Ragman by Walter Wangerin, Jr.
“I saw a strange sight…
“Even before the dawn one Friday morning I noticed a young man, handsome and strong, walking the alleys of our city. He was pulling an old cart filled with clothes, both bright and new, and he was calling in a clear tenor voice: ‘Rags!’ Ah, the air was foul and the first light filthy to be crossed by such sweet music.
“‘Rags! New rags for old! I take your tired rags! Rags!’
“‘Now this is a wonder,’ I thought to myself, for the man stood six-feet-four, and his arms were like tree limbs, hard and muscular, and his eyes flashed intelligence. Could he find no better job than this, to be a ragman in the inner city?
“I followed him. My curiosity drove me…
“Soon the ragman saw a woman sitting on her back porch. She was sobbing into a handkerchief, sighing, and shedding a thousand tears. Her knees and elbows made a sad X. Her shoulders shook. Her heart was breaking.
“The ragman stopped his cart. Quietly, he walked to the woman, stepping around tin cans, dead toys, and pampers.
“‘Give me your rag,’ he said gently, ‘and I’ll give you another.’
“He slipped the handkerchief from her eyes. She looked up, and he laid across her palm a linen cloth so clean and bright that it shone. She blinked from the gift to the giver.
“Then, as he began to pull his cart again, the ragman did a strange thing: He put her stained handkerchief to his own face; and then he began to weep, to sob as grievously as she had done, his shoulders shaking. Yet she was left without a tear.
“‘This is a wonder,’ I breathed to myself, and I followed the sobbing ragman like a child who cannot turn away from a mystery.
“‘Rags! Rags! New rags for old.’
“…the ragman came upon a girl whose head was wrapped in a bandage, whose eyes were empty. Blood soaked her bandage. A single line of blood ran down her cheek.
“Now the tall ragman looked upon this child with pity, and he drew a lovely yellow bonnet from his cart.
“‘Give me your rag,’ he said, tracing his own line on her cheek, ‘and I’ll give you mine.’
“The child could only gaze at him while he loosened the bandage, removed it, and tied it to his own head. The bonnet he set on hers. And I gasped at what I saw: for with the bandage went the wound! Against his brow it ran a darker, more substantial blood— his own!
“‘Rags! Rags! I take old rags!’ Cried the sobbing, bleeding, strong, intelligent ragman.
“The sun hurt both the sky, now, and my eyes; the ragman seemed more and more in a hurry.
“‘Are you going to work?’ He asked a man who leaned against a telephone pole…
“‘Are you crazy?’ Sneered the [man]. He pulled away from the pole, revealing the right sleeve of his jacket— flat, the cuff stuffed into the pocket. He had no arm.
“‘So,’ said the ragman. ‘Give me your jacket, and I’ll give you mine.’ So much quiet authority in his voice!
“The one-armed man took off his jacket. So did the ragman— and I trembled at what I saw: for the ragman’s arms stayed in its sleeve, and when the other put it on, he now had two good arms, thick as tree limbs; but the ragman had only one…
“After that, he found a drunk, lying unconscious beneath an army blanket, an old man, hunched, wizened, and sick. He took that blanket and wrapped it around himself, but for the drunk, he left new clothes.
“And now I had to run to keep up with the ragman. Though he was weeping uncontrollably, and bleeding freely at the forehead, pulling his cart with one arm, stumbling for drunkenness, falling again and again, exhausted, old, old, and sick, yet he went with terrible speed. On spider’s legs, he skittered through the alleys of the city, this mile and the next, until he came to its limits, and then he rushed beyond.
“I wept to see the change in this man. I hurt to see his sorrow. And yet I needed to see where he was going in such haste, perhaps to know what drove him so.
“The little old ragman— he came to a landfill. He came to the garbage pits. And I wanted to help him in what he did, but I hung back, hiding. He climbed a hill. With tormented labor, he cleared a little space on that hill. Then he sighed. He lay down. He pillowed his head on a handkerchief and a jacket. He covered his bones with an army blanket. And he died.
“Oh how I cried to witness that death! I slumped in a junked car and wailed and mourned as one who has no hope— because I had come to love the ragman. Every other face had faded in the wonder of this man, and I cherished him; but he died. I sobbed myself to sleep.”
“I did not know—how could I know?—that I slept through Friday night and Saturday and its night too. But then, on Sunday morning, I was awakened by a violence.
“Light—pure, hard, demanding light—slammed against my sour face, and I blinked, and I looked, and I saw the first wonder of all. There was the ragman, folding the blanket most carefully, a scar on his forehead, but alive! And, besides that, healthy! There was no sign of sorrow or age [or sickness], and all the rags that he had gathered [throughout our city] shined for cleanliness.
“…I lowered my head and, trembling for all that I had seen, I myself walked up to the ragman. I told him my name with shame, for I was a sorry figure next to him. …[and] with dear yearning in my voice [I said to him,] ‘Dress me.’
“He dressed me. My Lord, he put new rags on me, and I am a wonder beside him. The Ragman, the Ragman, the Christ.”
The realities of the cross can feel confounding. The reality is we celebrate the cross. Our minds often rightly fly to the reality that at the cross, Jesus saves us. Yes, and amen. At the cross, the long span of separation between God and man is healed, yes and amen!
At the cross, the head of the serpent was crushed, and the death blow that left Satan reeling slammed into both him and his demonic horde. Yes and amen! At the cross, Jesus demonstrates the immeasurable depth of God’s love for his people. Yes, and amen.
The cross causes celebration, and come this Sunday, I promise you, we will celebrate. But the reality is also that we lament the cross. We must never forget or overlook that our celebration comes at an immeasurable cost. Paul writes about the cost this way, 2 Corinthians 5:21.
“For our sake [God] made [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Our celebration flows from the reality that God made Jesus to be sin. Jesus, the divine one, the one who shares equally and with no divine distinction all the attributes of God the Father and God the Spirit.
Jesus, the holy one, the one who is completely distinct and unique. Jesus, the Word of God, through whom God created the world and holds everything together that we see right now. Jesus, so close in eternal fellowship within the Godhead that he’s referred to as the Son of God.
This Jesus at the cross, God made to be sin. Sin, the very antithesis of who God is. Sin, the inherited identity we have. The thoughts and acts, commissions and omissions that cause us all to fall short of God’s glory and leave us separated from our very creator.
That sin, and not just the sin of one person, but in his divine eternality, Jesus is sufficient for the sin of the entire world and enough to heal the brokenness of all that is in creation. God made Jesus to be that sin, a cost that cannot be calculated.
Why? Why did God do it? So that we might become the righteousness of God.
At the cross, there is a cost that leads to celebration. At the cross, there’s a great exchange. At the cross, that which belongs to me (sin), Jesus takes. At the cross, that which belongs to Jesus (righteousness), I’m offered.
The great exchange: our sin for the righteousness of Jesus himself.
For the Hebrews of Jesus’s day, the picture of the great exchange was right in front of their faces all the time (at least annually). It wasn’t a secret. They weren’t unaware of how the problem of sin had to be solved.
At the tabernacle and temple for millennia, the Jewish people lived out the law of God, picturing the great exchange. In Leviticus 1, it says this:
“If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall offer a male without blemish…that he may be accepted before the Lord. He shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him” (Leviticus 1:3-4)
“If he brings a lamb as his offering for a sin offering, he shall…lay his hand on the head of the sin offering and kill it for a sin offering…and the priest shall make atonement for him for the sin which he has committed, and he shall be forgiven” (Leviticus 4:32-33, 35b).
God provides within his law great clarity, informing his people of how they can be accepted, how their sin can be atoned, and how they can be forgiven: a perfect, costly, substitute sacrifice.
When they make that sacrifice, they put their hands on the head of that sacrifice. The human sin was exchanged with the blamelessness of the lamb. In that sacrifice, an Israelite was forgiven, atoned, and accepted by God.
But the problem was, for them, those lambs had to be perpetually offered all the time because they kept sinning all throughout the year, just like we do. So their exchange was a temporary exchange.
The author of Hebrews puts it this way:
“For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshippers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1-4).
Anyone who wants “forever forgiveness” requires a much more powerful lamb. John the Baptist, Jesus’s cousin, twice declares the identity of the more powerful Lamb.
The next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” And the very next day, John was standing with two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, “Behold the Lamb of God.”
Paul declares in 1 Corinthians,
“For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.”
Peter preaches it this way in his first letter:
“…knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:18-19).
And John, the disciple who Jesus loved, describes thousands upon thousands in the heavenly realms saying,
“Worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”
Friends, it is as if, at the cross, we lay our hands on Jesus as our substitute/perfect sacrifice. Through that lamb, we are then forgiven, atoned, and accepted by God.
In that moment, we have the full experience of the great exchange. That which belongs to me, Jesus takes. That which belongs to Jesus, I am given.
May we not miss this moment to remember well, to remember on purpose, to meditate, to purposefully think about the cost of the great exchange. For in that remembrance, we will actually fuel our celebration for this coming Easter celebration.
Let us not celebrate the results of the great exchange without spending time contemplating the cost of the great exchange. God made Jesus to be sin so that we might become the righteousness of God himself in Jesus. To the Father, the Spirit, and to the Lamb be glory forever and ever. Amen.
