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During these high and holy days, in the Orthodox calendar, we experience intimately the Lord’s Passion.  The Lord knew human nature very well.  And this is for me the most unspeakable, most unfathomable mystery: He knew.  He knew that He would have to die; He knew the most ignoble way He would die; He knew that those closest to Him those who had sworn their lives to Him would abandon Him in His greatest hour of need; He knew the weaknesses and passions of His supposed friends would get the better of them. He knew how crooked, how vile, how petty, how stupid humanity was.  He knew, but He suffered anyway.

Divine love is hard for me to comprehend.  Why would someone innocent and kind agree to suffer for the hideous, for the murderers and malfactors of the world?  Who hasn’t experienced betrayal at the hands of a lover or friend? The human reaction would be to go and kill that person or else take justice for the wrongs he or she has wrought on you.   It seems counter-intuitive, almost stupid, that it is for the people who most do you harm that you would be willing to spill your blood, to give your precious life in an excruciatingly agonizing way.  It’s like the young victim of 12 offering to go to the electric chair for her rapist and murderer?

Why?

Sometimes I can’t understand it.

Except that I know it has something to do with love.  That it has something to do with faith. And hope.

First love.  God must love His creation so deeply that He is willing to die for it.  That underneath the murderer and the liar and the thief He sees the child of God.  He sees the limitless power in that human being. Second, faith. So deep is His understanding of His creatures that He is willing to die to bring us back. To remind us that we are so worthy, so valuable even in our lowest that God can die in our stead.

Forgiveness is easier when you love. And God has showed us that He can forgive even the most despicable of us.  We are worth the price of His most precious blood. We are worthy to be redeemed because despite what we think and feel about ourselves, despite what we think or feel about God, He has faith in us. He believes that we can change our ways, that we can hear His call, that we can come to know that we are children of God and worthy of our nobility.  Ultimately Jesus hanging on the Cross has more to do with us, humanity, than Him.

Lastly, hope.  Christ’s Crucufixion I think is an act of hope.  In witnessing the greatest sacrifice of all, that a man might lay down his life for his friends, we are given hope that we can change. That we are worthy to be called sons of God. That our life even if it be fraught with brutality, violence, betrayal, anxiety, death, that there is hope.  All these things must come to pass so that the mighty Ressurection might be all the more glorious.

So then my friends I am no theologian but I know this–that God so loved the world, the wayward sinful world, that He gave His only begotten son, to save it.  Love. That’s the reason the Lord hangs in front of you on a Cross today Good Friday.  Because He loves you enough that even in your most hideous, He is willing to take your place on the scales of universal justice.  He believes in You more than you believe in yourself, more than you believe in Him. And that is an unbearable mystery.

As Christians we must be moved by His example and become like Him. We too must know that the people closest to us will betray us someday, we must love them anyway.  We must understand that we will suffer death, mockery, injustice. The world will hate us.  But this is just how it must be. It is our destiny, if we are to walk in imitation of Him.  It is through the vale of tears that we will glimpse the Bourne of the promised land, the kingdom of heaven.
This I know.

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