He Voluntarily Suffered: Be Grateful
Luke 22:14-22, 39-46, 63-65
Sometimes it’s tough to concentrate during the Lord’s Supper. Our minds tend to multi-task or even to zone-out when we sit in silence, during our safe, predictable observances of this ordinance. At the Lord’s Supper (the real, actual one), Jesus had no trouble remaining focused. Being the eternal God incarnate, He had a perfect understanding of what was taking place and what was being foreshadowed and symbolized in the taking of the elements.
Jesus was the only one in the room who understood what was coming and how the bread and the wine pointed directly ahead to His own gruesome death on a Roman cross. He knew what He faced over the ensuing 24 hours. He told them He was going to suffer. That was an understatement. In a sense, he was conducting His own memorial service. How unnerving, especially knowing, as He did, the exact cause of death in advance.
God the Son knew, even before the original Passover was instituted, that the slaughter of lambs and smearing of blood was all about Him. He knew that the sacrificial and offering system dictated to Moses really pointed ahead to His offering of Himself as the sacrifice for us.
As Jesus inched closer to receiving the assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature and the murder that was coming, the waiting must have been hideous. The emotional and mental anguish Jesus experienced as a result of having full foreknowledge of the brutal maiming, mutilation and humiliation He would face that night and the next day caused hematidrosis (the literal mixture of blood in His perspiration). That’s stress, to put it mildly.
Jesus, of course, knew He would rise from the dead, yet He was still agonizing. He knew how the story would end, but He still had to go through the process. He would be mocked and blasphemed. He would be beaten, whipped, scourged, humiliated, nailed-through with spikes, and publicly displayed in profound physical and emotional shock and distress.
The closest Jesus came to wavering seems to have come during His prayer in Gethsemane when He told the Father that He would, indeed, go through with it, but He would prefer a different path. It would seem, though, that He held His own feet to the proverbial fire, forcing Himself to proceed down the dreaded path. So, in fact, He did not waver.
Jesus volunteered for this mission and refused to walk away from what He knew was God’s redemptive purposes for His death. Instead, it was His obedience to His Heavenly Father and his love for you and me that led Him to Calvary. There should be no limits to our gratitude.
– The ETB writer for the spring quarter is a South Carolinian who formerly served Southern Baptists in a closed country. We are honoring his request not to publish identifying information.