Who God really is.

The week that showcased God’s proclivity for self-disclosure and self-sacrificial love.

Photo by Samuel Lopes on Unsplash

An added benefit of Holy Week is reaping an incredible harvest of encouragement from the assortment of articles and essays reflecting on the events leading up to that first Easter weekend. Even though the biblical texts that are often mined for church homilies and worship services at this time of year are among the most familiar, it is refreshing to read so many different thoughtful considerations that inform as well as inspire. Dave Zahl’s “The Bullet Inside of Whiplash Week” was especially evocative of the emotional pendulum of the events of that remarkable week two thousand years ago when, on a hill just outside of Jerusalem, the world was made to see the clearest picture of who God is. Consequently, this is the premise of Ian Olson’s piece for Mockingbird, entitled, “When We Learned Who God Really Is,” in which he considers the circumstances of that inaugural Holy Week and how rather than serving as seven days of hurdles and complications that week demonstrated God’s proclivity for self-disclosure and self-sacrificial love. Ian writes:

God holds nothing of himself back in the accomplishment of redemption for sinful creatures. There is nothing stingy or resentful in his self-giving. There is no disappointment on his part to find that the humiliation and death of the Son was for — well, us . . . There is nothing hidden behind his back, nothing, therefore, that could negate or overturn his surrender to and subsequent victory over Death.

The stark reversal of Holy Week, from the laudatory celebration of Palm Sunday to Good Friday’s repeated shouts of “crucify him!” shows what is in the human race: the contradiction, the hypocrisy, the irrationality, the myopic death drive. But it also shows what is in the man Jesus Christ, who accepts the adulation of the crowds as he enters the city of David knowing it will swiftly dissolve and calcify into condemnation. Good Friday isn’t a tackle Jesus found himself blindsided by, but neither is it an obligation he was begrudgingly bound by scruple to honor after being fooled by his reception at the beginning of the week. Creation and its preservation has always been in service to this: the definitive substantiation of God’s love.

What transpires during Holy Week is the occurrence in history of who and what God is. For while the death of the Son of God could be nothing more than the final certification of how irredeemable we are, it instead renders the love of God not simply a concept or a quality but an accomplishment. From before the beginning he comprehended the disappointments of the race for whom he would die and unreservedly elected himself not to be God without them.

The events of Good Friday, then, are not a last, desperate option taken to stop a runaway train or to contain a wreck. It was what God endeavored to do from before the very beginning. Before God ever said, “Let there be light,” his purpose was for everything to come into place so that he could walk these streets, be scourged with these whips, and carry this cross to die on this hill.

On that hill far away, creation witnessed its Creator give himself over to death in order to reconcile every creature to himself. Far from being a sudden shock to God’s intent to redeem the world, Holy Week is the divine culmination of the Son’s purpose to make the Father known to us (John 1:18). Through the cross and the empty tomb, we are given a glimpse of what fills the heart of God — namely, grace upon grace for the lost and the undone. Rather than deterring God’s divine program, these events crescendoed his resolve to save sinners and redeem the world for his glory.

Grace and peace to you, my friends.