Selah2020: Pause and Reflect

[A ‘Tuesday Challenge‘ originally prepared for the congregation of Horley Baptist Church during April 2025]

Easter is one of those events in the ecclesiastical calendar that present us with a challenge. Like Christmas and, to a lesser extent, Palm Sunday, the story has become so familiar that we feel that we need to find some way to ‘revitalise’ the story each year.

But should we think like that? Is there a risk that the quest for novelty or entertainment value may become a digression?

Throughout the years since the first Easter artists, sculptors, authors and hymn writers have given us their interpretations of those events; many of their efforts were secular or speculative but surely some of them were inspired by the Holy Spirit as they worked. Here is one example, written by Birdie Bell:

Tell me the old, old story, tell it, for ‘tis always new,
Tell me of a Saviour’s pardon, tell it for I know ‘tis true;
Tell me how He died for sinners, tell it to me o’er and o’er,
For I am longing to hear it, longing for it more and more.

The gospel writers include one detail that we often overlook when we focus on the events of that weekend; even our popular translations try to play it down by using language that is less graphic. An older version is not so restrained:

… and he delivered Jesus, after he had scourged Him, to be crucified.
Mark 15 v15b [NKJV]

Our primary source must always be the Bible passages themselves but we also have accounts from secular historians which provide some details that would have been common knowledge for the original readers. Charles Spurgeon used those sources to give us an alternative to the sanitised versions:

Pilate delivered our Lord to the lictors to be scourged. The Roman scourge was a most dreadful instrument of torture. It was made of the sinews of oxen, and sharp bones were inter-twisted every here and there among the sinews; so that every time the lash came down these pieces of bone inflicted fearful laceration, and tore off the flesh from the bone. The Saviour was, no doubt, bound to the column, and thus beaten. He had been beaten before; but this of the Roman lictors was probably the most severe of his flagellations. [1]

Spurgeon’s description is challenging to read but, as horrific as that image is, it is but a prelude to the crucifixion itself when Jesus felt the full impact of physical pain and spiritual anguish. His cry ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ is a measure of his torment but it also poses a question: Why was he there? The apostle Peter provides an answer:

He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.
1 Peter 2 v24 [NIVUK]

Easter is not simply an event in the calendar or even just the event on which our calendar is based. We can never fully appreciate the full scale of what Easter means if we just allow it to come and go each year. The events of that first Easter should be central to our devotions, even when it is ‘out of season’.

Tell me the story slowly, that I may take it in –
That wonderful redemption, God’s remedy for sin. [2]

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References:
[1] “Morning and Evening”, Charles Spurgeon, 31 March
[2] “Tell Me The Old, Old Story”, Katherine Hankey (1866)

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Bible dates: Where appropriate, the dates given for Biblical events are based on the Bible Timeline resource
and are subject to the constraints defined on the corresponding webpage.

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Contributed by Steve Humphreys; © Steve Humphreys