Worship - April 2021
Right around the time when you receive this newsletter, we will either be heading into or just coming out of Easter weekend. Perhaps you have even found yourself reading this article on Good Friday, the one day of the year when we celebrate death. We will of course be celebrating a lot more than just the death of Jesus on this weekend, we will celebrate his resurrection, his victory over sin! But first, we celebrate his death.
When was the last time you sat down to contemplate and meditate on the death of Jesus? It is very good for us to meditate on his death. Maybe your mind is jumping to the film that came out several years ago, The Passion of the Christ. But I’m not really talking about the physical torture he underwent, or the gruesome way in which he was murdered. As heinous as the means of his death was, that is not what makes Jesus’s death unique or important. In fact, thousands of Jews were crucified during the first century, and by comparison, most of them probably suffered for a lot longer before they finally ran out of the strength required to lift themselves up and take a breath.
I think it’s fair to say that the most important thing about Jesus’s death is not what was happening in time and space on that hill outside of Jerusalem, but what was happening between God the Son and God the Father. There is a short drama, if you could call it that, that was composed many years ago, which I think helps us understand the transaction that finally culminated in the Son of God dying on a hill just outside of Jerusalem two thousand years ago. Though not lengthy, it is powerful. In fact, I remember where I was the first time I heard it several years ago, and I’ve been returning to it ever since. It was written by John Flavel, a 17th century pastor, and this is his thought-provoking version of how the conversation between the Father and the Son could have gone. This short story, known as “The Father’s Bargain with the Son” reads as follows:
“Here you may suppose the Father to say, when driving his bargain with Christ for you:
Father: ‘My son, here is a company of poor miserable souls, that have utterly undone themselves, and now lie open to my justice! Justice demands satisfaction for them, or will satisfy itself in the eternal ruin of them: What shall be done for these souls?’
Son: ‘O my Father, such is my love to, and pity for them, that rather than they shall perish eternally, I will be responsible for them as their Surety; bring in all thy bills, that I may see what they owe thee; Lord, bring them all in, that there may be no after-reckonings with them; at my hand shalt thou require it. I will rather choose to suffer thy wrath than they should suffer it: upon me, my Father, upon me be all their debt.’
Father: ‘But, my Son, if thou undertake for them, thou must reckon to pay the last mite, expect no abatements; if I spare them, I will not spare thee.’
Son: ‘Content, Father, let it be so; charge it all upon me, I am able to discharge it: and though it prove a kind of undoing to me, though it impoverish all my riches, empty all my treasures… yet I am content to undertake it.’”
