Beginning to Floruish - Week Seven
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February 16, 2025
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Love stripped bare — on the cross
At the beginning of Lent Jesus went into the wilderness and in Holy Week Jesus is about go into another wilderness, everything is going to be stripped away from him — belonging, shelter, water, and finally his breath — but the one thing that isn’t taken away from him his everlasting love. Betrayed, rejected and suffering but because Jesus is loved by the Father — he and the Father are one — he can rebuild love in the human heart. The one thing that cannot be taken away from him is his identity and his identity is love.
SEEDS TO SOW: This week consider how you can support Christians facing oppression and hostility around the world.
Read Isaiah 53
Suffering servant.
A heartbreaking picture of love brought to its knees. When Jesus takes on our pain and sorrow and rejection it is with the voice of experience. Jesus speaks to us as one who knows what it is to fight for breath, to long for water, to be without a permanent address, to find oneself forsaken, betrayed and abandoned.
Q: What words or phrases stand out for you in this reading?
Read Luke 23: 32-43
Love whispers.
Even as love is being stripped bare it manages a whisper as Jesus invites another suffering man to paradise.
In the incredible weakness of love stripped bare… love’s strength blazes — reaching out in the laboured breaths of agony to another thirsting soul.
Q: The Bible doesn’t tell us how the thief replied or if he did at all. What do you think the thief could have said in response to this incredible invitation?
Read John 19: 28-30 & Luke 23: 47-49
Final drink, final breath.
The essential needs that unite all humanity, that we looked at in the first half of our theme, are one be one taken from Jesus. He has been ripped from community, he is without shelter, without sustenance. Love is stripped completely bare. But in the hollow of this searing loss we remember the resurrection to come that will return these things to Jesus, as love triumphant will have the final word.
At the heart of the cross is the message that love can be stripped bare — but it cannot be defeated. Love on the cross stripped back to the suffering servant —God as man come amongst us to walk our road — will overcome all.
The armour of the Roman centurion, in the Luke reading, is no defence against love stripped bare as he takes in all that has happened. The tomb with its giant stone is no defence against love stripped bare. Death itself has no defence against love stripped bare. Our own experiences of pain, sorrow, and shame ultimately have no defence against love stripped bare.
Q: What is our prayer that all might know the power of this transforming, redeeming love?
Lent Transformations Week 7
Love Stripped Bare
The Son of God became one of us and had a human body. Just as we are united by our breath, thirst, search for shelter, and need for belonging — so was Jesus, God amongst us.
Every day this week take a moment to consider the human life of Jesus and then come to God in a short time of prayer.
Sunday: reflect on the everyday breaths of the everyday family who brought Jesus up. The laughter, cries, cheers, sobs and sighs.
Monday: reflect on the festivals and speciall occasions Jesus would have shared with family and friends.
Tuesday: reflect on the various shelters that would have provided respite, protection and shade for Jesus, in his very human skin.
Wednesday: reflect on the friendships Jesus would have had growing up — that we read nothing about in the New Testament — but which he must have had.
Maundy Thursday: reflect on the wine of the Last Supper and the wine we continue to drink at Communion.
Good Friday: reflect on love stripped bare on the cross.
Holy Saturday: think of the powerful hope in the sorrow that took Jesus’s followers to take his body into a garden.
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