More than I can afford

 

I was visiting my parents in Long Beach, maybe twenty years ago now. I wanted to take them out to dinner. As we approached a special restaurant along the coast in Laguna Beach, I told my dad I wanted to pay for this.

‘You can’t afford it,’ he replied with a smile. ‘I’m getting it.’

I can’t really describe how I felt. Hurt. A little angry. Sad, because of course it was true. I couldn’t afford it. (Why such negative feelings, when I know my dad was picking up the tab in love, with no judgment or condemnation on me?)

‘It is finished,’ Jesus breathed out as he paid the huge debt of sin humanity had run up. He wasn’t picking up the tab for a nice steak and glass of wine; he was paying the price for the injustices, the cruelties, our sharp words and unkind actions.

Today I am overwhelmed with sorrow that I can’t pay my own bill for the sin I have perpetrated and continue to commit. But the price is way beyond me.

‘You can’t afford it,’ Jesus says to me, to you, with love in his eyes. ‘I’ve got it.’

And he breathed his last. ‘It is finished.’ The price is paid. It’s settled: he has set us free from the clutches of the evil debt-collector.

More than the sense of sorrow is the huge sense of gratitude and relief and love which floods me as I look on his broken body on that cross of pain.

Thank you, Jesus. I worship you, in awe and love and gratitude. Thank you.