Broken For Us

In her captivating book, Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit, tells the nail-biting story of Louie Zamperini who with pilot, Russel Allen Phillips, survived 47 days in a rubber raft which floated 2,000 miles in the Pacific in 1943 only to land on a Japanese occupied atoll, where further pain and suffering were inflicted on them. The story of endurance beyond what we would ordinarily think would be the limits of human suffering gives somewhat of a picture of what Jesus suffered in a more compressed and intense form from his arrest in the gardent to his last breath on the cross: hunger, thirst, weariness, abandonment, and enormous physical pain from the scourging, nails and hours on the cross. He who had said over bread, "This is my body which is broken for you" allowed his body to be truly broken on the cross. As a third grader pointed out after making the stations of the cross: "What Jesus did for us is awesome." Yes, it should strike awe in us, just from a physical perspective, and when we think of it in terms of the Son of God, emptying himself that our sins might be forgiven and our souls filled with new life, it is even more awesome, provoking us to "tremble, tremble, tremble." Meditating on the sufferings of Jesus can also give us courage to face the range of human pain, from a sliver in a finger to the excruciating pain of the final stages of stomach cancer in an "if he can do it, so can I" type of challenge. And such a meditation can lead us to humble gratitude and expressions of love in word and action. If God so loved us and gave his Son as the price of our salvation, so might we offer our lives to him to be instruments of showing that love to others.
Bro. Rene