Jesus is Everything (Good Friday/Easter Thoughts)

   Jesus Christ is both the sinner's repentance and the Father's forgiveness, both the Sacrifice for sin and the Priest who offers it, in the Temple of His own body -- the place where YHWH has made His Name to dwell -- in which the curtain separating mankind from God has truly been torn in two. For He Himself is both fully God and fully Man, the two natures united without confusion, distinct without separation, both in all their perfect fullness joined together in the one Person of Christ -- and thus has He become the one Mediator between God and Man, for Jesus Himself is both.

   He is both call and response on both sides: As God He commands that the Law be fulfilled; as Man He fulfills it on behalf of mankind. He is the eternal Word of the Father, which must be obeyed, and He is the perfect Man who perfectly obeys. In the Jordan River He is baptized by John for repentance -- not that He needs to repent, but as a Man He repents on behalf of mankind, so that our baptism and repentance (fitful and imperfect as it is) may count as participation in His perfect repentance and so be accepted in the same manner in which His is accepted: with the Father's words, "This is my Beloved Son; with Him I am well pleased." And then Jesus (having Himself repented as a man on behalf of mankind) as God bestows forgiveness on those who come to Him: To the paralytic let down through the roof, to the prostitute who washes His feet with her tears and dries them with her hair, to the thief on the cross who acknowledges Him before death.

   And most clearly do we see and hear this on the cross, where, as Man and on behalf of mankind, He offers the cry at the heart of every man, woman, and child from Adam to Himself -- the cry of humanity exiled from Paradise, bound under sin, and cursed with death (the ultimate exile from the goodness of God in Creation): "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" -- and in that very moment answers it with Himself: Immanuel, "God With Us," God Who never has forsaken us and has even now come to redeem us, doing for us what we could not: in His incarnation restoring His Spirit to our flesh, uniting His own nature with ours so that we might share His and have true communion with Him; in His death going to the furthest reaches of our exile to find us, so that there is no part of our experience and no distance we can run to in which we ourselves can now say, "Why have You forsaken Me?" for He Himself has already been there; in His resurrection bringing us back from that exile in which He found us, raising us up to new life and promising our own resurrection, as  surely as the fullness of the harvest inevitably follows the firstfruits; in His ascension raising us up with and in Himself to the right hand of the Father, so that by being united to Him in faith and obedience by the indwelling presence of His Holy Spirit, we ourselves are drawn into the perfect fellowship of the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- which fellowship is Life, and Peace, and Joy everlasting, immortal, invincible.

The sinner's repentance
The Father's forgiveness
Both Sacrifice for sin
And Priest Who offers it
In His body, where the LORD's name dwells:
"God With Us" -- Immanuel
Whose cry for us:
"Why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
He answers thus:
"I AM here, you to redeem."

   To our eternal God, Who has indeed done for us all our works, who has never forsaken us (and whose Presence, indeed, we cannot escape), Who saves and delivers and rescues, who works signs and wonders in Heaven and on Earth, who alone is able to prevent us from stumbling and present us before His glory faultless and with great joy, be all glory, and honor, and power, and praise, now and forevermore! Amen.