Is It Nothing To You? (Lamentations 1:12)

 


Monday, April 14, 2025


Psalm 21

Lamentations 1:1-12

John 14


Monday in Holy Week


Is It Nothing To You? (Lamentations 1:12)


Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
    Look and see
if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,
    which was brought upon me,
which the Lord inflicted
    on the day of his fierce anger.


What do we mean when we say that “Jesus died for our sins”? It is a declaration that requires no little amount of faith; the type of faith that can know something truly, but can never perceive it fully. Certainly when Christ hung on the cross he was suffering the punishment for sin that we all deserve. Yet at the same time, two wrongs do not make a right. Punishing an innocent man for the sins of another is noble, but it does not make a watertight case.


When Jesus spoke to his disciples immediately before his arrest (as we read in John’s gospel today) he speaks about persons being “in” another: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (Jn 14:10, 11); “[The Holy Spirit] will be in you” (v. 17); “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (v. 20). Jesus is describing our relationship with God as something far deeper than just two people alongside one another.


When Jesus died on the cross, it was not only him dying. It was also all those who are in him who died. We nailed him to the cross with our sins; and we also died in him. At the same time, it was not us who were physically nailed to the cross, but Christ alone. Christ died for our sins on the cross; we died in him at our baptism.


Now that Christ has been raised from the dead, all those who died in him have also been raised in him. It is no longer we who live, but Christ living in us. And he is in the Father, and the Father is in him. We can pray a Psalm like today’s and recognise it is not we praying the words, but Christ praying them in us: the Father met the Son with rich blessings, setting a crown of fine gold upon his head. Christ is made glad with the joy of the presence of his Father, and that joy is in us just as we are in Christ, and he in us.


More than joy, even: whoever is in Christ and loves him is loved by the Father, and Christ loves them, and Christ makes himself manifest to them. The love of the Triune God, only known to those three Persons who are in the Trinity, is now known to those who are in Christ, as they are now in God.


God of our salvation, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: give us quiet hearts in order to worthily contemplate the manifestation of your love for us in the cross of Christ.

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