It was a still afternoon, peaceful really. Sunny, at a
pleasant twenty two degrees Celsius, it was the perfect afternoon to lie on the beach and work
on a tan. Perfect, unless your name was Tony Stark.
To Stark, the sun seemed a heartless predator; the sea a
haughty tease. Asserting just enough willpower to pull his mind away from the
now dull ache of his broken ribs and the hundreds of tiny cuts on his arms and
thighs, he tried to remember how he had ended up in this position.
Twenty four hours earlier he had met with Nick Fury to
discuss an unfortunate development in the Middle East. In Ramla, Israel there
was a warehouse storing Stark’s newest invention: Aerocarapace – cutting edge armor
that he had been developing for S.H.I.E.L.D. Aerocarapace was strong enough to
protect a person from anything short of a nuclear attack, yet small enough to
be embedded in the skin in five anchor points around the body. To make it even
easier to use, Stark had developed an oral trigger disguised as a molar. He had
chosen the countryside near Ramla for the warehouse locale, because it was a
quiet, beautiful city that had survived the slow march of time. Given its
unassuming location, it seemed like the least obvious place for his competition
to look. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
Somehow, information had leaked about the warehouse and
the armor within. As a result, the warehouse had been infiltrated. Stark’s
workers had all been killed and replaced with heavily armed mercenaries.
Because S.H.I.E.L.D wanted to preserve the Aerocarapace
chips, an explosive showdown wasn’t the solution. Stark was to go ahead and
scout out the mercenaries while Fury assembled a strike team as back up. While
he knew Fury’s plan was best, this grated on Stark who had never been a team
player. However, the simple fact was that he could get there the soonest and
was the most resilient on his own, yet still needed the team to overtake the
warehouse successfully. In forty eight hours, the strike team would join him in
Ramla and the situation would be resolved quickly and with no harm to the chips.
Until they arrived, no one must know who he was or the entire situation would
blow up and Aerocarapace would be at risk. A simple enough directive for Iron
Man.
And yet, here he was. With blatant disregard for its
almost sacred significance in the region; his captors had hung him by the
wrists from the stout branch of a hundred year old olive tree. Stark’s
appreciation for olives faded as did the blood from his fingertips over the
next hours. His toes could just touch the ground, which was stained with blood
from his lacerations. If only they were low enough to push up on the dirt and
relieve some of the weight from his strained shoulder joints. It had amused the
men to nick his skin, testing their blades, over and over throughout the
morning, but they had grown bored of it and retired to drink in the shade.
Occasionally one would get up and beat Stark with the butt of their rifle or
make obscene gestures against his battered body to the hysterical approval of
their comrades.
Hours passed. In his lucid moments, Stark knew only one
thing: this was ridiculous.
In time, he was done with waiting. Tony wasn’t sure if
these men were stupid or just acting it, but none of them seemed to know who he
was. There was no way that Aerocarapace falling into the wrong hands was worth
this agony. What had Fury said? “Wait for
us. Just wait. Don’t reveal yourself. It’ll be on your head if the world’s
villains are protected by your own chips.” But he had had enough of it. He
wasn’t some weak fool. He was Iron Man. How many lives had he saved over the
years? Disasters averted? With an elite Aerocarapace already embedded in his
skin, featuring propulsion engines and ultrathin missiles, it would be a simple
bite on the trigger to activate the armor and escape these men.
With that, he did it. He said, “You puny idiots. I’m Iron
Man. I could blow you all to bits in seconds.”. In their drunken state, the men
laughed lewdly in response. One man, laughing so hard that drool hung from his
bearded chin, slurred, “Me too! Look guys, I’m Iron Man…..but I’m so stupid
that I’ve been hanging here for the past ten hours.” Another pretended to fly
around the group while his friend swaggered up to Stark and said, “Is that so?
Well then, Iron Maaaaaan, prove it.”
With this, they all glinted at Tony, some goofily, some angrily, some preparing
their knives for another round of slicing.
Time seemed to stand still. With pride and body battered,
Tony Stark bit down on the trigger.
(I’ll leave it up to your imagination as to what happened
next.)
I have been thinking about another man and what he
experienced just fifty kilometers from Ramla, Israel. He too was hanging in the
sun from a tree. Worse, he was nailed clear through onto that tree. It wasn’t
nicks covering his body, but great seeping gashes caused by hours of
unthinkable torture. It wasn’t merely a handful of drunken men that watched
him, mockingly; but a crowd. Some came out of curiosity, some of pride, some of
grief. Regardless of their motives, there they all were- gawking at this man
who claimed to be the Son of God.
What a ridiculous notion, they must have thought. The Son
of God wouldn’t let himself be subjected to torture, perverse scorn and death. The
Son of God, one with the Father, had set the stars in the heavens. He had
created every blade of grass, every natural wonder, every commandment and law
that these people had. He was father to Moses, David and Elijah. He was a
mighty king and warrior. He could not be this mere man, hanging “helplessly”
from a tree.
Often, I wonder that Christ didn’t act on these thoughts
himself. As men mocked and called for him to come down, how did he, with all of
the power of the Godhead in him, resist? He had every right to! And then I read
this:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is
yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count
equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form
of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form,
he humbled himself by becoming
obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:7-8 (emphasis added)
Jesus Christ, greater far than any cool superhero with
awesome capabilities, could have flung himself off of the cross and displayed
his greatness for the crowd to see. It would have taken nothing – just a
thought. But, what would it have accomplished?
For a while, it would have been a brilliant story; a
story that could have grown or faded with time. The crowd that had gathered
would certainly believe that Jesus was God. What justification that would be.
I think that’s
what any of us would have chosen. Our pride and pain would have won out so that
(like Tony Stark) we showed them just who we were.
But Jesus, full of humility, said nothing. He hung on to
the cross, bearing the full weight of all of humanity’s sins. When his work was
done, He gave up his spirit.
And what did that accomplish?
Therefore God has highly exalted him and
bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every
tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians 2:9-11
Wow!
Wow! Wow! Wow!
I am amazed by Christ’s relentless humility and by what
it accomplished for his glory.
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