That's Why They Call Him Savior

Ever since Adam & Eve stupidly covered their nakedness with fig leaves and tried to deny their disobedience before the most loving and merciful Being in the entire universe, human history has been marked repeatedly by that same shamed posturing, whether ludicrously ineffective (like theirs was) or brilliantly deceptive. It is the human condition.

Each one of us a deceiver. Each one of us a posturer. Each one of us deeply fearful that the real truth about ourselves will be discovered. And from this lifetime task we never can rest or let down our guard. When from time to time we have foolishly done so, we have often been badly wounded. Judged inadequate. Found wanting. For everyone everywhere is always and ever a potential judge and jury. No one can be trusted. And even were we to hide ourselves from the world, there would remain the judging voice within, speaking the same condemnation we so feared from others. Loser. Failure. Never-ever-good-enough. Fool.

No such hurtful, judging word is ever really forgotten. Stored up, these seem to echo in our conscience and return again and again to our troubled dreams. Running from these interior voices, we charge after every meaningless victory in the various games of life, all of which have been carefully designed to foster the illusion of prowess. Finding a weak spot in another, we press the momentary advantage. We make grandiose assertions of competence, claims of superior knowledge or goodness, pretending always to know more than whomever we’re talking with, about whatever we’re talking about. Depending on the needs of the moment, we swagger, deny, or take the fifth. Press charges. Run and hide. Whatever works. Even the things we own are an ostentatious display in service to this dreadful charade. The important thing is to keep the truth in deep cover.

Into this very world of lies was born one honest man. All his life he grew in wisdom. Imbued with the Spirit of God he knew every man’s heart. Nothing that was ever done to him, right to the very last, came as a surprise. Until one terrible and seemingly eternal moment on the torturous cross, he had never been separated form the Father, never been cast out of His loving presence, never once been turned aside. What he endured in that time of separation, he endured for us.

Yes, his was the one pure heart, the one worthy soul, the one true and consistent intelligence, that has ever walked the earth; and the purpose of his coming was to slay forever the monster of guilt and fear that every man woman and child carries about like a terrible incubus on his or her back. This victory Jesus won in a pitched battle with the enemy of our souls. That battle lasted an entire lifetime and was completed at last on that ghastly device of torture and death we call "the cross." That instrument of capital punishment was intended by Satan to be the once-and-for-all grave of God's plan to redeem His creation, the final defeat of righteousness, the victory of deceit. But instead, it was the nexus of Satan's undoing, the unraveling of all his lies. There, at the place of the skull, on that bloody cross, Jesus slew the monster of guilt.

Every last one us carries that monster through life until he or she turns at last to Jesus, sees the kind of man he was--sees who he was and what he did for us--and crying out in desperation to this warrior of God, the only one who can truly save, experiences then the slaying of his own personal monster. Jesus is the hero of our story, over and over, to the end of time. In him we find, each one of us, our freedom, our worth, our joy, our life. What more could he have done that he did not do? Nothing. That’s why he said, in his last words from the dreadful cross that bought our very lives, “It is finished.”