…the punishment that brought us peace was upon him
Isaiah 53:5
“On a ruined wall in Hiroshima is dimly etched the figure of a human being who was standing next to it when the flash came.  The body, through instantaneously vaporized, stopped enough of the awful light to leave that abiding epitaph.  When German theologian Heinrich Vogel gazed at the dim silhouette, the thought gripped him: Jesus Christ was there in the inferno with that person;  what was done to him was done to Christ; the horror he may have had no instant to feel, Jesus felt.  The Light of the world stood uncomprehended, comprehending, and undone by the hideous splendor of humankind’s stolen fire…Jesus’ presence in the midst of atomic holocaust was intimated also in the fact that the bomb on Nagasaki exploded very close to the largest Christian cathedral in all Asia, annihilating 1,100 worshippers.  God, in order that we might meet him, narrowed himself down into Jesus.  But Jesus was also the narrowing down of the totality of humankind.   Our Lord does not ask that we stare heroically into the nuclear abyss; he asks that we look toward him and let our sight become aligned with his.  Will we put our lives on the line, his line, against the onrush of chaos?”
from “The Central Murder” by  Dale Aukerman