THORNS

                   I wear a crown of thorns. Not on my head, that would be odd, but on my arm, right under the name of one of my children. I do not wear it to be morbid or maudlin; granted, it may be a hideous symbol, but it is a hideous symbol of hope. Hope for a world without pain, a world with no thorns.

                  In the bible thorns are the emblem of our fallen world. Sometimes we forget that this world is fallen, like when we stand gazing at a beautiful sunset and for a moment, it seems, there is nothing wrong with creation. Then we turn and walk back into our lives and are soon confronted with…thorns; we see a dead deer on the side of the road, we stub our toe, we get a stomach bug, our child comes home from school with head lice, we are forced to put another beloved dog down because he is old or sick. Thorns. They are an appropriate symbol for the curse; life will cut you, it will make you bleed, you don’t go through a week in this world without some cuts and scrapes; thorns. We may live in a glorious ruin, but it is still a ruin.

                  “The creation was subjected to futility”, the Bible says, because of us. We are the kings and queens of creation and our kingdom has rebelled against us, it may not seem fair but it is only an echo, a consequence of our rebellion against the Creator. It resists us, as we resist Him. It is hard, because we are hard. When I am frustrated at work because things on the jobsite are not cooperating, or things are broken, I often whisper to myself “thorns”. God reaches out His hand toward us and we push it back, we reach out our hand toward creation and it pushes back, we get pricked by thorns. Jesus used the imagery of thorns when describing “the cares of this world”. When Paul writes about a physical disability that he suffers from he refers to it as “a thorn in the flesh”. When we are confronted with a frustrating or acrimonious situation we often refer to it as a “thorny issue”.

                  I was speaking with a friend of mine and he was insisting that Jesus was just a “good teacher” and that I needed to forget about his crucifixion and not talk about it. The longer we spoke the more animated he became, eventually he was yelling at me and calling me a fool. This is a man who has always been pleasant with me and we have had many congenial conversations about God and life, but now he was angry and bitter, he made his contempt for me plain to everyone around us. My sleep was little and troubled that night, I awoke with a deeper sense of just how offensive the Cross of Christ is; that we could needsuch a thing, the blood, the thorns, the violence and degradation; for what?

                For two men to consider the same event, the same symbol, together, and have it provoke one to adoration and the other to sneering defies human explanation. It requires some outside force that enables the one man to “see” and the other to not; my friend simply refused to see in the Cross what was so obvious and inescapable to me…

                That if what is proclaimed about the crucifixion and resurrection of this Galilean is true, there was more horror and more glory in that one weekend, than in all the rest of human history combined.

                That the Creator did not just become a man, He became a man of sorrows; He chose to wear the emblem of His own curse as a crown, He became the curse. He had entered the system and become the infection that was destroying us, then He left the system, taking the virus with Him. The curse is now working backwards; it will continue to do so until “the rivers clap their hands and the mountains sing together for joy”.

                 I heard a song on the radio today; it was a nice sounding song by a local artist, I liked it. One line jumped out at me; “I don’t need a savior because I don’t believe in sin.” I was not surprised by that line and its obvious theological implications, but, I was struck by the faulty reasoning, the sloppy logic of it. it’s like saying “I don’t need a parachute, because I don’t believe in gravity”; you are free to not believe in gravity, but you are never free from the effects of gravity, it is ever present, it is relentless, you will die regardless of your belief in it or not. Sin does not care whether you believe in it or not, it has no opinion of you one way or the other; you cannot reason with it, or bargain with it, or wish it out of existence. It dominates us, and, as a result, corruption, death and decay dominates all of creation. The only hope is if someone from the outside takes it away, or renders it powerless, that is the only way you, and the creation around you, will ever be set free. That is why that Galilean construction worker came, to set us free, and to liberate creation from this bondage to destruction; He lived the life that we should have lived, He died the death that we should have died.

                 And so, I wear a crown of thorns…

I wear it for every dead deer on the side of the road.                                                                                                                             

I wear it for every forest fire and every earthquake and every flood that ravages this creation.

I wear it for every beloved pet I have had to put down.

I wear it for every hospital full of kids with cancer.

I wear it for every mother’s son blown to bits on some dreadful battlefield far from home.

I wear it for every little girl born with a heart defect.

Mostly, I wear it for my King, the Galilean, the One who stepped across time and eternity and stood here in the dirt, with thorns on His head and blood on His cheek. Majesty, in misery. For that day when man punched omnipotence in the face. The day we, literally, stabbed God in the heart.

I wear it for the most appalling act of love that has ever been conceived. Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.

I wear it because a beautiful sunset can never forgive you.

I wear it because you do not need just another good teacher, you need someone who can come and pull out all your thorns.

I wear a crown of thorns because it is the only crown the King of Glory has ever worn. He was not ashamed of me, I will not be ashamed of Him.

            “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God… creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”      Romans 8

© 2019 JD Green