“He isn’t just feeling the anger and spite and unbearable self-disgust of this one crowd on this one Friday morning in Palestine; he’s turning his bruised face toward the whole human crowd, past and present and to come, and accepting everything we have to throw at him, everything we fear we deserve ourselves. The doors of his heart are wedged open wide, and in rushes the whole pestilential flood, the vile and roiling tide of cruelties and failures and secrets.
Let me take that from you, he is saying…I am the light behind the darkness. I am the shining your shame cannot extinguish. I am the ghost of love in the torture chamber. I am change and hope. I am the refining fire. I am the door where you thought there was only a wall. I am what comes after deserving. I am the earth that drinks up the bloodstain. I am gift without cost.”
-Francis Spufford, Unapologetic.
Anyone ever feel if they started to really confess their sins they'd never stop? And at the same time that because we know the end of the story which starts on Good Friday it's too easy to minimise our darkness and brush aside the horror of His sacrifice for us?
I grew up in very harsh and judgemental denomination - full of reminders of my overwhelming sinfulness, which for an insecure and doubting teenager translated to my overwhelming worthlessness.
That's only part of the story, I'm learning.
I am overwhelmingly sinful, but I am overwhelmingly loved and full of worth to our Jesus.
May you be blessed this Good Friday with the reminder that no matter how messed up you feel, or how dry and dull and dead your soul seems to be, YOU ARE LOVED. And yes, I did mean to shout.
He surely is the light behind the darkness, the shining our shame cannot extinguish.
Hallelujah, what a Saviour indeed.
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