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Passion Week Reflections

Dr. Rick MarshallGo with me in your imagination back to Jerusalem this Passover Week when Jesus entered the city. Most of us know it began with jubilation and admiration for Him. It quickly turned ugly when the celebration became cruelty beyond our ability to fully appreciate. Three days at the end of the week forever changed our world. In this note let us think of the Friday and
Saturday.

Friday is called “Good Friday” on the Christian calendar. It is difficult to think of the day our Lord was crucified as “good.” We might call it “Black Friday.” Most of us who change the colors on the cross this season drape a black cloth on Friday. It is the day of the cross, the day of death, the day of darkness.

“Black Friday” has been applied to the dismal day in 1929 when the stock market crashed and men jumped to their death in despair. It was the bleakest day in our economic history. And “Black Friday” is also given to the day President John Kennedy was assassinated in 1964.

But no label can adequately describe the depravity and horror of the day God’s Son died. The sun refused to shine when the “light of the world” was put to death. The earth quaked, the graves were opened and the veil in the Temple in Jerusalem was torn from top to bottom. “Mankind was killing God.”

Paul wrote about how God can bring good out of bad in the book of Romans. God had already demonstrated it. He turned the greatest tragedy in history into His greatest blessing! Christ was not victim but victor. He became sin for us completing and fully paying the penalty for sin, ultimate separation from God.

I call your attention to the other day which is almost overlooked in the great Passion drama of history. It is the “Silent Saturday.” “Both sacred and secular history are strangely quiet about this particular Sabbath.” The Gospel writers skipped over it and Josephus, the great church historian, said nothing about it. Neither have secular historians described anything about that day.

Therefore, it is up to our imagination to suppose what it was like the day when the world thought God was dead. What went on that day? Was it life as usual for those who knew what had happened, both believers and the others? I wonder what happened that day during what must have been numbness and fear, when it seemed, hope had fled.

The Passover day was supposed to be a quiet day of reflection for the Jewish families remembering and rejoicing in how God had delivered the children of Israel from bondage in Egypt more than a thousand years earlier. But now what were they to think?

“The priests in the Temple must have been uneasy as they examined the torn veil which bared to their startled eyes the sacred articles of the Most Holy Place.” I wonder did they hurriedly stitch the torn pieces together again? They had asked Pilate to station soldiers at the tomb. Did they go check to see if anything had happened there to make sure this “disturber-of-the-peace” was silenced forever?

What about the Roman soldiers who crucified Him? Perhaps they got drunk in an effort to blot out memories of what they had done. What about the Centurion who recognized Jesus for who He was as the Son of God? He must have experienced grief as he realized that with his own hands he had crucified the Son of God.

What happened to the disciples that day? Most left the scene of the crucifixion to save their lives with the exception of John. Their Master was dead and so was their cause. This must have been a day of deep questioning of themselves and God. They were tossed by storms of despair. They gathered in the Upper Room at some point and locked the door for their own protection. That’s where the Master found them on the first day of the week.

“If God’s not alive nothing else really matters.” Two of them must have gone for a walk down what we have come to know as the Emmaus Road the next day. They expressed their despair and anguish to a stranger. “We had hoped,” they said, “but His death was the end of our hope.”

The priests must have otherwise gone about their usual ritual and ceremonial duties. But the symbols had become meaningless. They made sacrifices but the “Great Sacrifice” to which their rituals pointed had escaped them. They put their Passover lambs on the altar while the true Lamb of God lay in a borrowed tomb just a few yards away.

Martin Luther, the great reformer, went through a dark and melancholy time in his spiritual journey. One day his wife entered his study all draped in black. Startled, Luther asked, “Woman, who died?” She replied, “God is dead.” He quickly scolded her asking, “Why would you say such a thing?” “Well,” she said, “the way you have been acting lately, all hope is gone and God might as well be dead.”

This season reminds all of us that we need a resurrection of belief and hope, a faith that walks with a risen Savior, just as much as those who experienced that Black Friday and Silent Saturday.

Evening came on that Saturday long ago. The horns sounded from the Temple towers to mark the end of the Sabbath. The shops opened and life picked up again. Mary Magdalene and the other women brought spices to the tomb the next morning. Through that evening they made preparation.
The Master didn’t need their spices, but they needed to bring them. They needed the work to make the hours bearable. All of us sometimes need the healing of work which can calm and comfort our hearts. Ultimately work will not suffice. It takes more.

The work of faith, when practiced regularly, not just in one night of getting ready for one special service of the year, serves to protect, inform and guide our hearts through the troubling times of this world with a view into that which is to come.

What would you have done that Saturday? What do you do when the worst things happen in life? Do you know how to turn to God and find Him as a friend? Is faith a practical reality for you?

My prayer is that this week will be a time of reflection, that Easter Sunday will be true joyous celebration of our risen Lord, that we will discover a fresh journey with our living Lord every day and that the first day of every week will become a reason to gather with God’s people to remember and rejoice in what He has done for us.

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FOCUSED

One of the casualties of aging to which I find myself a victim is the dimming of the eyes.  Ecclesiastes 12 counsels the young person to remember God, their Creator, in their youth before the aging process takes over and various faculties, as listed in verses 1-7, are diminished.

Clear eyesight when we are young may be something we take for granted. However, as we age the realization that our vision is not as sharp as it once was takes hold. “Readers” become standard fare for all intricate tasks. Our once keen laser sharp focus is now blurry and in need of help to restore its youthfulness. That restoration is found through glasses or some sort of rejuvenating surgery. Especially in the early stages of this degenerative eye problem we may be able to fake it and get by, but eventually we must relent and do something to correct the problem.

There is a parallel between physical and spiritual vision. “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” was written in the early 20th century. The hymn writer, Helen Lemmel, was strongly influenced by the artist and later little-known missionary, Lilias Trotter. Miss Trotter started off as an aspiring artist but early on felt a call from God to reach the lost. She began her ministry by rescuing prostitutes from the streets of London. Later she went to Africa, without missionary funding, and served for over forty years. While there she penned a poem that would greatly influence the writing of the hymn “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.”  The poem was entitled “Focused: A Story and Song.” 

The poem centers around focusing one’s attentions fully and completely upon God. She writes that Satan knows that if a person uses all their powers of concentration on being led by God’s Spirit, they will have a great intensity and impact upon those to whom they are called to minister. Lilias Trotter, writing in a more formal use of the English language than we are accustomed, shares some timeless insights which could very easily have been written today but with a different accent. She writes: “Never has it been so easy to live in half a dozen good harmless worlds at once—art, music, social science, games, motoring, the following of some profession, and so on. And between them we run the risk of drifting about, the ‘good’ hiding the ‘best’ even more effectually than it could be hidden downright frivolity with its smothered heartache at its own emptiness.”

The “good” hiding the “best” leads us to emptiness.  Could this be true of us today especially as American Christians? Have we sought the “good” while missing the “best”? The chorus of the hymn, which we will be singing in worship this Sunday, says it best.

                Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face,                                                                                                                                        And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.

Keith Pate

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