Passion Week

I’ve been thinking about what I could share on the blog during Passion Week—this week when we reflect on Christ’s death and resurrection. Without sounding trite, it’s hard to even put into words what this week means to us as Christians. How can one even begin to express the profundity of this event in human history?

Ironically, the most profound thing I’ve read this week was a story {or a few stories actually} in one of Mr. Boy’s books. In The Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd-Jones offers beautiful retellings of numerous Bible stories. {That sounded like the opening sentence of a book review, now didn’t it? Can you tell I’ve been writing too many school papers? :)}

Although Mr. Boy can’t really understand the stories yet, I love reading them to him. Mostly because I love reading them myself. They are beautiful stories, full of profound truth conveyed simply for young hearts. Lloyd-Jones does a great job of showing how every individual story in the Bible is a part of the big story…the four part story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation…the story of the rescue of humanity…the story of Jesus.

Throughout the week, I plan to share some of my favorite excerpts from a few of the stories in this book {the stories of and surrounding Christ’s passion and resurrection}.

In this post, I’ll be sharing from the story A Dark Night in the Garden {The Garden of Gethsemane from Luke 22, Mark 14 and John 18}.

The wind was picking up now, blowing clouds across the moon, shrouding the garden in darkness. . . Jesus walked alone, into the dark. He needed to talk to his heavenly Father. He knew it was time for him to die. They had planned it long ago, he and his Father. Jesus was going to take the punishment for all the wrong things anybody had ever done, or would ever do.

“Papa! Father!” Jesus cried. And he fell to the ground. “Is there any other way to get your children back? To heal their hearts? To get rid of the poison?” But Jesus knew–there was no other way. All the poison of sin was going to have to go into his own heart.

God was going to pour into Jesus’ heart all the sadness and brokenness in people’s hearts. He was going to pour into Jesus’ body all the sickness in people’s bodies. God was going to have to blame his son for everything that had gone wrong. It would crush Jesus.

But there was something else, something even more horrible. When people ran away from God, they lost God–it was what happened when they ran away.

Not being close to God was like punishment. Jesus was going to take that punishment. Jesus knew what that meant. He was going to lose his Father–and that, Jesus knew, would break his heart in two.