Ugly

I've been reading through Matthew and something stood out to me that I never thought about before: Jesus heals the physically sick by erasing their sicknesses - He heals the spiritually dead by taking on the ugliness of their sins on the cross.

I was just imagining what Jesus would have looked like if he chose to take on all of the sicknesses that he healed - leprosy, paralysis, death, blindness... It isn't a beautiful thought. That is only because I can see that, I can imagine the ugliness of that.

Instead, he took on the sins of his people - jealousy, anger, lust, murder, selfishness, sloth... I had never thought deeply about how that looked to God the Father as he saw His son on the cross - much uglier than leprosy, or even death.

The sins Jesus died for should be more ugly to me even than the sickest of sickness. But, I don't usually see them that way. I'm much more likely to say of someone with cancer, "Oh, did you go see "so and so"? She really looks bad!" than to look in the mirror of the Word and be repulsed by the ugliness of my own sin.

Just a little gleaning from Matthew