Thirty-three Years a Prisoner, by His Own Will

I was a teenager when I read Black Like Me written by John Howard Griffin, a Texan who, under the care of a physician,  changed the color of his skin from white to black and then traveled through the South for six weeks, journaling about his experience along the way.   People who knew him as a white man did not recognize him as a black man. Regardless of how mannerly he behaved, he was viewed as less than, even sassy when he attempted to offer his bus seat to a white woman.

That book challenged me, as a young white girl, with the injustice in the world, and my inability to do much about it, especially since there were no black people in my world in rural Pennsylvania nor people all that interested in racial injustice.  But it made me think about what it must have been like for him, and for all black people, to be judged by your skin, the real you, the essential person, caged by the color of your skin.

Then this morning in my reading in A Year with God, a similar challenge hit me when the author asked “How has the reality that God took on human flesh and lived among us changed your life?”  For thirty-three years, he voluntarily took on the prison of a human body.  He got tired, hungry, thirsty, perhaps frustrated, was ignored, persecuted, chased, humiliated, unfairly judged and finally killed. For thirty-three years, he lived in a human body; can you imagine the Divine God living in the body of an infant, a toddler, a child, a teenager, a young man, chased about by his parents, siblings, and perhaps eligible young women?

He did it all so He could honestly say that He understood our needs.  The writer of Hebrews puts it this way in chapter 2, verse 17-18: “For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

My God in the person of Jesus Christ allowed himself to be caged in a human body, to look out through the eyes of God and know how we might feel and experience life.  What love!  What sacrifice – certainly His death on the cross in satisfaction of our sin debt was a sacrifice we as humans cannot really comprehend, but the years of sacrifice before that – caged in a human body, how can we understand that?

I guess we can best understand it when we recognize that we too are strangers in this world.  Indeed this world is not our home. Peter writes this in I Peter 2:11-12, “Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in this world, to abstain from sinful desires which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans (unbelievers) that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”

I wanted so much to find a way to honor the black people back then, but didn’t do very well finding that way.  But today, we can find ways to honor our God, “Who, being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing taking the very nature of a servant, being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-even death on a cross.” Phil. 2:6-8.

We can consider the reality of what He did, and learn from it, not just assent to it.

All Scripture is from the New International Version

Picture is from the cover of the book