Infinitum Lent JourneySample

Today we consider Jesus & Surrender in the context of Lent.

Probably more than a billion people on the planet are beginning to observe Lent as you launch out in this Infinitum Lent Journey. That’s about twice as many as having the YouVersion Bible app on their phone (2022!).

If Lent is a new experience for you, here is a little historic context: “It was a time of preparation of candidates for baptism and a time of penance for grievous sinners who were excluded from Communion and were preparing for their restoration” (Britannica.com).

“As a sign of their penitence, participants wore sackcloth and were sprinkled with ashes” (Britannica.com). Penance and more than a month of sackcloth and ashes have devolved over the centuries amongst many Christians to a blanket recognition of the need for penitence during Ash Wednesday. Along with preparation for baptism and penance/penitence, fasting is strongly associated with the season.

As these three Lenten features—fasting, penitence, and preparation for baptism—roughly correspond with the Infinitum foci of surrender, generosity, and mission, we will match them in our reading plans through the Infinitum Lent Collection.

Now, there is so much in our text for this week, and we will dig into some of it during these five days of this reading plan. In John 13:4, there is a clause, Jesus ‘took off his outer clothing’ (NIV). That seems innocuous, almost something we’d zip over, especially to find out that he was going to be washing his apprentices’ feet!

But let’s look for a moment at the term ‘outer clothing’. It is, in a Greek transliteration, ‘imatia’ and is defined as ‘imatia = an outer garment, a cloak, robe; Strong’s—long flowing outer robe, tunic’. Nothing special here?

The word isn’t even that rare in the New Testament, appearing in some form more than 60 times! But let’s zoom in on a few of them:

• it is not a stretch to speculate that this garment that Jesus took was the same one was wearing at the ‘Transfiguration’ when, “His clothing became intensely white, brighter than any earthly cleaner could bleach them” (Mark 9:3 Voice).
• it’s quite possible this was the same cloak Jesus wore while evangelizing in previous days: “Wherever he went—in villages, cities, or the countryside—they brought the sick out to the marketplaces. They begged him to let the sick touch at least the fringe of his robe, and all who touched him were healed” (Mark 6:56 NLT).
• or how about Jesus’ attire the day he encountered the lady who had been suffering from hemorrhage and ‘many doctors’ for a dozen years? “She thought to herself, 'If I can just touch his clothing, I will be healed.' And sure enough, as soon as she had touched him, the bleeding stopped and she knew she was well! Jesus realized at once that healing power had gone out from him, so he turned around in the crowd and asked, 'Who touched my clothes?' ” (Mark 5:28-30 TLB).
• and for our purposes here, how prophetic is it that he might have been wearing this same garment when he taught this (Mark 2:18-22 NRSACE)?: “Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.
• ‘No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.’”

In these verses, in the context of fasting, Jesus foreshadows the actual enactment in John 13:4. This outer clothing, a garment that had glowed ‘intensely white’ and had healed ‘all’ the sick people who touched it, a robe that would soon be gambled over by Roman troopers (Matthew 27:35), Jesus took off.

This cloak had likely grown to symbolize supernatural power, almost a divine mantle for Jesus. It implicitly underlined the celestial authority of Jesus himself.

And Jesus took it off.

Surrender.