Reflection on a Hymn

Did e'er such love and sorrow meet?

'Love hurts,' so the saying goes.

Why?

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about community, how the notion of it is attractive to all people and yet the reality of it often frightens people away from it.

To love is to know and to be known. Intimacy and vulnerability are two sides of the same coin.

To be vulnerable is to expose your weaknesses to another; and to do so in a fallen world is to court betrayal and loss.

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This sheds greater light on just what it was that Jesus sacrifices for us, and what it is that He accomplishes on our behalf.

He lived in a community of divine love where this vulnerability and intimacy carried with it no taint, no threat of violence or fear of deception. There exists within the Godhead a complete selflessness without the need for protection, submission and surrender without mistrust, service and sacrificial love without suffering. All is love, and all is joy!

He left this behind to come to a world that knows only the faintest glimpses of love, our best loves are merely glimpses of shadows of the real thing. We love, even when we love truly, with one hand on our wallets. We love, if we love at all, with a contingency plan in the back of our minds. And so Jesus came, vulnerable and offering this same intimacy with us, that He shared with His Father. A baby in a blanket, laid in a feeding trough in a poor town, born to a single mother from a small people who were oppressed by one of the largest and most powerful empires in human history. Vulnerable. A man, naked, even his skin has been flayed from his body, put on display before the crowds of the capital city, pinned there, unable to escape, or to move. Barely able to breathe as he is nailed to wood, exposed. Vulnerable is not a strong enough word.

(Take a moment here and close your eyes, imagine yourself being stripped naked and tied up spread eagle in front of City Hall; imagine yourself being captured by a serial killer and being tied down as he prepares to go to work on you. Or even, less gruesome, imagine that you are to stand before a large crowd and proclaim your love for someone who doesn't know how you feel about them and you are unsure of their response. That feeling is complete vulnerability.)

Is a young man who professes love to a girl in front of the entire school vulnerable? God has become more so!

Is an animal being prepared for vivisection vulnerable? God himself has undergone such treatment!

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It was our own weakness that he accepted, our own evil world that He exposed, and the shame heaped upon this Good Man was born without retribution, and so was revealed for what it was, our shame.

It is His very weakness and shame that allows us to enter into His strength and glory...