He’s calling Elijah
Categories : Christianity, Quotes, books |
How is the King achieving this? How is he delivering his people from their bondage? How is he being God’s agent in the redemption and renewal of Israel and the world? What the crowds could not hear in the cry from the cross was the voice of desolation, of God-forsakenness, wrung from the very soul of one who was being wounded for their transgressions, not his own; bruised for their iniquities, not his own. Upon him was the punishment that brought them peace; with his stripes they were being healed. They, and we with them, were lost sheep without a shepherd: and the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. And Jesus, in that hour, experienced the darkness and the horror from which he, even he, had shrunk in Gethsemane, from which not only Satan, not only Judas, not only Peter, but also all his natural inclinations, all his love of his own people, had done their best to turn him aside. In identifying totally with the sin of the world, he became cut off from the presence of God. At the very moment when he was most fully embodying the love of God, he found himself totally separated from the love of God, the love which he had known in precious intimacy ever since childhood.
This, then, was the end of the road which he had begun to tread in his baptism by John, the Elijah who had indeed come: identifying with sinners, so that sinners could be saved. This was where it had all led. The road ended not only in the bitterness of apparent failure, not only in the physical torment of a cruel and gruesome death, but in the spiritual darkness of separation from God, bearing upon himself the sins of the world. That is how the world was redeemed: not by Elijah and the Messiah coming and ridding Israel of her political foes, calling down fire to burn up all opposition, but by Jesus, commissioned by John in the spirit and power of Elijah, ridding Israel and the world of her true enemies. Just as Elijah challenged the powers of darkness to that great contest, in which the god who answered by fire was to be God, so now Jesus takes on the rulers of the world: the might of Rome, the law of Israel, and behind both the usurping and destroying power of Satan. And this time the rules of the contest are: the god who answers by love, let him be God.
~ N T Wright - The Crown and the Fire pp44-45 (discussing Matt 27:45-50
)
