, given at the end of Jesus’ time on the cross, and the hyssop
was yet another important prophetic sign.
When the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, the Israelites were told to dip
a hyssop branch into the blood of the sacrificial lamb and paint its blood over
the door, thus saving the family from death. Jesus is our Passover lamb. As the hyssop was lifted up to him, it was a
picture of painting the blood of the lamb over the door, saving the people from
death.
Hyssop was a symbol of God’s cleansing. King
David’s Psalm 51, that he wrote after his affair with Bathsheba, says this; “Cleanse
me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.”
Isaiah also tells us
some more about this Lamb of God who takes away our sin and saves us; Surely he has borne our infirmities and
carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and
afflicted. But he was wounded for our
transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that
made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have
all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
Throughout the Gospels
we witness the connection between God saving and God healing. We are saved and we are healed by the blood
of Jesus. I met a lady once, who said
she’d had a vision of every disease written in the drops of Jesus blood. Meaning that Jesus had made a way for the healing
of absolutely everything. There
certainly is a lot I don’t know and don’t understand, but I do believe that Jesus
loves us, died for us and shed all his blood on the cross…. Blood shed for us…
His blood, that saves us.
Today we are called
to listen... to hear that whisper. Let us pray; “Lord, open our hearts and minds
to accept and know the extent of your love for us. Lord, we sit now, in your
presence. We listen to hear that intimate
whisper. We know that you, Jesus, died
for the sins of the world, but Lord, let me hear what it means that you died
for me.”
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