The Gospel is a Person. One who has come to us to tell us that as bearers of the divine image, we were created to enjoy the love and intimacy of our divine good Creator. The Person reveals to us that this Truth about ourselves is foreign and unfamiliar. That somehow in the scope of how life unfolded, mankind’s ability to perceive himself rightly was seriously distorted; that what we thought was true was false and what we thought was real was pretense. This Person then showed to us how this happened; how man once chose to love himself rather than be loved by another more perfect than him; how that choice turned back onto man and how that misplaced love cut man off from all that made him Alive and Real. The God that loved him was now distant but His love for His creature was so great that He put a small bit of Himself into that man just to keep him alive. The God then began to work his way back to that man, reconstructing his memory and his soul to remake him into a fully real person.
For a long span of time, the man was conscious of none of this. There was no memory of that past love of that Person. The picture had long since been disfigured by the ingrown-ness of the man’s love, love once beautiful that had turned to deep, ugly, painful wounds. Yet the man was so distorted in what he saw that his wounds looked to him to be pleasurable things. And each time he loved himself more, the wounds grew bigger and more deadly and the pleasure appeared to become greater. Then the God-part in that man began to speak and he was sensitized just enough to begin to feel the pain of the wounds and to see the tormentful evidence of what he now looked like. And the man sensed that what he was now was not what he once had been. But the past was so dark and the future was so unattractive that the man saw no way to change what he had become.
Then the Person appeared again, hanging onto the thread of His love he had put into the man long ago. He began to talk to the man; he began to speak to him of the things as they once were, of the world that had once been. Of how the man and the Person had loved and shared, walked and talked; how they had found joy in being together. Of how the One who knew not love had been able to distort and mangle the Truth for the man. And as they talked, the Person began to grow solid, like a mountain peak emerging out of the early morning fog. His voice grew stronger, His body became bigger and bigger and soon He stood there face to face with the man. And the man could not bear to look at the person. The shame and guilt in his scarred, twisted figure could not stand to open itself up to the brilliance of the Person who had come to love him. And the man knew nothing to say.
Then the Person spoke, “It’s your soul, you know. Your spirit, it long ago twisted in on itself, growing more and more inward. The scars have kept you from seeing it.”
And the man wondered, “How have I been able to live?”
The Person knew his thoughts and answered, “I love you and I gave enough of my life to you to help you get to this moment. But you must let me finish this.”
The man twisted deeper in on himself, thinking, “But I do not deserve anything. Just look at me! I don’t even like myself!“
Again the Person spoke, “No, you do not. You have chosen a lie over my love; this is what you have become and it is not what you were created for. But I love you and that will be enough for both of us if you will let it be.”
The man trembled. Dare he speak? What would the Person do if he did? Yet something about the Person was drawing him in. Something inside could be faintly heard amidst the cacophony of years of calloused self-loving, something that said there was indeed more.
His voice quaked and barely escaped in a whisper, “What must I do?”
The Person smiled, His face deeply drawn and grieved, “No. It’s what I must do.” Silence hung heavy for what seemed like an eternity and then the Person reached up his hand and plunged deep into the flesh and bones of his side. Agony leapt across his face as the flesh tore and the arteries sprayed their blood across His garments. A deep, guttural cry burst from his lips, his eyes clenched tightly against the pain. His hand emerged, shaking, holding His beating heart, the blood running from it down his arm. He gasped, his body heaving with the torture. The man was frozen in horror. Sweat caked His hair to his forehead, the veins in His neck and arms bulging as if threatening to rupture. The color had drained from His face and the brilliance that He earlier had was gone. His eyes were beginning to glaze over as shock set into His body.
He turned and looked at the man and through shivering, blue lips said these words: “This is a price only I could pay.” He again plunged His hand holding the heart straight into the chest cavity of the man. The scarred, brittle, scaly skin fell away under the blow. The heart of the Person was shoved deep into the vacant center of the man where it instantly began to beat with a deep, throbbing rhythm. Then the Person collapsed to the ground, his arm falling limply to His side. With a rattling, groaning breath, He was dead.
The man was transformed in an instant. Gone were the twisted, bent muscled; the limbs that had not functioned properly in a lifetime now moved strong and true. The man’s eyes took in a whole different world. He felt something strange and new yet vaguely familiar begin coursing through his veins. From deep inside there rose a wave of exultation and joy. He didn’t understand entirely what had happened, but he knew what it was. He was what he had once been long ago, what he was meant to be all along. The man was Alive!
And then his eyes took in the limp, bleeding figure of the Person laying on the ground where He had fallen. And instinctive groan burst from the man’s lips and he rushed to the Person’s side. Cradling the sweat-soaked head in his lap, the man look down into the beautiful face of the One who had loved him and tears poured down his face. And he saw one thing clearly against the backdrop of his mind: the Person had loved him so much that He gave up His life so that the man could have it. And the man knew love again in that moment.
For hours, the man sat there, motionless with the Person’s head in his lap, weeping at what he had lost, so nearly gained, and lost again. Then he felt a faint tremble and a slight movement from the Person. He caught it again from the corner of his eye: an ever so little movement of the hand. The man looked. The wound was still there, still deep into the side. Yet how was this possible? The Person had become alive again! The man, breathless and unbelieving, watched. Color began creeping back into the Person’s face. His eyelids fluttered a moment and then He began to blink, as if waking from a dream. The man could feel life coursing back into the body. And then, ever so slowly, still wrapped in His blood-soaked garment, the Person sat up on the ground.
The man was simultaneously ecstatic and stunned, “How is this possible? Is it really happening? You…you were…dead!”
The Person, his body growing stronger and more brilliant again by the moment replied, “I told you my love was enough for both of us.”
Then the Person loved the man, the man received that love joyfully and joyfully gave back to the Person. This, then, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ: the promise that man can be reborn as a new creation with new life.