Lamentations 2:15-16, ‘All who pass along the way clap their hands at you; they hiss and wag their heads at the daughter of Jerusalem: ‘Is this the city that was called the perfection of beauty, the joy of all the earth?’ All your enemies rail against you; they hiss, they gnash their teeth...’ Jerusalem lies in desolation, slain—as it were—for her sins. The once beautiful, virgin Bride is now stripped and exposed in shame for her adulteries; desolate and cast off, she is forsaken by the God whom her sins have estranged and scorned by her enemies. This is the due of God’s adulterous people, of YHWH’s once-virgin Bride. And yet, for those who stand before the Scriptures as they are illumined by the paschal light of the cross, who can read these lines without being carried in the Spirit to Calvary (see Matt. 25:39-44)?

Christ the Lord, the King and Covenant Head of God’s people, endures in Himself precisely what Jerusalem endures in the shattering of her exile as recounted in Lamentations 2. And yet He endures these things not as an adulterer and sinner in Himself, but as one who bears in His own flesh the adulteries and sins of another, namely, of Jerusalem—of His Bride. Yes, Christ is stripped and shamed and lifted up as a curse for the derision of the human and demonic realms because this is what His Bride has incurred, because this is what His Beloved One has brought upon herself. Our Lord and our God becomes the derided and cast off one of Matthew 25:39-44 because His Beloved Bride is the derided and cast off one of Lamentations 2:15-16.

In this is love....Yes, in this is the love for which the cosmos exist, the love of the Only True God by which the one who has made herself the Whore of Babylon is loved with an everlasting love, a love that bears her abominations in Himself, which endures the wrath she deserves in His own shattered body and spilt blood, which loves into and through and beyond the death of her deserved exile, and so raises her up from the sea of her ruin—which He has made His own—onto the white shores of the New Creation, the cosmic Holy Place which is the eschatological Bridal chamber of God and His pure, spotless, blood-washed Bride.