Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent

Who is the Jesus whose suffering, death and resurrection we will celebrate in Holy Week? What images of him do we hold? How do those images contrast with what the scriptures tell us of the Christ?

Dorothy Sayers (yes, the same one who wrote the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries) offers this desciption, shattering our plaster-statue images of the Redeemer:

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore — on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommend him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand.



True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as ‘that fox’; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a ‘gluttonous man and wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners’; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God, either. But he had "a daily beauty in his life that made us ugly," and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quiet.

- Dorothy Sayers in A Matter of Eternity, Selections from the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers


Who is the Jesus whose suffering, death and resurrection we are about to celebrate? What are our images?

As we move into Holy Week and hear the story of Christ's last days and hours, let's upon our eyes and ears, our minds and our hearts to the Christ the scriptures offer us, the Christ they paint, the Savior they sculpt...

-ConcordPastor