The life laid down
The prince of power with meekness
Submits in mortal weakness. Paul Gerhardt
Read John 10:17—25
I cannot know all the deep things of the heart of Jesus, but I can know some things. I know that he was resolute that he must go to Jerusalem;[1] that there he must share the fate and fatality of the prophets because Jerusalem killed prophets;[2] indeed, that the judgement for the death of all the prophets was to fall upon that very generation,[3] a thought too deep for me, perhaps, to grasp. Yet this one in whose presence I am this night, Jesus, my Lord, willingly submitted himself to this judgement on behalf of the people. He entered Jerusalem deliberately and scripted a demonstration full of significance.[4] The persecution and suffering he drew on his own head fills the story of his passion. The hatred without cause, justice abused, the cruelty, the mockery, the utter renunciation, the death. All this he could call, in almost homely words, ‘laying down my life to take it up again.’ In another image it is a grain of wheat dying to bear much fruit,[5] as beautiful and as natural as that. It is not demonic. It is the depth of the love of the Father for a Son who travelled to the far country and entered a lost and cruel world.
Father, dear Father, you love and you loved the Son. You loved him because he lay down his life. Here you entered in to all that adds up to death itself, to all that accumulates as the rejection of God. It is a story I can follow in my Bible. It never gets easier to read. What you endured in the Son never becomes more endurable. I cannot take the human sin out of it. It is written all over the laying down of his life. Yet he did it to take the human sin out of me. Father, dear Father.
[1] Luke 9:51,53; 18:31; 19:11
[2] Luke 13:33—34
[3] Luke 11:49-51
[4] Luke 19:28-40
[5] John 12:23-24