His name is Ransom

And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you.

But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

– Mark 10:42-45 (ESV)

In Mark 10, Jesus spelled out his mission plainly, didn’t he? His disciples had been busy jockeying for their positions of greatness in the Kingdom, without understanding what greatness really is. Perhaps by now they had gotten used to being caught sideways by Jesus’ teaching, but I have to believe that his corrective words had them scratching their heads:

“But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

The next statement in Mark 10 is the simple narrative “and they came to Jericho”, so we don’t get to see the reaction of the disciples to Jesus’ teaching on servanthood, or their reaction to the frightening statement “to give his life as a ransom for many”. Though confused, they would soon learn what Jesus meant by this, and in graphic detail.

Think of the greatness of our God for just a moment. If, hypothetically speaking, you or I were God, how would we have saved the world? I’m pretty sure that one of the last options on my list of ideas would have been to come down as a servant and as a ransom. But that is exactly what our Lord decided to do. And, for those of you who have tasted his salvation, aren’t you glad? God’s way is always simultaneously best and not what we would have chosen.

The word “ransom” is a beautiful word to me. The greek word that translates as “ransom” in this passage is the word lutron. It literally means “a means of loosing” and is derived from the verb that every student learns on their first day of studying greek: luo, which means “to loose, to destroy”.

Jesus saw us lost, in bondage to sin, and chose himself to be our ransom, our redemption, the price to secure our freedom from slavery. He is the “means of loosing” us. That was his purpose, simply put: to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. He is my Rescuer and my Hero, and I hope he is yours too!

I leave you with a beautiful passage from C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. In this passage the protagonist, Elwin Ransom, hears from God. This never fails to send chills up my spine:

“It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,” said the Voice.

And he knew that this was no fancy of his own. He knew it for a very curious reason – because he had known for many years that his surname was derived not from ransom but from Ranolf’s son. It would never have occurred to him thus to associate the two words. To connect the name Ransom with the act of ransoming would have been for him a mere pun. But even his voluble self did not now dare to suggest that the Voice was making a play upon words. All in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident.

The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our use, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern…

“My name also is Ransom,” said the Voice.

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