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Gentle Reader,
“To the first-century citizen, the cross was not a beautiful piece of jewelry; it was the lowest form of death and the ultimate in humiliation. The proper Roman citizen would never mention the cross in polite conversation. It stood for rejection and shame.” – Warren Wiersbe, Be Free: Galatians, 155.
If anyone ever had the right to walk the earth with a strut, it is Jesus. After all, He made it.
Yet from His first, squalling baby-cry to His last gasping breath on the cross, Jesus exemplified humility. He came here and lived as and among the lowest. He chose to identify with shepherds and carpenters, peasant girls and widows. He did not have the finest clothes to wear or the best food to eat. He didn’t have a place to call His own.
His parents couldn’t put Him in a snug little bed that night so long ago. They laid Him in a feeding trough. Rough hay rustled with the smallest of His movements.
Jesus suffered. He lived as one hounded and oppressed from His first day of life to His last. The carpenter’s Son lived in a backwater. He never had money to spare. He felt the weight of religious legalism and the weight of political chaos. A king tried to kill Him in Bethlehem and a king would conspire to kill Him in Jerusalem – and succeed.
It’s no wonder that the world-at-large is okay with faith so long as it’s not faith in Jesus. Unbridled tension gallops through the story of His life. A King who served? A Savior who bled? God in flesh? Tremble at the implications. Jesus is confrontational. He gets up in your business and there are only two ways to respond: Love Him or hate Him. There is no such thing as indifference toward the Man from Galilee, for indifference is only the sly form of hate.
The infinitely wealthy Lord of all, in a manger.
The King of Kings, on the cross.
