Reflections on Lent, #8

I have missed a day, I confess.

See, from his head, his hands, his feet, 
sorrow and love flow mingled down. 
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, 
or thorns compose so rich a crown. 

Were the whole realm of nature mine, 
that were an offering far too small; 
love so amazing, so divine, 
demands my soul, my life, my all.

Isaac Watts' classic poem about the cross, asks me to do what I don't want to do--

really, really survey, examine, look deeply, understand the geography of the 

suffering Christ on the cross.  "Sorrow and love" are what he asks us to see.  The 

blood in itself represents both the violent death at the hands of Roman 

authorities and complicit mankind, and the sacrificial require-

ments of the Old Testament.  Here, the blood is also symbolic of the love and 

sorrow, which is an interesting thought.  Love and sorrow come together at the

cross.  Love, that Christ was willing to do this for humankind, and sorrow, that

he had to and sorrow about all the evil and pain that sin has wrecked on us.

We live in such a sinful world that we don't even recognize the effects of sin, 

of our own self-addiction, only the really bad cases.

Last night I watched the rather hard to watch film, Flight, by Robert Zemeckis

and starring Denzel Washington. It puts sin in the viewer's face and also its

consequences.  For that I liked it, but wish I didn't have to go through so much

to see it.  At the same time the fact that it shows the sin so blatantly sort of 

outweighs the point about the consequences. 

"Or thorns compose so rich a crown."  I don't think I understand this part. 

Perhaps it is the juxtaposition of the humiliation of Christ with a full knowledge

of his being.  A king killed by his people for their own good.  The crown of thorns

is the best we can do, perhaps.  We are told these are not rose thorns, but several-

inch long spikes from some middle eastern plant.  Everything we think in Western

culture about the cross is much less than it was; our comfortable lives sanitize

everything.  His visage was marred to unrecognizability, Isaiah 53 tells us.

The last verse of Watts' hymn speaks for itself.  He uses the subjunctive mode 

because he's talking about an impossibility, a statement contrary to present, past, 

and future fact.  But he ends with the truth:  Christ and what he did demands my

life, my soul, my all.  This cuts to my heart because I fall so very short of this 

response.  My life is characterized by more holding back from Christ than letting to.