Let it go, reckless in your love… John 12:25 (TPT)
Broken Body and Spilled Blood – The Good Gift Series – Part 5
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7
After their meal, while most families slept soundly, Jesus took his friends to Gethsemane to pray. Blood fell from his brow like drops of rain from the sky. Blood as red as wine.
“Take this cup from me…”
And as he wrestled and prayed for what was to come, they came for him. Under the cover of darkness, hidden in late night hours, they arrested Jesus and took him away. Judas fled, Peter lost control and the disciples scattered.
While his supporters slumbered, his adversaries were hard at work. Jesus’ court hearings were held during the night to ensure there would be no objections or protests to his conviction. They had everything planned, even down to the witnesses and what they would say.
By the time the city woke, Jesus had already been convicted, sentenced, stripped, and tortured. As people left their homes to attend the Temple, the day after Passover, they met a hardly recognizable Jesus stumbling in the opposite direction on his way to Golgotha.
Unexpected.
Unbelievable.
Horrific.
Happening.
People lined the streets, the disciples hidden in the crowd. Perhaps Mary was there watching over her son. What of Lazarus and Nicodemus? The once blind beggar and Leppers? Were they there too? Did they watch as their healer, teacher, Rabbi, friend, son, brother, saviour; the man who had raised their children from the dead, fed them, and loved them, was at his most vulnerable and broken, carrying a cross, stumbling down a road toward a hill?
And then it happened.
His body was broken open, his blood dripped from it, poured out bit by bit, winding its way down his legs and seeping into the ground beneath him, staining the earth with his impending death.
Jesus was nailed to a Roman cross.
Crucifixion was a death of domination. The Romans crucified people as a public display of their power. They used it to incite fear and terror into those they’d conquered. Because of the way it tortured and killed, it stripped a person of their culture and identity, showing that they had been overcome and overpowered. Dominated. No longer a citizen of their country, but a dead person, conquered by Rome. Peter Rollins says, “To be crucified meant to be robbed of one’s political and religious status. The person being executed was no longer a citizen and was considered cursed of God. Thus to identify with someone on a cross was to identify with someone robbed of identity.”
When Jesus was crucified, he was stripped of his identity. In Rome’s attempt to dominate him, he sank deep down into the fabric of the world. He took the weight of us all on his shoulders, and in doing so, he became every single one of us. Dominated. There were no identity markers that limited or blocked his connection with the world. In his death, he unified us all. (Body and blood, broken and poured for the repair of the world). His way of conquering was not about raising a flag of allegiance, choosing sides, deciding who was in or out, and crushing those who were out. In his death, broken body and spilled blood, he boldly, vulnerably and courageously declared our common union.
As his last moments of life slipped by, he cried,
“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
To the afflicted, abandoned, addicted, beaten, shamed, abused, heartbroken, bent, diseased; to the sinner, to the abuser, to those filled with hate and greed, to the those weighed down with worry and fear; to those who have felt the darkness of loneliness and hopelessness; for all the suffering of those before him and those yet to be, Jesus was saying, “Me too…”
He shed his identity and authority to share in our pain and humanity. He mixed it into himself, transcendently becoming one with us all, across space and time.
And then he died.
But all was not lost. Just a few hours before, he had said,
“Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is, destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.” John 12:25
Go to Part 6 – These Bones »
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