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Two extracts from Scene Seven: Simeon—"A sword will pierce your own soul"
There’s only one old man who gets a mention at Christmas. He wears red… brings the presents… and, bizarrely, often pops up at random points in nativity plays. Santa Claus may not be real (sorry if that’s news to you) but he’s pretty popular. Of course, Santa was nowhere to be seen at the first Christmas. But there was an old man at the heart of the real events. Not Santa, but Simeon. And Simeon didn’t do presents.
But he did do predictions…
The piercing sword
One of the worst things in the world is to be a parent whose child dies. Someone once wrote that it’s like losing a leg: you get used to it, but the loss and the pain never really go.
Mary didn’t only know what it was like to have her son die. She knew what it was like to watch her son die. She knew an unimaginable grief—what that old man Simeon had described thirty years earlier, while holding her baby, as having a sword pierce her soul.
She must have felt that emotional sword as Jesus—who’d lived a blameless life but was killed because the Jewish leaders didn’t want him to be their Christ—had real six-inch nails hammered through his wrists and his ankles.
She must have felt that emotional sword as Jesus had a real spear pushed through his side.
And she must have felt that emotional sword as Jesus hung on the cross as the sky went black; as her son experienced a spiritual torment far worse than either his physical pain or his mother’s emotional pain.
The anger of God
The sky going black as the Jewish leaders killed God’s Christ should be of no surprise. The darkness signalled that God’s anger had come. Of course God the Father was angry! His own Son, who he loved, was being unfairly executed. Wouldn’t you be angry?
The surprise is not that God the Father was angry; the surprise is who God was angry with. His anger and his punishment didn’t fall on the men who’d fought a turf war against his Christ. They didn’t die. No, God the Father’s anger and punishment fell on the man who was his Christ. His anger fell on his Son—on the only man of his day, of any day, who had never done anything wrong. The shock is that Jesus died.
On the cross, God the Son chose to bear the punishment that people deserve for their sin, for their refusal to let Christ rule. Jesus experienced the hell of being shut out of his Father’s kindness and kingdom. He traded places. He was punished instead of sinful people.
God’s Son took God’s anger so that we don’t have to.
What the cross shows
Stand next to Mary for a moment, and watch the Christ dying under God’s punishment. His agony on the cross shows us how horrific life without God is. It shows us what you and I face beyond death for trying to push him out of the turf of our lives: a future outside Christ’s kingdom.
But his cross also shows us that this doesn’t need to be our future. When we die, instead of standing before God with nothing to say and no excuses to make, we can stand there and say:
“The Christ I resisted took hell instead of me. The Christ I resisted saved me from hell. The Christ I resisted has given me a place in his perfect kingdom.”
When the angel told those shepherds that “a Saviour has been born to you … Christ the Lord”, he was pointing to the cross. The baby lying in a manger at the first Christmas had come to hang on the cross on the first Good Friday. Jesus came not only to rule people, but to rescue them. Not only to tell people about his eternal perfect kingdom, but to make a way for sinful people like us to get into that kingdom.
He came to be the Saviour. He chose to die so that our death does not need to be a terrifying dead-end, the end of all hope and joy and peace. It can be the doorway to perfect life in Christ’s kingdom.
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