Clothesline 319 "He Could Have Walked Away"

Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to be grasped. But he laid down his divinity and took on human flesh… he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. Phil.2:6ff

One of the most profound passages in Holy Scripture and the very heart of our Christian faith. It was likely part of a hymn sung in the early Christian church. It parallels the prophecy of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53, and it speaks to the important characteristics of Jesus: He is God, he became man, and He is our Savior.

In the summer of 1995, I was part of a group that spent a month in the Holy Land, and I want to share a journal entry of mine from that pilgrimage:

We are in sight of Gethsemane now, and we stop at a nearby church: the Church of Dominus Flavius, the weeping church. It commemorates the weeping of broken friendships, the weeping of the prophet Jeremiah, the weeping in the garden. As we leave the church, we walk down a very steep hill toward the Garden of Gethsemane, and a scuffle breaks out between a vendor and a Palestinian who is part of our group. How ironic: a modern-day scuffle in the Garden of Gethsemane! As we come face to face with this place of infamy, I’m struck by the olive trees. Not very attractive, rather short in height, and strange in shape. From the ground to the top of the foliage, the tree is shaped like an hourglass, the center being where the branches and trunk meet. We are told that the trees in this garden are between 800 and 1000 years old, and as strange as they are, their very evolution preaches what happened here. As the tree ages, the heart of the tree “breaks” and the tree becomes two trees. Both trees grow together for a time. Then, one tree begins to die off. But before the tree dies, a “shoot” springs forth from the dying tree, and life is reborn, even as the parent tree dies. Our attention is then turned behind us to the Kidron Valley… today, there is a sidewalk and a highway between us and the valley—just a few steps away. Thousands of years before Jesus, this valley was a haven for David when he was running from Saul who wanted to kill him; it was a valley of escape. This valley was out of the jurisdiction of the Sanhedrin—just a few steps away. The Garden of Gethsemane, a place of capture, despair, and the pain of desertion in contrast to the Kidron Valley, a place of freedom. And Jesus knew that. Jesus could have stopped it all; he could have changed direction—just a few steps away and up the hill to freedom. Instead, he walked right into the hands of those who would kill Him.

God…became man…put aside his divinity…lived a life like ours…and died so that we could be with him in heaven when we leave this earth. God in Jesus gave his life so that we might be reconciled to God, so that we might have the opportunity to be in relationship with him on earth and live with him for eternity in heaven.

How blessed we are to have such a God! Develop a relationship with Him through prayer. Invite Him into your heart. Let God be the God of your life… remembering: He humbled himself, not grasping his divinity, but taking on our humanity, and he died that we might live….