The Opposite of Pardon

If God had sent a general pardon to the world, through the emissary of His only Son, then Jesus would have arrived in splendor and we would have crawled like supplicants to His feet.  The way they did for kings and their nearly-king governors.  We would have begged, and He would have kindly obliged, and we would have groveled and loved Him.

Resented it later and questioned our fealty perhaps.  But mostly we would have loved Him.

What happened instead is that Jesus took the burden of our consequences on His own body.  He took on our faults.  And we hate looking at our faults, especially when it is others they are hurting.  We have found oh so many creative ways of denying that we are hurting others.  So many ways of avoiding looking at our sins.

We spurned Him because we saw our guilt there.  We hated Him because we didn't want to own the pain and sin He carried.  We spit at Him because it's impossible to spit in your own face.

We draped Jesus's sacrifice in so much worldly grossness to hide the perfect splendor of His gift.  Because that would have meant looking squarely at what and who we are.  At our own dirtiness, the pain we've caused, the mess we've made.  The faults we own.

When I was young, I read Pilate's refusal to change the inscription over Jesus from "King of the Jews" to "He said he was king of the Jews" as a kind of quiet, passive recognition of Jesus's true worth.  This was naive.  Pilate was making a point.  No less a personage than the Chief Priests of Jerusalem brought the Roman governor a messiah and lifted not a finger to stop Pilate from killing Him.  So Pilate sent a message to the people -- this is what Rome will do to your Jewish heroes, your budding revolutionaries, your kings besides Caesar.  Was there a better moment in all of Pilate's tenure then when the crowd shouted as one, "We have no king but Caesar"?

Pilate and Herod played tennis with Jesus, testing each other and building an alliance.  Draping the salvation of mankind with paltry, passing politics.  So caught up in the game they never had to look at their own guilt in His suffering.

So much hate flung when Jesus was brought low.  Because surely we wouldn't do this to the Son of God.  Not so much that the Son of God wouldn't take it -- although if you'd asked us beforehand, we probably would have said so.  Oh no, what is unthinkable is that WE would do this to HIM.  We wouldn't do that.  So it must not be happening.

That's a sad paraphrase of something my students struggled to accept as true yesterday.  One even said blatantly that she didn't want it to be true, so she didn't believe it.  We can't be doing this to the Son of God -- therefore He must not be the Son of God.

How far we will go to avoid looking at our own sin.

But if we don't.  If we don't.  If we look away from Calgary.  If we join the crowd spitting so we don't have to look at the man suffering as human, if we relegate Him to the position of criminal and thus subhuman (still an ugly pillar of our society's morality).  If we drape it in passing politics and temple infighting or dress it up as pragmatic patriotism saving the people of Jerusalem from a losing fight with the Roman Empire.  If we make it something that happened but we never think about.

If we look away from our own sin and its consequences on that cross, then we also miss our salvation.  We also miss power sacrificing itself for us.  We miss deity becoming human and then becoming a corpse.  We miss love dying a traitor's painful death.

We miss God's purest love for fear of looking at our own shame.  It's a poor trade, but it takes courage to make the choice to look at the cross on the hill of Calgary.  I'll never say different.  It is hard and painful and it will burn away your life if you're paying proper attention.

I'm not saying it's not hard.  I'm just saying it's worth it.  I'm just saying that a new life is waiting on Easter morning.  I'm not saying you won't be staring at a death you've earned.  I'm just saying that God Himself paid the price and bought you a new life.

You are more loved than you can ever know...unless you have the power to look at your faults and the Son of God, wearing them to His death.