Easter's Transparent Father
Jesus' Father could do more contain His love to man, than Jesus could contain His devotion to His Father.
It is only the blind and wilful pride of man that prevents him seeing this. As with Hezekiah's proud heart (King of Judah circa 715-686 B.C), the proud heart is the heart that does not see/respond to a kindness shown to it (see 2 Chronicles 32:25). This is the eternal malaise of Calvary.
Brennan Manning wrote:
Jesus, who lives for those in whom love is dead, and died that His killers might live, reveals a Father ... who does not cherish us as we deserve - if that were the case we would be desolate, but as He must, unable to do otherwise. He is love. Hard as it is for us to believe, because we neither give nor receive love among ourselves in this way, yet we believe, because of the life-death-resurrection of the Carpenter-Messiah, that His Father is more loving, more forgiving, more cherishing than Abraham, Isaac or Jacob could have dreamed...
God loves you as you are not as you should be...
God loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity, that He loves you in the morning sun and in the evening rain, that He loves you without caution, regret, boundary, limit, or breaking point.#
Easter bled the separated Father and the crucified Son, for neither held a limit to their love. They did not then, They do not now.
Think for a moment: the torn, broken, lacerated, spit-covered, blood-drenched body of Jesus is only a hint of the Father's love.#
Still spilled across the earth is Jesus' blood, and still splashed across the heavens is the Father's heart.
Today's Soul Snippet:
'Sympathy is two hearts tugging at the same load'. ~ anon
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# Brennan Manning, The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Revell, 2009) 24, 25, 138