I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I atone for you for all that you have done, declares the Lord God.
I stumbled across it last week, looking for a passage to read at the wedding of a good friend. I had underlined it, presumably in my last pass through the Old Testament, yet it struck me as pointedly fresh, and cutting. Scripture is a double-edged sword, I have found.
I almost cried, reading this, which is odd for me. Rarely do I perceive the weight of what I read, but when I do I take notice. I wrote the verse out on a flash card and kept it in my back pocket that day, pulling it out occasionally. It continued to move me, largely because of the intensity of emotion it describes, and the regular lack of that same emotion within me.
We who have been raised in the church know the story of the death of Christ. We know the time-tables of the last supper, prayer in the garden, arrest, beatings, trials, beatings, crucifixion. And for a while there seemed an emphasis in church culture on the physical suffering of Christ. I remember going on retreats where clips of the suffering God were shown from several different movies. And I remember long talks by speakers stretching out the descriptions of the tortuous death that was endured by Him. And they were shocking, and moving- but largely out of compassion, and visceral disgust. I don't ever recall watching, or listening, and reacting with shame, or confounded silence.
We have so repeated the story that I fear many of us have forgotten its force. This should be to us a shameful moment, as Christ was shamed for our liberty. The physical pains were great, but the emotional suffering was likely greater. God, bearing shame, mocked and spit upon. But the spiritual pain was greater still. The Son of God becoming alienated from the Father as the sins of man are driven between Them as a keenly sharpened wedge, even as the nails were driven between the bones of Jesus' arms. I may be amiss here, but I believe the very fabric of the Trinity was torn in that moment, that separation was endured and received, so that the veil in the temple may be torn for our reconciliation with the Father.
We ought to hear the story and cringe, not in a humanistic discomfort, but in deep, personal shame. This is the fruit of our labor. This is the result of our whoring after other things, our ingratitude and self-centeredness and rebellion: the suffering, dying, Lord of all. Jesus, very God made humble man, received the wrathful payment for our actions; and so we ought to be confounded, and shamed. By the magnitude of what has been done, we ought to be silenced.
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