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Bishop Harold Miller's Holy Week Series 2011 the Wounds of Jesus

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Bishop Harold Miller's Holy Week Series 2011 the Wounds of Jesus Bishop Harold Miller’s Holy Week Series 2011 The Wounds of Jesus 2. His head A couple of years ago I was invited to speak at Christ Church Belfast, a church which is an offshoot of the Brethren movement, on someone from history who had profoundly influenced my life. My choice of person was Charles Simeon of Cambridge, who exercised his ministry as an evangelical within the Church of England, at a time when the Methodist movement was at its height, and who is a great example of a person transformed by the Gospel who gave his whole life to Gospel ministry in the established church. Simeon tells the story of how he went up to Cambridge as a student without a living personal faith in Christ, and after three days in residence at King’s College, he received the customary note from the Provost requiring his attendance at Holy Communion in three weeks’ time. The news was so devastating to him that he always remembered the day he received that note: February 2nd, 1779. Simeon’s first reaction was to dodge the issue, to get out of it if he possibly could. He put it in these words a few years later: ‘Satan himself was as fit to attend as I’. Feeling he had to try to prepare himself he read a popular 17th Century devotional writing called The Whole Duty of Man which made him feel worse. William Cowper, the hymn writer, called that particular writing ‘a repository of self-righteousness and pharisaic lumber’. It is one of those books filled with what I call ’oughtery and mustery’! Then, by the grace of God, Simeon happened upon a wonderful book by Thomas Wilson, Bishop of Sodor and Man on the Lord’s Supper, and began reading it. But he tells us that he found that first compulsory communion at Cambridge very difficult. Charles Simeon faithfully continued reading Bishop Wilson’s book until it came to Holy Week and Easter of that year He spent hours trying to reconcile his sense of guilt and sin with the cross as portrayed in the 1662 Communion Service. In this frame of mind, he suddenly happened upon a phrase in Bishop Wilson’s book to the effect that, (and he quotes): ‘The Jews knew what they were did when they transferred their sin to the head of their offering.’ Like a flash it came to Simeon: ‘I can transfer all my guilt (and sins) to Another. I will not bear them on my soul a moment longer! Looking back in happy retrospect over the years, he recorded later: ‘Accordingly I sought to lay my sins on the sacred head of Jesus; and on the Wednesday began to have a hope of mercy; on the Thursday that hope increased; on the Friday and Saturday it became more strong; and on the Sunday morning, Easter Day, April 4th, I awoke early with these words on my heart and lips: ‘Jesus Christ is risen today, Hallelujah! Hallelujah!’. From that Hour peace flowed in rich abundance into my soul, and at the Lord’s Table in our chapel I had sweetest access to God through my blessed Saviour.’ ‘I sought to lay my sins on the sacred head of Jesus‘: ‘O dearest Lord, thy sacred head With thorns was pierced for me: O pour thy blessing on my head That I may think for thee’ Father Andrew ‘O sacred head, sore wounded, With grief and scorn weighed down; O Kingly head, surrounded With thorns, thine only crown, Death’s pallor now comes o’er thee, The glow of life decays; Yet hosts of heaven adore thee And tremble as they gaze’ Paul Gerhardt Just as the guilt of the people is laid on head of the sacrifices of Leviticus, and particularly the scapegoat, so our sins are laid on the head of Jesus, his sacred and precious head. This is the head which engaged in thought and debate with the scholars of his day even from an early age in Temple and synagogue; this is the head in which the perfect mind is formed: the mind of Christ, our example and template for godly living; this is the mind which taught the Beatitudes, created the parables, challenged the Pharisees to robust argument and discussion; this is the mind formed by the Old Testament scriptures, and filled with memories on them, seen even on the Cross he is about to suffer. All of that is in the head of Jesus, and all of that becomes the focus of human mockery and destruction as Holy Week progresses. It is important that, when we think of the head of Jesus and the wounds suffered in and on his head, we don’t simply limit out thinking to the crown of thorns, the most obviously wounding implement. Christina Baxter notes that: During the trials, several different actions were directed at Jesus’ head: Spitting, blindfolding or covering, striking or slapping, and crowning with thorns. And then she begins with something else altogether: The kiss of Judas, as the first occasion when Jesus’ head was wounded. If the truth be told, the deepest wounds to our heads are often to do with relational and mental anguish. What a torment it must have been for Jesus to see one of his own disciples betray him with a sign of profound affection and loyalty. The kiss of Judas may not have been physically painful compared with what was to come, but it was personally destructive, violating a special bond of trust, and cynically using a sign of friendship to transform the relationship, on Judas’s side, into vicious enmity. It is important this Holy Week that we all know that Jesus Christ truly understands the mental and relational pain we suffer in our own lives. The anguish of a tormented mind, the mental pain which is more searing than any physical pain; the relationships which should have been sustaining and have turned out to be damaging; the smooth words and actions which cover betrayal and cannot be taken back. Jesus has been there. He enters in to our pain to the point of utter dereliction; ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me/‘. Then we look at the other wounds. The spitting is described on two occasions. First immediately after the trial before the high priest, it says: ‘Some began to spit on him, to blindfold him and to strike him, Saying to him ‘Prophesy!’; Then there is the spitting while he is in the power of Pilate. In ‘the courtyard of the palace…they called together the whole cohort. And they clothed him with a purple cloak; and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on him. And they began saluting him ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’. They struck his head with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him.. After mocking him, they stripped him of the Purple cloak and put his own clothes on him.’ This is contemptuousness at its worst. The Jewish leaders mocking his supposed prophetic role which challenged their power; the Roman authorities his supposed kingly role which challenged their power. Spitting in someone’s face is just something most of us would never conceive of doing. It is the lowest of the low - despising and rejecting behaviour. But if the truth be told, Jesus, like the Suffering Servant, is despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Jesus at this moment stands with all who are treated as the scum of the earth. With those who are dehumanized by others by the way they treat them. With those who are confronted and humiliated by their enemies, who appear for a moment to have power over them and who use that power to literally spit in their faces. And then there is the striking.or slapping. The beginning of the physical abuse. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the de-humanization of Jesus moves very quickly to physical abuse. Isn’t it an amazing thing that the Lord of Glory, the one who is both perfectly human and perfectly divine, is treated as though he wasn’t even human. An animal would have been treated better. And to make it worse, they blindfold him, disorientating him: ‘Some slapped him, saying ‘Prophesy!’ Matthew 26:67 John’s Gospel makes it even clearer: ‘One of the police standing nearby struck Jesus on the face, Saying, ‘Is that how you answer the high priest?’ Jesus Answered: ‘If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong, But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?’ John 18:22-23, and ‘The soldiers kept coming up to him, saying ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and striking him on the face’. John 19:2-3. Indeed, Matthew records that they ‘took the reed and struck him on the head’. Matthew 27:30 I think we need to see all of this from two angles; First of all, the fact that any of us is capable of this kind of thing. In his book Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Wolf, the Croatian theologian, notes the different stages by which de-humanization happens. Speaking behind backs; presenting a negative image; seeing the person as a threat and the enemy; using the kind of language used in Rwanda of the Tutsis (snakes, cockroaches); presenting the idea that it would be better to get rid of them (as I read on the ring road in Belfast about 12 years ago: ‘ keep Britain tidy.
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