Thorns

A crown of thorns. Menacing. Malicious. Mocking. Piercing. Painful.

O sacred Head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown;
How pale Thou art with anguish, with sore abuse and scorn!
How does that visage languish, which once was bright as morn!

See Adam in the garden.  It was a garden without thorns. It was a garden marked with harmony, beauty, and bounty. It was a garden of open communion and conversation between creation and Creator, between man and his Maker.

But into the harmony comes dissonance and discord. Not content to exercise dominion over creation in the context of loving submission to the Creator, the poisonous seed of rebellion sprouts and invades the beautiful garden. Its fruit is death and brokenness. Thorns.

Casting aside their crowns as royal offspring, Adam and Eve grasp dust and sweat and thorns.

But from eternity past God planned an interposition of life into this spinning vortex of death. The hand of God reaches in rescue.  He reaches into this broken world to ransom, to redeem each of us who have sold ourselves as slaves to destruction. His hand does not hold gold or silver as the redemption price. Rather his hands are scarred by nails. And on his head, a crown. But this is not the royal diadem of power. It is thorns: menacing, malicious and mocking. It is the thorns that invaded and spoiled the garden, now twisted into a crown and roughly, violently pushed onto the head of Jesus. It is the crown that we grasped with Adam in the garden. Our crown, our punishment on his head.

Surely he has borne our griefs

    and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

    smitten by God, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions;

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

    and with his wounds we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;

    we have turned—every one—to his own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

    the iniquity of us all.