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| THE DAY OF EXECUTION |
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| but also a Suffering Servant (see Isaiah 53). To die was, after all, the central reason Jesus came to earth; he had insisted on that from the beginning. The Most Important Week Jesus last week so impressed the disciples that the four chroniclers of his life, including Mark, devoted one-third of their space to that final week in Jerusalem. By the time they wrote it down, of course, they could see his death in a new light: as a mournful prelude to the greatest miracle of all, his resurrection. Even so, nothing could erase the impact of those fear-filled, final days. When the eerie darkness had lifted and Jesus had breathed his last, the disciples had learned something profound about God and about love. Dorothy Sayers put it this way: "Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restriction of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile" (from Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World). At no other point in history did the fireworks appear so powerless as the day Jesus died. They had not yet been lit. Life Questions: Put yourself in the disciples' place. How would you have responded to news of Jesus' death? Would you have believed in him still? |