Today I began work slightly bitter that our office didn't close when all my friends in Australia are face-booking about their 5 day weekends. The we watched this animated video. And all I could think about throughout was 'that is my Lord and Saviour'. It's just a cartoon, but knowing that Jesus had to go through it in real life had tears pouring down my cheeks ( a little embarassing in an office situation, but luckily we have men who cry in this office so I don't feel too awkward).
Along with meditating on the substitution this was for me - the face I should have been the one there suffering, my thoughts eventually turned to the repercussions of this single act on the world. Phillip Yancey in his book 'What Good is God?' has an article in which he says (loosely paraphrased from my memory) that until Jesus the record of human history and narratives only celebrated victors. But with the sacrifice of Jesus a new narrative entered the thread of human history - that of the victim being the true victor, of the moral and transformational power of sacrifice and that the downtrodden individual has value and a voice. And it's this new narrative that birthed movements like the end of apartheid & segregation, the end of slavery and is still fuelling movements like the end of child traffiking. The value of any individual goes up immeasurably when someone else has sacrificed their life for them.
We do see in cultures over the world stories of great personal sacrifice for the greater good, and the power and value of that sacrifice is recognised in ways like the Mooncake Festival in China (my mother told me the mooncakes were thrown into the river to prevent the fishes from eating the body of a noble General who was unjustly killed) and even here in Chiangmai there is a Chedi that commemorates a soldier who saved the Lanna Kingdom by tying himself to a stone in the river and drowning, thereby winning the competition against an invading kingdom. These stories are of people dying for their communities, ideology and allegiances, but only in Jesus did someone sacrifice their life for everyone regardless of whether they regarded it as a benefit or not.
This was like a huge rent in the fabric human history, and when I am constantly brushing with issues like poverty, prostitution, child labour and human traffiking here, then this is a paradigm shift I must believe is still changing the world now.
