I have wondered from time to time about the years in the life of the carpenter about which we have no information. We know quite a bit about his birth, except for the actual date, of course. And, we know that he traveled to Jerusalem when he was twelve years old, held his own in discussions with the rabbis and reprimanded his parents for not knowing where to look for him: “Didn’t you know that I would be in my Father’s house?”

Other than that, we are given very little in regard to those nearly twenty years between the temple and the beginning of his preaching and teaching ministry. We know by inference that he learned the trade of carpentry and reasonably conclude that he was probably taught that trade by Joseph. I suppose that he snagged the occasional splinter, dropped a timber or two, although I’m sure that the angels charged with his protection made sure that he never “dashed his foot against a stone.” For all I know, he may have never sustained even a cut or a scratch but I’d like to think that part of being human meant that he did have a pain or two along the way.

Certainly, in the events leading up to his death, he experienced fully the pains of humanity. As he prayed in the garden just before his arrest, he begged to be spared from the coming affliction. For no less than an hour, he pleaded, “If there is any other way, let this cup pass from me.” His emotional agony grew to the point that the capillaries around his sweat glands burst and he began to “sweat as it were drops of blood.”

And yet, his prayer was denied. And not only did that cup not pass from him, he drank its full measure.

His inquisitors ripped whiskers from his face, hit him with their fists, beat him with a stick, jammed thorns into his scalp, scourged skin and flesh from his body with a whip, drove nails into his feet and hands and raised him up to die from one of the most excruciating tortures ever devised by humans. The blood that began spilling from his body in the Garden of Gethsemane spattered the yard of the high priests, the courts of the Sanhedrin, Pilate and Herod and the streets of Jerusalem, finally poured out at the piercing of the spear on Golgotha.

Why such agony? Why such sacrifice? Why such terrible suffering? Why such endurance of torment and obedience?

Because there was no other way for a holy and just God to pay the price of sin and redeem those he loves from the sentence of death and hell.

No other way.

H. Arnett

4/21/11