The Signature of Jesus

Bread and Wine Reading: "The Signature of Jesus", Brennan Manning

Scripture Reading: Matthew 8: 14-17
When Jesus entered Peter’s house, he saw his mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever; he touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she got up and began to serve him. That evening they brought to him many who were possessed by demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word, and cured all who were sick. This was to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.’

We are good at voicing the claim that Jesus “took our infirmities and bore our diseases.” Handel even put the words to music. But what do they mean? Do we really understand what it means that God in Christ took on our suffering and bore what many of us either cannot or perhaps will not? Brennan Manning tells the story of a meditative man who removed a drowning scorpion from the water. But when he touched the scorpion, it stung him. As he tried again, the scorpion stung him so badly that the man had a painful reaction to the poison. When a passerby pronounced him a fool and asked him why in the world he would risk himself for a creature that would only hurt him, the man replied. “Just because it is the scorpion’s nature to sting, that does not change my nature to save.”

Perhaps the reason that we struggle to understand what God did is because we do not understand who God is. This was not a “one-time” act; it is God’s very nature to save. And to understand that, we cannot just merely revel in gratitude for what God did; we must take on that nature for ourselves. Manning reminds us that the somewhat overused and commonplace term “born again” was seldom used a century ago. “Rather,” he says, “the words used to describe the breakthrough into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ were: ‘I was seized by the power of a great affection.’”

“Seized by the power of a great affection”: Christ came, manifest in human form, to reveal the essence of God’s love, to reveal that great affection that we can scarcely grasp. There has never been a love like Jesus Christ. It is a love beyond anything that we could have ever imagined. It is indeed a love that the world would deem foolish. Manning says, though, that “Jesus was seized by the power of a great affection and experienced the love of his Father in a way that burst all previous boundaries of understanding.” It is God’s nature to save; it is God’s nature to love us beyond what we could grasp or know; it is God’s nature to take on our suffering, not to shield us from that very part of ourselves, but so that we will not have to do it alone.

Manning reminds us that Jesus did experience suffering—born into poverty under (as Manning points out) questionable circumstances, misunderstood, insulted and mocked, betrayed, and then persecuted, beaten, and murdered in a public and humiliating fashion. The pain and humiliation that Jesus experienced was not the judgment that God passed on the world, but rather the judgment that the world passed on God. And yet, God’s nature is not to walk away but rather to save those who passed judgment, to bring humanity into the arms of God. Why would God do that? God does that because that is God’s nature; that is the signature of Jesus Christ.

Discussion Questions:
1.) What does it mean to think of saving as God’s “nature”, rather than an act that God does?
2.) What does the term “seized by the power of a great affection” mean for you?
3.) What meaning does that hold for you that Jesus’ signature is on our suffering, that God participates in it just as we do?

So go forth toward the Cross that you might be seized by the power of a great affection!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli