15 March 2016 - love is deeper

When you lift up the Son of Man,
then you will realize that I AM,
and that I do nothing on my own,
but I say only what the Father taught me.

LORD, help us to see you lifted up. Give us grace to behold your cross. We might think ourselves more likely to realize your identity when you are teaching and healing. And indeed, because you do these things many come to believe. But we are afflicted with the saraph serpents of sin. They bite at us and sometimes kill the life of the Spirit within us. Teaching and miracles are not enough for a people struggling with sin although they are a beginning. We need a deeper cure. 

Make a saraph and mount it on a pole,
and whoever looks at it after being bitten will live.

We need something that is not merely external. We need something transformative. The cure you give brings us to terms with the evil we unleash. Looking to the cross we see the full ramifications of our sinful selfish desires. We see them borne by the one least deserving of them. We see them freely embraced by love. And seeing this we live.

We see innocent love choosing to suffer for we who are guilty and we realize that you truly are the great I AM. At first such love can't help but seem futile. The consequences of sin seem stronger than such apparent sentimentalism. Yet looking to the cross we recognize, even before we see the victory of the resurrection, that love is the deeper truth. Sin and death are not.

When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!” (see Matthew 27:54).

Jesus, we look to you on the cross and we intuit the truth of what you say.

The one who sent me is with me. 
He has not left me alone,
because I always do what is pleasing to him.

The only way the love of the cross can even exist is if this is true and the Father is always with you Jesus. Even when you cry out to the Father...

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (see Matthew 27:46)

...you remain obedient to him and do only the mission for which he sends you to us. Your love is too great to abandon that mission. You and the Father love us too much to leave us in the desert of sin at the mercy of serpents. 

The LORD looked down from his holy height,
from heaven he beheld the earth,
To hear the groaning of the prisoners,
to release those doomed to die.

Give us grace to behold your cross today.