What do you or I know of humility?
We know of this simply
because the infinite God condescended to our level.
He came to the earth to shake heaven and hell.
By virgin birth took on a Human Nature,
without sin He walked upright without waver
amid the violent hatred of the world for His witness.
He came naked and then hurled into tests like litmus.
The Healer of our soul
surrounded Himself with those we wouldn’t choose to reach our goal.
He washed their feet like a slave in intimate immanence,
knowing full well His transcendent preeminence.
He kept silent during unjust proceedings,
patiently enduring mocking, spitting, and beatings.
Without dignity He was stripped in public,
nailed to wood like a guilty subject.
Though He was elevated some meters from the earth,
He was lower than where He was at the first.
Finally He cried, “It is finished!”-
paid in full.
He died humiliated at the Place of a Skull.

What do you or I know of pain?
To search for any other example is vain
than to see the One who for our gain suffered loss.
Such pain goes deeper than nails and a cross!
Deep in His soul Immanuel must have felt
the pit of hell as His heart melted within,
crushed for our iniquity, bruised for our sin.
Being beaten and battered didn’t matter as much as the woe
of being smitten by God and afflicted as though His foe.
What more an oddity is there
when He became sin- it was His to bare,
onto the tree the Scapegoat left outside the camp
to be met with holy fury fit for the lamp of the wicked-
He became our filthy rags for our enrichment!
What does it feel like to be completely exposed,
and have all your darkest secrets and sin disclosed
from His perspective to God the Father,
as if those sins were His and then hotter fire than words explain?
This His soul knows as pain.

~my Master’s greatest debtor