A story by John Grisham, "A Time To Kill," begins with the brutal, heartless raping and beating of a ten-year-old girl by two cruel beasts who were drunk and stoned. It was an act of pure hatred. The girl was left near dead, unable to ever have children. The father of the girl, who wasn't there to protect her while this happened, couldn't live with that. He bought a machine gun, stalked the courtroom where these two animals were going to be arraigned, and as they were being escorted down the stairs by police, methodically stepped out of a closet and sprayed them with bullets. His act of love for his daughter was to make sure that these wicked men paid for their deeds with their lives. He was not sorry for what he had done, and was confident in saying he would do the same thing again.

The story debates the subjects of revenge, justice, and parental love. Was this father right in protecting his daughter in this way and avenging the crime against her? Would other fathers act similarly? What would you do if someone harmed your daughter like that? The story tells of many fathers who were able to sympathize with what this father did, and admitted they would probably do the same thing. So, is what he did pure love? Well, let's look at the story of another Father and child. And let's see how this story demonstrates pure love… Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12.

These words from the prophet Isaiah, written some 700 years before they were fulfilled, give us a very powerful image of the suffering servant, the crucified Christ. Here was a Son who was tortured so severely that his appearance was "disfigured beyond that of any man, and his form beyond human likeness." He was despised! Rejected by men. Familiar with suffering by the end. So familiar, it would have been hard to even look at Him without wincing. He was stricken, smitten, and afflicted! You can just hear it! Whack! Slap! Thud! He was pierced! Crushed! Wounded! He was slaughtered finally, put to death, cut off from the land of the living. It just wears you out to even try to picture the scene. It's painful just to hear this text.

But now, the real kickers: He was innocent. Had done nothing wrong! Falsely accused! And yet, did not open his mouth once to defend Himself. He went through this willingly. And verse 10 tells us the worst part: "it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer." Who was responsible for all this torture? His Father! Completely opposite of the father in the story above, this Father was the one inflicting the damage on his Son! What does this have to do with pure love? Are we sure this isn't pure hatred? His Son was innocent!

Have you ever been in a situation where you were unfairly accused? Has anyone ever said anything about you that was untrue? Have you ever found yourself in a situation in which another person took advantage of you or used you for their own personal gain? What is our natural human response to this? We clench our fists! Our minds are suddenly filled with all sorts of thoughts about retaliation. We look for ways to get even, ready to do whatever is necessary to bring the offender down. We want to play the role of the enforcer. Yet, that is precisely what makes the passion of Jesus so incredible! Isaiah reminds us that during his final twelve hours on earth in which He was publicly embarrassed and personally humiliated, He restrained Himself from responding in any sort of retaliatory way.

In his book, "The Jesus I Never Knew," author Philip Yancey imagines some of the exchanges that may have taken place between Jesus and his accusers. Yancey writes: "Messiah, huh? Great, let's hear a prophecy. Wham! Who hit you, huh? Thunk! C'mon, tell us, spit it out, Mr. Prophet. For a Messiah, you don't know much, do you? You say you're a king? Hey, Captain, get a load of this. We have us a regular king here, don't we. Well, then, let's all kneel down before his honour. What's this? A king without a crown? Oh, that will never do. Here, Mr. King, we'll fix you a crown, we will. Crunch! How's that? A little crooked? I'll fix that. Hey, hold still! My, look how modest we are. Well, how about a robe then…something to cover that bloody mess on your back. What happened, did your majesty have a little tumble?"

With human imagery, and the media of motion pictures and art, we can try to recreate the awfulness of the human suffering Jesus endured at the hands of men. But it is very difficult to portray or even imagine the spiritual suffering and separation Jesus endured at the hands of his own Father! God the Father unleashed pure hatred upon his Son!

Hatred that should have been directed at you and me! "He [Jesus] was pierced for our transgressions." Our Creator had designed us to live in a perfect relationship with Him, and given us a beautiful world to live in. We were the apple of his eye! But we broke that agreement! That's what transgression means: it means we broke faith with God! It means that we didn't want to live with Him! And we show that by the thoughts, words, and actions that are a part of our lives every day! And Jesus was pierced because of that! Yes, you can see it, can't you! A spear driven into his side! Thorns inserted into his skull. But there is something worse than that we can't see: his heart broken and pierced because God, once his loving Father, now taking out his hatred of our sins upon his beloved Son! God abandoned Jesus because of our sin! His heart was pierced with a pain much greater than any human executioner could inflict! Pain that was supposed to be felt by you because you broke faith with God!

And "He was crushed for our iniquities." "Iniquity" means "the load of guilt" our sins bring upon us. One we could not carry. One that would ultimately crush us. There is no way you can either carry or get rid of that load. The inevitability is that it is going to crush you. It should crush you. But instead, it was placed on Jesus. It crushed Him! Sure, He was crushed by the 300 pound cross that He had to carry after being nearly scourged to death. We can visualize that, and maybe even "feel" what that weight would be like. But can we feel what the weight of God's righteous anger with our sins bearing down upon our guilty shoulders would feel like? No we can't. Then we certainly can't imagine what the weight of the sins of all people would feel like! But Jesus knew that day - because He had to bear it. He was crushed by our iniquities.

"We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way." Even though we were designed to live for God and with God, we have chosen instead to turn our own direction and live lives independent of Him! We want to do our own thing. We want to answer to ourselves instead of a perfect Divine being. We want independence. God calls it rebellion. But instead of heaping his pure hatred for sin upon us, "the LORD has laid on him [Jesus] the iniquity of us all."

Why?? What was it that caused the Father to do this to his own Son? What was it that caused Christ to take it? If He could speak a word and create the world in 6 days, how much would it really have taken to speak a word and bring these men down in an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like barrage of revenge and destruction? What was it that enabled Jesus to resist any temptation to respond in any sort of get-even way? No matter how we try to explain the Passion of Christ with some level of human understanding, the events of Isaiah 53 and the final twelve hours of Christ's life come down to one simple word: LOVE! A passage you have heard before says: "For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." The only answer is love. Pure love!

As a parent of two children, my appreciation for the outrageous love God showed me when He gave up his Son is deepening and growing. As a father, the thought has surfaced, "What would I do if someone would endanger my child?" "How would I act if a culprit would kidnap, abuse, or hurt my child in any way?" I would like to say that I would respond with Christian grace and forgiveness. Yet, to be honest, I am not sure. Even if I were to eventually get to that point, I wonder if my sinful nature would erupt and fill me with such anger and rage that I would fear what I might do if I ever encountered the person who caused my child harm? Look what the father in "A Time to Kill" did. How many of you feel the same way?

That is what makes the Passion of Christ so incredibly amazing! God willfully gave up his Son out of love for the world that He had created! Instead of inflicting anger and wrath on all the multitudes who have harmed his Son, He inflicted that wrath on his Son, so the multitudes of wicked people, you and me included, could be declared not guilty! This is pure love!

Experience it! Experience it by being sure of this: "He was pierced for our transgressions! He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed." Jesus went through all that for you! He was separated from God so you wouldn't have to be! His removed that burden of guilt from you so it wouldn't crush you! Jesus paid a debt He didn't owe because we owed a debt we couldn't pay.

Listen: No matter who you are, where you have come from, or what you have done, God considers you worth loving! You are not a product of a happen-chance encounter between two human beings. You are not a number who is lost in the massiveness of this world. You are significant to God. You count! And nothing in all of God's creation will ever cause God to quit loving you…nothing!

Have you ever been involved in a relationship in which you sensed that you had to earn the person's love? Do all the right things. Behave in a particular way. Dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and in the end, the person will love you… you have to work at getting the person to love you and even if the person eventually says they love you, in the back of your mind, you wonder, "Do they?" But not God! That is what makes God's love so outrageous and so pure! There are no conditions attached. He stands at the doorway of your life and knocks with tenderness, inviting you to experience his love, just as you are! It is not a matter of living a perfect life. It is not a matter of acting in a religious sort of way. He offers you the free gift of love. It is yours for the taking!

The true story is told about a man named Tedd Kidd and his friend Janet. Tedd, having completed college before her, accepted a position in a city hundreds of miles away from her school. Yet, every Valentine's Day, he persisted with the same question, "Will you marry me?" Every Valentine's Day, the answer was the same: "not yet." Finally, when they were both living in Texas, Tedd bought Janet a ring. He took her to a romantic restaurant where he would, for one last time, offer her his proposal. After dinner, Tedd decided that the time had come to ask the question one last time. Yet before the question was asked, Janet surprised Tedd by handing him a box. He opened the package and slowly peeled away the tissue paper. The gift? It was a one-word cross-stitch design that read, "YES!" Yes! That is the only word God wants to hear from you. That is how He wants us to respond to his pure love. "Yes, I believe You."

At the time of Jesus' coming to the earth, humanity longed to hear a word. Like a family that sits in a waiting room to hear a word from the doctor or like a parent who sits by the phone waiting to hear from their child, humanity desperately wanted to hear God say something. That desire continues today. The Good News is that God has spoken! What God says today is what He said when Christ died on the cross and rose again. He says, "You are worth loving. You matter to me. I love you no matter what. I want you to be my child." That is pure love! The One called "The Word" has spoken. Are you listening? Amen.

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