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If you've ever been the victim of an action that's blatantly unfair, consider Jesus. Acquitted by the highest court of the land ("I find no basis for a charge against him," John 19:4, 6), He is led away and roughly nailed to a cross to die anyway! Even in this crisis, the habit of His life continues: He prays. "Father, forgive them . . ." Who is "them"? Not just the Roman soldiers carrying out the act. Not just the Jewish mob shouting, "Let His blood be on us and on our children!" Father, forgive all people from Adam on: "all have sinned." All are responsible for His death. Forgive me, Anne Ortlund. Forgive you, reader. ". . . For they do not know what they are doing." You didn't know; I didn't know -- we weren't even born yet! Remember the Old Testament Israelites who qualified to live in one of the Cities of Refuge because they'd accidentally killed somebody? We're like that. We crucified Jesus "accidentally and without malice aforethought" (Joshua 20:5). Nevertheless, we did it: We killed Him. We sinned -- and to pay for us, He had to die. Wrote Johann Heerman in about 1630 -- and he was right -- Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon Thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone Thee! 'Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied Thee: I crucified Thee. And it was so terrible, when it happened all nature went bonkers. From high noon to mid afternoon, a thick blanket of darkness covered everything. An earthquake rattled the land so violently that rocks split. Tombs broke open, and people long dead got up and walked out of their graves and into the city! The walls of the temple were left undamaged -- and yet inside, the great thirty-by-sixty-foot curtain separating the Holy Place (where humans could go) from the Most Holy Place (where dwelt the presence of God) was split right down the middle -- interestingly, from the top to the bottom. "Surely this man was the Son of God! said one soldier (Mark 15:9). There was no other explanation. And yet -- The scandal of the incarnation . . . [is] the shame of a God Who has so wallowed in the muck and misery of the world that He has become indistinguishable from it.1 When we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not (Isaiah 53:2-3). By Thy sweat bloody and clotted! Thy soul in agony, Thy head crowned with thorns, bruised with staves, Thine eyes a fountain of tears, Thine ears full of insults, Thy mouth moistened with vinegar and gall, Thy face stained with spitting, Thy neck bowed down with the burden of the Cross, Thy back ploughed with the wheals and wounds of the scourge, Thy pierced hands and feet, Thy strong cry, Eli, Eli, Thy heart pierced with the spear, The water and blood thence flowing, Thy body broken, Thy blood poured out -- Lord forgive the iniquity of Thy servant And cover all his sin.2 The Lancelot Andrewes quotation above was to end this chapter. But when I'd written these words I got down on my face on the floor. I groaned, "O God, O God! Have I written this chapter hoping I've written 'powerfully' to touch people about Your crucifixion -- so they'd buy the book and I'd make money? Am I standing near the cross hawking my wares to take advantage of the Great Event? "Then I'm another Demetrius!" (You remember him, the silversmith. He lived under the shadow of the great goddess idol Artemis, and he didn't want Christ preached because he made a good income selling little silver shrines to the tourists who came to worship her.) Oh, a thousand, thousand curses on all Demetriuses! I, too, bow myself at Jesus' cross, in humility and shame. I repent of all my personal sin that put Him there. You do the same. O Lord, Lord! Forgive us our dry eyes. _____________ 1. Fredrick Buecker, The faces of Jesus, p. 172. 2. Lancelot Andrewes. Quoted by Oswald Sanders, Christ Incomparable, p. 141.

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