Scars and Stripes

“O beautiful for spacious skies,” many will sing this week, as Americans celebrate freedom, and the stars and stripes wave proudly nearby. “How beautiful is the body of Christ,” Rachel sang to us Sunday as we celebrated freedom in Jesus through the scars and stripes that He bore for us. And the bridge of that song challenged me afresh:

“And as He laid down His life, we offer this sacrifice, that we will live just as He died”

How did He die? Scarred and striped. The way His followers will live. The apostle Paul wrote, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). Because of his persistent witness to Jesus, he’d been hunted down and flogged and stoned - and he wore the evidences to prove it.

Jesus could have lived a pristine life and died a respectable death, I suppose. No blood. No violence. Nothing invasive. Just a quiet leave-taking and a returning to His Father. Paul could have retreated from persecution to a safe place, to write for future generations that might better appreciate what he had to say. But I needed the incredible plan of the Father that means my salvation. I needed Paul’s example of radical discipleship. I needed the blood and the scars and the stripes – and you do, too. They are beautiful to us, aren’t they?

Similarly, you and I could live self-contained lives and die respectably and without much mess or fuss - but would that be living “just as He died”? Might somebody near us need to see what real discipleship looks like? How will they, if we never take off the self-protective armor and embrace the specific plan that God has for our lives, however invasive and messy that might get? (There are scars and stripes that are not worn on the outside, you know). Besides, if we’ve paid no price and bear no marks, inward or outward, that identify us with Christ, might we one day hear, “Sorry, I never knew you”?

Some say that on that day Christ will bear no scars to remind us of our sin and shame. Yet in his vision of the yet-to-come, John saw a Lamb “looking like it had been slain” (Rev. 5:6). A Christ who had been crucified. I don’t want to show up on that scene looking like I’ve just come from a stroll in the park. I want to be willing to pay the price – whatever it means in my life – to join Jesus and His beautiful Body, the Church, in the Fellowship of the Scars and Stripes forever.