“Hast Thou No Scar”

As I write this it is Good Friday, “the Ninth Hour”.  Three o’clock in the afternoon by first century Jewish reckoning.
By this hour on the day of Christ’s crucifixion, He had already been hanging on the cross for several hours.  This, after an excruciating night of psychological and physical torture.
Matthew tells us that the  land of Judea had already been enveloped in darkness for three hours.  Jesus had one last statement to make from the cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”.

I am always ashamed at the ease with which we glide through the remembrance of Holy Week.  A Maundy Thursday night communion, perhaps a day from work with family on Good Friday and, rightfully so, a celebration on Resurrection Sunday.  But many times we lift our voices to sing, “Jesus Paid It All”, but with our actions add presumptuously , “And Rightly So”.
To help me come around to a right appreciation of the incomprehensible pain Christ suffered on our behalf , I look to older writings. This year I read again the thoughts on discipleship penned by Amy Carmichael, missionary to India:

Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star,
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned:
Hast thou no wound?

No wound?  No scar?
Yet, as a Master shall the servant be,
and pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole: can he have followed far
Who has no wound nor scar .¹

¹ Quoted in “A Chance to Die” by Elisabeth Elliot, Grand Rapids, 1987 p.264