Simply Renovated

 

 

 

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"

 

The candles are lit and my warm coffee sit cupped in my hand as the steam swirls about in confusion.  I couldn't pick a better word for me right then....confusion.  This week is Holy Week and although most concentrate on the different stories of Jesus (and we still will do so as a family), I personally, am concentrating strictly on the cross and the last words of God in the flesh.

 

"Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him.  And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left.  And Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.'"

Luke 23:32-34

 

I sat with my coffee in hand, talking to my husband about what Americans think the cross really is.  We talked about those who don't even believe in God but will tattoo a cross the size of their entire back on them. We talked about how we have romanticized it but possibly forgotten the horridness of it as well. 

"In Jesus' time, crucifixion was not against the law, it was carried out by the law.  It was an exceptionally gruesome method of torturing a person to death, carried out by the government not in secret dungeons but in public.  Not even the celebrated film by Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ, can convey the full ghastliness of crucifixion to a modern audience.  We don't understand it because we have never seen anything lit it in the flesh." 

 

In the New Testament times, everyone had seen crucifixion.  They would see them along side the roads of the Roman Empire.  "Everyone knew what it looked like, smelled like, sounded like - the horrific sight of completely naked men in agony, the smell and sight of their bodily functions taking place in full view of all, the sounds of their groans and labored breathing going on for hours and, in some cases, for days.  Perhaps worst of all s the fact that no one cared."  Corporations now make the cross into anything and everything they can because people will buy them.  Maybe they think it makes them religious...maybe it is romantic to them or maybe they think it's a fantasy story and everyone goes to an afterlife that is glorious.  Me? I am a little terrified to wear a cross because I feel so incredibly unworthy to look at it...yet alone wear it.  The cross is both beautiful and repulsive.

 

"There was nothing religious, nothing uplifting or inspiring about a crucifixion.  On the contrary, it was deliberately intended to be obscene, in the original sense of that word; the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, 'disgusting, repulsive, filthy, foul, abominable, loathsome.'  It is therefore of the utmost importance to note that in an era when crucifixion was still going on and was widely practiced throughout the Roman Empire, Christians were proclaiming a degraded, condemned, crucified person as the Son of God and Savior of the world.  By any ordinary standard, and especially by religious standards, this was simply unthinkable......We are accustomed to thinking of the Cross merely as a 'religious symbol', like the Star of David or the yin-yang.  Yet at the most fundamental level - this can't be emphasized strongly enough - the Cross is in no way 'religious'."

 

My mind still can't grasp this.  I talk it over with my husband and I remain speechless.  I don't think of the cross like this enough...or at all.  My simple mind goes to the picture of Jesus hanging on the cross and that is for me...which isn't bad BUT THERE IS MORE.

 

Crucifixion was designed to display and humiliate.  The crosses were placed by the roadside as a form of public announcement: these miserable beings that you see before you are not of the same species as the rest of us.  THE GOD OF UNIVERSE WAS DECLARED BY US THAT HE IS NOT WORTHY TO LIVE.  My first thought right here is PRAISE GOD he is not the same species as us....PRAISE GOD death did not overcome Him.  The purpose of pinning the victims up like insects was to invited the gratuitous abuse of the passerby.  Those crowds understood that their role was to increase, by jeering and mocking, the degradation of those who had been thus designed unfit to live. 

 

Meditate on this hymn....

 

Upon the cross of Jesus mine eyes at times can see

The very dying form of one who suffered there for me;

And from my smitten heart with tears who wonders I confess:

Take wonders of redeeming love and my unworthiness.

 

I take, O cross, they shadow for my abiding place;

I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of his face;

Content to let my pride go by, to know no gain nor loss,

My sinful self my only shame, my glory all the cross.

 

Shame....the center of crucifixion.  And Jesus of all people did not deserve to be shamed.  Whose shame is it, then? IT is our shame that we see Jesus taking upon himself.  In the mocking of Jesus, in his death by torture, we see all of the absolute worst that people can do.  And here is what we need to remember.  In this first word from the Cross, Jesus does not pray for the good and the innocent.  He prays for people doing terrible things.  We cannot grasp this.  His prayer for the worst of the worst comes from a place beyond human understanding.