Why is the month of April so crazily full?

Why is the month of April so crazily full?  Between rainstorms and raspberries, manuscripts and music, it has been an amazing and crazy month!

I entered a concert venue this month which values not only music, but art. The particular exhibit on display around their lobby demonstrated Christ’s love in suffering. I believe many of the artists were from Western NC.

One painting in particular caught my attention. The consensus amongst my friends was that if we’d had the money, we would have bought it. 

But alas, I did not have the money. ($4500 is a lot.) So I’m sharing the link with you instead. 

The Good Shepherd. The suffering Savior. Abstract but wild enough to make you feel. 

The Lord met me so deeply during this Easter season, and I’m still thinking about it. I was blessed to attend Andrew Peterson’s Resurrection Letters concert, during which the Lord reminded me of so many things. 

When we think of Christ’s crucifiction, we admit that it was painful. That he suffered. But the unfortunate reality is that we sugarcoat it. While Christians from the first few centuries after Christ’s ascension understood what this kind of death entails, we of the twenty-first century are quite well removed from the realities of Christ’s death. 

I stumbled upon a post sometime during Lent that the Lord has kept at the forefront of my mind for weeks. The sufferings of our Savior have weighed on my heart. 

Firstly, the physical abuse that Jesus endured was greater than just about any form of capital punishment we can imagine. The beating he received tore open his body, exposing his ribs, intestines, and spinal cord. Isaiah 52 testifies that Jesus was so disfigured, one could not even tell whether he was human, and I’m inclined to take that literally. 

After receiving the maximum number of lashes in his beating, Jesus, whose blood was totally drained out of him, was forced to carry a 200-300 pound cross uphill. He was then nailed to that cross, the nails piercing through every nerve ending in his hands and feet, and suffocated to death as he had to lift himself up, scratching his exposed back against the wood of the cross and pulling at his already excruciating hands and feet with every breath. But that was only his physical pain. 

Jesus never once sinned. He did not know what it was like to feel guilt or to do something wrong. He had never felt shame for a wrong action. But on the cross, Jesus endured the guilt and shame of the sins of the world, in addition to the righteous, consuming wrath of a God who hates sin. 

Because of the sin he bore on his shoulders, Jesus endured the worst punishment–separation from God. Never before that moment when he cried out, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 227:46), had Christ known what it was like to be apart from the Father. For the eternity before the creation of the world, and for the entirety of human history, Jesus enjoyed the delight of communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit. It was the Father’s presence that sustained him during his life on earth, but this lifeline was removed from him as he hung there on the cross with the sin of humanity burdening his bleeding body.

Jesus was beaten, blamed, and abandoned. 

So that we wouldn’t have to be.

The sufferings of Christ were ultimately transformed into joy as he rose from the dead Easter morning, soon to ascend on high, soon to receive the worship of every tribe and tongue and people and nation. He did it, as Hebrews 12 tells us, for the joy set before him.

But he also did it for us. The sufferings of Christ are at once the most horrible and most beautiful action of history. No man has suffered so much. No man has given so much. No man has loved so much. Jesus chose this road according to his Father’s will because he knew it would bring us back to him. He wants to be known. And this was necessary that he might bring us back into right relationship with God. This was necessary to rescue us from the very same fate. 

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” 2 Corinthians 5:21