Meditations on Jesus During Lent
The Messiah is a never-ending fascination.
One of the books I’m reading in this season of Lent is a daily liturgy from Jonathan Gibson entitled O Sacred Head, Now Wounded: A Liturgy for Daily Worship from Pascha to Pentecost. It is filled with Scripture, Catechisms, Confessions, Readings from the Law and the biographies of Jesus, Hymns, confessions that lead me to bring my sin before God, right along with portions of the Bible that give me an assurance of pardon. And prayers. Many prayers.
Oh, and quotes from dead guys (and gals).
Because, you know, we need quotes from dead guys, to protect us from what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” — thinking that it is our contemporaries who are the depositories of all knowledge and wisdom.
And it is this chronological stretching that opens up new vistas of learning, discovery, and insight, because usually the dead guys have a different way of seeing, savoring, and saying. Which then catches my attention, drawing it to Jesus, in particular.
And as I make my way through this devotional for the season of Lent, I’m finding in it fresh ways for how the Messiah is a never-ending fascination. Like any long-term relationship, just when you think you’ve learned all the important bits, there’s something new, something marvelous, that somehow you’d missed. You see something, hear something, unearth something you’d never seen before.
Like in the quote below, from Hugh Martin. (scroll down, and read it)
I’ve known for some time that the incarnation of Jesus exposed him, fully, to our humanity. Fully GOD, and fully man. But Martin has made clear to me that I hadn’t worked out all the implications of it. Such as the reality — stunningly, shockingly — that Jesus entering into our humanity means that he entered into the fullness of the dwelling place of the curse with us.
For us.
I mean, yes, I knew that. But I didn’t really know that. Hadn’t spent a great deal of time pondering that. Specifically. Intentionally. But I’ve been doing that for a few days now, and it has made him more beautiful in my eyes than he ever had been before. It has drawn me to my knees in worship and praise. And it has made me long ever more deeply for the day when he returns, or I die, to meet him, and to thank him. Oh, how I can’t wait to thank him, the Blessed One, for becoming cursed, for me, and for us!
Thank you, King Jesus.
I love you.
For, while he is eternally in the bosom of the Father; as for us, each of us was as one cut off from him; cast out from his presence, wrapped up in his own curse. Even thus poor did Immanuel become for us; thus cursed did the Blessed One submit to be.
For into our place, though it was ominously distinguished as the dwelling-place of the curse, Jesus, in his love, consented to come; and his Father's wrath became then his portion.
Then he became "acquainted with grief." The Blessed One became "a man of sorrows." Anxieties, cares, hunger, thirst, wounds, stripes, agony, bloodshed, a cursed death, accrued unto him.
His Father, far from helping him; concealing his love for him; hiding his countenance; appearing against him, armed with an offended judge's indignation; forsaking him to the malignity of men and the onset of principalities and powers of darkness; drawing against him the sword of justice; calling on the sword to awake and smite and slay him — such was the inexpressible exchange which Jesus made when he took our curse upon him to bear it.
He indeed suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, [that he might bring us to God.]
Hugh Martin
