By By Kerry Whipple Bean – publisher
Before He appeared, dazzling in white, to Mary Magdalene, before the linens were left behind in the empty tomb, Christ's suffering was a painful sight. Crucified on a cross with other convicts, scourged and beaten, Jesus was not the attractive son of God we might imagine, Father Adrian Cook told congregants Friday at Brewton's final Holy Week service at First Presbyterian Church.
But in reality, Jesus was more like the person prophesied in Isaiah 53: “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him.”
Hanging on the cross on Good Friday, Jesus was “not a pretty sight,” Cook said. “He had been beaten and spat upon, pierced for our offenses. There was nothing attractive about Him.”
But that is the Jesus Christians are called to see in others every day, Cook said.
But that Messiah - the one considered an outcast, who had a loyal but small following - is the one we should look for in others, Cook said, the sick and the suffering that all Christians should help.
Even amid the glory of the risen Lord, Cook said, Christians should remember how today's celebration of Easter came about.
First Presbyterian pastor John Mathieu said Christians are able to see Jesus' beauty - despite His suffering - because of faith.