Holy Week

[HKHaugan]

We will never know what it was really like for Jesus in the last week of His earthly life. To know that you are going to die on a cross, humiliated by a foreign government, victimized by your own ethnic and religious leaders, deserted by your friends and disciples---that is isolation, that is crushing. But to have embraced a mission with such love and perfection and end up with no one grasping even a smidgeon or an inkling of why you said and did what you did must have been the height and depth of human dereliction and depravity. Has sin really overwhelmed the world that much, that severely, that completely?

When Jesus surveyed the world around Him in that last week could this be what His humanity might have felt?

–-And I have to die with the weight of their indifference burning in my heart? I have to die in their place for their sins, their fears, their hypocrisies, their insensitivities, their politics, their lusts, their greed and their selfishness. I have to feel all that in my mind and heart and grieve for them in my Spirit? I have to let their doubts touch me, their guilt, their needs, their self indulgence? Their confusion and inabilities and refusal to understand or even desire or even be curious about why I came? And now, finally, in these last hours, to know in me their aloneness, their separation from you Father. Is this the Cross you have called me to bear?

Yes, all of it.

Yet not my will but yours be done.---

“God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God (2Cor.5:21).”