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Day One
Day One // February 17 // His Body
“May nothing entice me till I happily make my way to Jesus Christ! Fire, cross, struggles with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs – let them come to me, provided only I make my way to Jesus Christ.” – Ignatius of Antioch –
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He was – and still is – the perfect Son of God. Without blot or blemish, Jesus came to live amongst us – a life that thundered with all the power of heaven. He came to heal and to love and to save. Yes, to save the world… but more than that. He came to save us – you and me… we, sinners. In His body, the Lord became for us what we couldn’t be for ourselves: righteousness and holiness and hope. The perfect Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!
And we say that He was wholly divine – and rightly so. But in the same breath we must confess that Jesus was wholly human, too. It’s the only way that atonement works. His was mortal flesh. His were salty tears. He knew the pains of loss and grief and betrayal. From
12 PERFECTLY WOUNDED
the inside, He knew (and still knows) the full course of human experience. And praise God for that!
For, in His body, imbued with full divinity and full humanity, Jesus wept. Jesus hungered. He worked and sweat and bled. He was tempted in every way as we are, but He was found without sin (Hebrews 4:15). And in enduring the torments and suffering of this world, He redeemed them. In His weeping, Jesus redeemed all the tears we’ve ever wept. In His woundedness, Jesus redeemed all the wounds we’ve ever felt – all the broken places, all the painful places, all the shameful places we don’t want to admit. In His body, He gives worth – sacred worth – to all those dark and guilty moments we’ve long feared worthless.
And now, from personal experience, He stands able to make intercession at the throne of the Father – hearing our prayers with knowing ears, not as some distant deity incapable of empathizing with our plight… but as One who knows and who feels from the inside what it is to be human.
This is the journey of Lent: to figure out what it means to be fully human. To examine ourselves through the righteous lens of Christ. To reflect upon who we are, upon who we aren’t, and upon who we could and should become.
