I was listening to a sermon on the radio the other day and a pastor was going through Hebrews. He breezed through verse 2 of Chapter 12 on his way to making a point. For some reason a bit of the later half of the verse stuck out to me.
"For the joy set before Him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
It's one of those verses we speak with the solemnity and quasi-ignorance of hymn. It rattles off the tongue and sounds all full of fundamentalist meter and rhyme, but I've never actually thought about it until the other day.
"For the joy set before Him he endured the cross..." What joy?
It would be easy to think that his joy would be sitting down at the right hand of the Father. That would make me joyful, but he was already there before he came to earth. The cross, its shame, that's a lot to take on for something He already had. Naturally that doesn't follow logically.
So what is the joy? Us. Being with us and in us all; God connected to man once again.
We tend not to think of it like that. Left to our own devices we could think that the Lord Jesus did it begrudgingly. "Yeah, Father, there's a lot of people suffering because of sin. *sigh* Ok...I guess I'll go, die, bear their sins because the number is so high. It's a moral imperative. Something that's gotta be done. Ok...see you guys in 33 years, I guess."
Deconstructing the sentence it could read, with less fundamentalist poetry, "He endured the cross because of the joy set before him..." He chose to die because the very thought of what lay on the other side filled him with joy. He is overjoyed that he endured torture and death because of you.
Too often I see the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit as figures looking down from heaven wondering just when the heck am I going to get it right and be perfect, DANGIT! I've almost given up the notion that when I sin it's like crucifying the Lord over and over again. It is more like He has loosed the chains, opened the doors and I am finding my way out of the prison I've spent a lifetime in. Even while I'm finding my way out of that institution I am his joy...the joy for which he endured the cross.
