Wednesday: For the Sake of the Joy
The remarkable truth about Holy Week that we find so hard to grasp is the fact that everything and everyone is redeemable.
There is no tragedy so great, no action so unjust, no person so evil that he or she cannot be redeemed by the saving work of Jesus Christ.
We say we believe that, but most of the time we are carrying around grudges and shame and wounds that we, in our heart of hearts, don’t think Jesus can heal.
Because why would he want to? Why would he bother with redeeming our sins when he could just sweep in on a white horse and carry us off to heaven?
Well, Jesus doesn’t work that way, and we’re never going to understand his work on the Cross if we don’t understand what redemption is.
Sometimes people think that redemption is erasure of bad things.
It’s just gone, like it never happened.
But that is not redemption.
God is not doing a retroactive censorship of our lives, blacking out the parts that we’d rather not remember.
Redemption is a threefold process. It consists of forgiveness, illumination, and healing.
Erasure, elimination, forgetting and cutting out the deeds of sin and pain does not happen at all in redemption.
They’re still there. But they are fundamentally changed.
Let me explain. Continue reading