Angels sang at His birth. Angels came to serve Him in the wilderness of temptation. Angels came to comfort Him in His Gethsemanic sweat. But now there are no angels. Ten thousand times ten thousand of powerful shining spirits, faces ablaze with indignation, swords drawn and singing, mounted on steeds chomping at the bit and pawing the sky for release, would have swooped to work a rescue that would have made the most powerful cavalry charge seem like a twitch of the nose. But God looks down on this Man of Sorrows, Grief, and Death, and says to the angels who love to do His will: “Stand back. Do not raise a finger to help. Verily, do not raise an eyelash.”
The burden is the burden of the Lamb alone.
We are that terrible and lonely burden. He is the God who comes to us in our loneliness, forsakenness, and curse. Lost in the “non-place” of our aloneness, He comes to be our place. We cannot go to Him. He comes to us. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Caught in the enchantment of our self-love, bound in the enslavement of our own sin, strapped down by the Law’s verdict of condemnation, and writhing in our shameful servitude, this Lamb comes to us. Well do we sing, “Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna – please save us.”
Enough of this religious prattle that speaks of our doing this and deciding that. First He comes to us. He helps us, not by stepping on us, and not by shouting out commands for self-improvement at us, but by coming, by stooping down even under us to lift us up on His neck. He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death – even death by the cross. We are His burden.