“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).
For six weeks God’s people ponder and meditate upon the suffering of our Lord.
Some consider this unrelenting look at the cross and the suffering of Jesus a little gruesome or gory. Others look upon it much as they would view a baseball game with no hits or a concert with no favorite tunes. Lent tends to drag a bit, so much so, that by the end of Lent when they hear Jesus announce, “It is finished,” they breathe a little sigh of relief and say, “Thank God, it’s over.”
It’s amazing how many Lenten seasons we can live through and listen to Jesus—and still not really hear him. We watch and we pray all through Lent, but sometimes we tend to view the whole thing as an awesome saga on a grand scale—a kind of monumental performance, like watching the passion play or hearing Handel’s Messiah. It’s a moving time and a moving experience. But when we get to the last act, we simply go back home again as if nothing happened. It’s as though all that Jesus endured is just a story on a big screen, with a great cast and a wonderful screenplay, but, nonetheless, just a story.
It’s nice while it lasts.
It tugs at our heartstrings and overwhelms us with its scope and passion. But when it’s all over, we put on our coats and go back home to reality. And the reality back home isn’t always very nice. For there are the same tensions and struggles, the same bottomless cravings and temptations, the same sad record of sin and sorrow, the same old hurts and wounds.
We live, not just with an “abstract” thing called sin, but with all the concrete fallout of that sin in terms of fractured and broken lives and torn and wounded consciences. No matter how nice and quiet and serene we appear on the outside, on the inside we are tattered and torn, frazzled and worn. We ache for recovery and renewal and healing and peace of heart and mind and soul.
And that’s what brings us to walk the Lenten pathway once again.
That’s what invites us to rehearse yet one more time the astonishing plan of God for our salvation. That’s what compels us to follow Jesus to Calvary—where he hung naked and despised before the mocking eyes of his enemies where he suffered and died for the sins of the world.
This was the ordeal Jesus dreaded—the cup of wrath he pleaded not to drink. “Yet not my will,” Jesus had prayed to his Father, “but yours be done.” And at the cross, God himself—for Jesus is God—endured our pain in order that we might have his healing. He made the complete payment for all our sins, once and for all. God’s will was done.
And all that Jesus earned by his cross and suffering, he now extends to you and me in his holy gospel and precious sacraments. He comes to meet us in his Holy Word and Sacrament—to lift our burdens, to carry our sorrows, to erase our guilt. He comes to bring us joy instead of sorrow, peace instead of anxiety, and the very life of Christ himself instead of the death in which we live.
From Triumph at the Cross: Lenten Devotions for Repentance and Renewal. All rights reserved.
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