C14th Byzantium.
Syriac Rabbula Gospels, C6th
The greatest scandal of Christianity, I believe, is that God allowed Himself to be vulnerable. Surely Christians are mistaken; a prophet, let alone One who had been acclaimed as God by His followers, could not die on a cross. In the death of Christ we see courage, integrity and understand it as a sacrifice by which our sins are forgiven. But Christ murdered by the people He created....exposed in public and depicted across cultures and generations as a victim.....surely the Christians have got it wrong! Maybe someone else died for Him; surely He escaped. I read an article about how in Byzantine art, Christ gradually lost His clothes in the paintings through the centuries. There may have been many reasons for this and I don't know enough to understand how contemporaries understood the images. I'm sure that later artists were more realistic in their presentation of Christ with minimum covering. But I think that we always want to see Christ clothed....we want Christ to be respectable. We want Him to be powerful and majestic, not a beaten and mocked Saviour. But if I cannot accept that Christ allowed Himself to become vulnerable, then I am left with a God who does not identify with my pain. He may offer me mercy as a condescension, sometimes having pity and sometimes not. The profundity of the Christian message is that Jesus, driven by compassion, gave Himself over to us and into our sinful hands.....He allowed us to do with Him whatever we would and we crucified Him. The incredible truth that Christians preach is that we can find forgiveness for all of our sins through this sacrifice which is payment for the debt that our sins have incurred. The extent of His forgiveness has no limits...we can reject Him and His offer to pay the price of our sin....but if we ask for it, there is no sin that can't be forgiven. Christ is not impervious to our pain....He Himself suffered unfairly, just as we have. The shock comes to us, however, somewhere on our journey with Christ, when we realise that we ourselves have crucified Him just as surely as if we had been present at the crucifixion two thousand years ago. I do not need a respectable and covered Saviour, One who has protected Himself from us and the messes we get ourselves into. I need a Saviour who knows and understands the depths of my pain and sin and can provide me with answers for them.
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