Holy Thursday
Jesus fell a final time along the road to Calvary. Many in the crowd must have expected He would not get back up again. Perhaps some even remembered Christ's own words after enjoining His disciples to take up their own crosses: "Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion? Otherwise, after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work the onlookers should laugh at him and say, ‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish’" (Luke 14:28-30). But Jesus rose from this fall as well, in order to show us once again that God will not set a project before us without the resources to complete it.
It is humility that gives us the ability to follow God's plan for our lives. Humility reminds us that we must put forth the time and effort to prepare for the great trials that await us as Christians. Humility also teaches us to look to the God Who will supply the strength we lack. How often do we fool ourselves into believing that we have reached our limit when we still have more to give? How much could we do if we truly trusted God to help us make it over the last hurdle?
Lord, help us look to you for the strength to finish the race and keep the Faith (2 Timothy 4:7).
"They divide my garments among them; for my clothing they cast lots" (Psalms 22:19). The stripping of the victim's garments was intended to further humiliate him in the eyes of the crowd. All of Our Savior's cuts and bruises were revealed before their eyes as they continued to jeer and mock. For the friends of Jesus, these same wounds were precious--each one a reminder that He had held nothing back in His love for them.
Many of the earliest and most persistent heresies have had to do with the nature of Christ as both God and man. It is easy to emphasize one to the detriment of the other, so that God is so far beyond us as to be meaningless or so close to us as to ratify our every whim. In reality, we know by Faith that Jesus Christ was "true God and true man," and we cannot escape the consequences of believing each completely. If Jesus is God, then we must worship Him as a being far above us with the right to rule our lives completely. If Jesus is man, we must know that He loves us enough (far more than we can love ourselves) to debase Himself and become a creature so that we might be become His friends and siblings. What level of humiliation are we prepared to undergo as friends and siblings of our Lord and Savior? Do we take enough time in our prayer life to strip ourselves bare and see who we truly are?
Lord, help us to have the strength to face humiliations as a means of growing closer to You.
The crucifixion itself was the culmination of a vast number of pains inflicted upon the victim. A living body would be nailed to the cross, and a corpse would be removed. As Jesus had earlier embraced the cross, now He spreads wide His hands over the crowds of humanity, the wood holding up His arms like Aaron and Hur did for Moses so that the people of God might have victory over their enemies (Exodus 17:12).
Just as when He first took up the cross, the pierced Jesus took on this agony for our sake. Now He had been bound to the very instrument of His suffering and our salvation. Part of choosing the Christian way of life is binding ourselves to instruments of suffering. How often do we spend our time and imagination thinking about escaping our responsibilities? Do we allow God to remind us that our obligations to our families, friends, coworkers and others are not inconveniences but opportunities to "work out our salvation" (Phil 2:12)?
Lord, help us not to flee from our holy attachments in life, especially when they cause us to suffer.
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