Lent Day 39 - Lashes

The Word Made Flesh is one of my favourite songs in the world, but I only listen to it twice a year or so. It has an effect on me that I don’t want to wear down or burn out. It’s a setting of words by the 17th Century poet and playwright Ben Jonson, and is a Christmas song about Christ’s nativity, but uses this to look onwards to Jesus’ death, its purpose and its injustice.

Christmas and Good Friday seem like opposites in mood, but they’re inextricably linked. God was born a man on Earth to save us, which took me many years to wrap my head around. He was here to spread his good news - though for all its goodness, a lot of it was advice, and warning, and condemnation of hypocrisy, and to do great works, healing the sick, feeding the hungry - but, perhaps most importantly he came to die. Words and medium sized acts of kindness were not enough to save us. If they were, God could have done it all through the prophets, as he had for thousands of years. Every prophet, every judge, caused a blip of repentance which could not last.

In Old Testament times, God’s people sacrificed a goat or lamb each year. The people’s sin was laid on it, and it died in their place. It seems a crazy sort of justice, to agree that someone wholly innocent should be given all the debt and suffer all the punishment. As I understand it, God promises justice and he promises mercy, and how are those two compatible at all. Justice without mercy leads to courts martial and wild west hanging judges. Mercy without justice sees the cops who did a murder given nothing but a parade. Justice and mercy are both very much needed, but they don’t fit together without someone catching all the flack. Human sin couldn’t just be ignored as irrelevant, with God saying ‘it was a mistake to say these things were bad’. There was a definite price, and he paid it

The part of Ben-Hur that affected me so much when I first saw it, and has often led me to tears, is not just Jesus crucifixion - the scourging and agonizing death of a man who has been nothing but kind -

It’s this exchange, as Jesus carries the cross: “What has he done to merit this?”

Balthazar replies “He has taken the world of our sins onto himsef. To this end, he said he was born. For this cause he came into the world”

What upset me was the horrible unfairness. Not just a man killed, but one who took it on himself and does it for some abstract or ancient - he did this for us, for me. He took this burden, to die in my place, and this is so, so unfair.

Ben Jonson’s poem touches the same truth. This is is fourth and final stanza:

“What comfort by him do we win,

Who made himself the price of sin,

To make us heirs of glory !

To see this Babe, all innocence

A martyr born in our defense ;

Can man forget this story ?”

I was overpowered when I first listened to this verse. To be born a martyr is so horrible and so wrong - and not just to ease the burden on us, but ‘to make us heirs of glory!’ - this was sick, it was shocking, but from the start he took upon himself our sin and suffered the death that came with it, to reunite us with God, and thus with him, and give us forgiveness and far more than that.

Isaiah wrote of this long before it happened: "But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds, we are healed."

Good Friday is one of the most wretched, evil things that ever occurred, but it was done for good, for me and for you, and it changed everything.