In her masterful book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, Fleming Rutledge writes perhaps better than any author I’m aware of on the sheer horror of death in this fashion. What follows are a series of excerpts from her book, and while this may be a longer post than usual, it might be worth taking with us to the celebrations that are about to begin, to help us better understand what’s happening to Him for us.

We – the guilty, the enslaved, the foolish, the rebellious, the unfaithful, the creatures – go free and have life because He – the Innocent, the Lord, the King, the Creator, the Son – placed Himself into the hands of Death.

What kind of God is this? What kind of love is this? Who am I that my King should allow Himself to be torn to shreds when it is I who should be?

Baptism, like the tsunami, causes things to drown. What things? Sin, guilt, the pasts by which we feel haunted. I know few things as a priest that compare with standing inside the font at the Easter Vigil, waiting in the water for those standing outside it to step in

Like the blind man who encounters Jesus in the Gospel this Sunday (cf. John 9:1-41), baptism moves us from blindness to sight, and from darkness to light. Those who refuse to believe, who refuse to honestly examine what God has done for us in Jesus, remain in darkness and blindness. And out of love, we should be eager to bear credible witness to them by our words and actions of the difference Jesus makes so that they too might walk in the light and come to know this astounding truth that is increasingly necessary in a lonely and anxious culture: God is Love, and the object of that love…is each one of us.