Read Today’s Scripture: John 18:1 – 19:42
Today, we finally arrive at our destination. This is a day that flipped the world upside down. To put this day in perspective, every person who has ever lived has had their lives irrevocably affected by this climactic moment in history, whether they are aware of this or not.
Though we see history turning dramatically on this day, what really happened is eternity pierced place and matter, exploded time, and swept us home through that opening.
For reflection...
Let us refrain from our own words today and allow the words of scripture to fill out thoughts and hearts. Read through the above passage of scripture thoughtfully and prayerfully a few times. Allow the significance and momentousness to seep through the centuries into your awareness of all that happened. Feel the tension, hear the contrasting voices, notice the vividness and intensity and rawness inherent to the story. Allow the image of the cross to penetrate the harder places of your existence and begin to soften them. Allow compassion to arise for your Lord and Savior as you see Him enduring, sweating, bleeding.
Allow yourself and all the areas that are already dead and apart from Christ to die with no hope of being reborn, no matter how painful death on the cross with Jesus is to bear. Let what needs to be finished, be finished, as you hear the words, "It is finished."
Allow those places you've joined with Jesus in death on the cross to be swallowed by the nothingness of the sealed tomb.
Image by Giulio Procaccini, Crucifixion
