Fully BelovedSample

When Christians argue that Christ was fully divine and fully human, what do we make of Christ’s lonely journey through rejection, mockery, and unjust sentencing? Where was God in that? Do we see an unfortunate but random death, or a toxic heavenly Father, as some portray?

These harsher turns in the story of the Son of God’s suffering and death ring true to life’s hardness and wreckage. I think of the battering ram of our own relational disasters and disappointments. Here instead, we see a God of costly kinship and self-sacrificial kindness, a Father whose love weathers the worst that human life can inflict, a Son who undergoes rejection at the hands of humanity, and even then communed with, prayed to his Father. If death did not sever the communal life of the Trinity, then what we see in this picture of God possesses great power to assure. The Holy Spirit had not skipped out of town. Jesus continues to turn to the Father, trustingly. The Father did not reject the Son.

At the same time, the drama shines out. God does not clutch the Son, the Son does not cling to his “Godness, the Holy Spirit still moves as from all eternity.” In Philippians 2, we glimpse a picture of Jesus,

Who, being in very nature God,

did not consider equality with God

something to be used to his own advantage;

rather, he made himself nothing

by taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself

by becoming obedient to death—

even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:6–8) . . .

What might it mean if Jesus joined with us in all the sorrows of human brokenness—even faced searing rejection by his own people, even for a moment wondered if he’d been abandoned by all his friends, even God? What if he faced what we will never experience but once—death—and came out on the other side?

Such questions matter because of how much help we need. We long for reclamation from the wreckage of human life. We need a rescue operation.

Prayer

Lord, I can’t imagine what Jesus experienced on the cross, but I am so grateful that his sacrifice means that I get to experience your love for all eternity. Thank you. Amen.