Lamar Howell's Weblog

A policeman without his bullet-proof vest feels vulnerable. A skirt-clad lady in a strong wind feels vulnerable. A mourning dove with its nest on the ground must feel somewhat vulnerable.

I’ve made myself vulnerable before, because I knew that many wise people say we must let down our barriers in order to overcome certain issues. I confessed a mortal weakness to a minister in front of a crowd of Full Gospel Businessmen and asked for prayer. I told an elderly lady I needed prayer because I hated someone. I sat before men as an experiment in inner healing and watched them chart details about my upbringing and complex family relationships, then brush their spiritual hands in victory and leave me like so many loose stripped electric wires, raw and zuhhhz-ing to the touch.

All those things which I thought were vulnerabilities faded when I read Isaiah 53 again today. The prophet looked seven hundred years into the future at true vulnerability. The Messiah, Christ, was to be marred beyond recognition, receive wounds for the sake of the whole world, be publicly punished for the wrongs of his malefactors and their progeny, be falsely called a transgressor, and in the face of all this, maintain complete silence–defenseless as a lamb.

That would have been enough to qualify him as the most vulnerable person who ever lived, aside from the fact that he came into the world as an utterly helpless infant, whose very life was endangered by a barbaric dictator. But that was not enough vulnerability, exposure, and weakness for the Savior. His clothing was seen as barter, a serendipitous prize in a game of dice. So, before gawkers and mockers, he died naked–the ultimate in vulnerability.

He was wounded for our transgressions, lashed for our healing, beaten to a pulp for our peace with God, and died for our sinfulness. His nakedness was not morally necessary for our salvation, so why did it happen?

I would dare say that few of us have been naked before a crowd, especially outdoors, and on a hilltop to boot. Far fewer of us have been punished in the nude. Our vulnerability ends where divine shame begins. For only One died naked for the secretly sequestered, godlessly garbed, and cowardly covered sins of a proud world. The disrobing of God extended even into the most holy place as the curtain was violently torn away to expose wholesale mercy.

No one can ever assert or even hint that the Son of God did not go the extra mile in humiliation.