Little
Johnny’s Cross
Easter
2010
You will have to be my age (65) or older for your
parents to even remember the days in which this story happened. It was the day of the one room school house
where all grades met in one room with one teacher. You know, the “good ole days”.
In those days school attendance was somewhat erratic, in
that when there was some work to be done at home, you would stay home and work,
usually from daylight till dark. The
work consisted of farming, planting, harvesting, hoeing, etc. At the time of our story, it was between
seasons and all the children were at school.
Remember, these were the days before guns and knives and
dope were the big problems. At the
school the rules included no gum chewing, no spit ball, no marking on your desk,
and of course, no stealing. On this
particular day someone’s lunch went missing.
After an in-depth search, it was discovered that Little Johnny had taken
the lunch belonging to Big Ed.
Big Ed, and rightly so named, was the biggest and oldest
and meanest boy in the class. He was
even bigger than the teacher, who because of his size,
was careful in how she dealt with Ed. On
the other hand, Little Johnny was the smallest boy in the class. Johnny’s family were
poor tenant farmers, actually working for another farmer. The house in which they lived was just a
shotgun shack. And as far as food and
clothing, there were very little of that also.
Johnny’s clothes were, to say the least, just rage. His pants probably belonged to four or five
other little boys before they became his.
His shoes were stuffed with old news papers in cover the holes and he
wore no sock. His coat would be hard to
describe. Just think of the most ragged
coat you have ever seen and multiply that by one hundred and you might be
close.
Once the guilty party was discovered, that being Little
Johnny, he was called to the front of the class. There the teachers reminded Johnny of the
rule he had helped make about stealing.
That rule was ten licks across the back what “the rod”. Now the rod was a stick about the size of
your little finger and about the length of a yard stick. When Johnny was asked why he took the lunch,
he gave no answer. He just continued to
look down at the floor. When he was
asked about his own lunch, he simply replied that he did not have one.
With this, the teacher instructed him to take off his
coat and bend over and put his hands on her desk. Instead of taking off his coat, he just
pulled it tighter around his little body.
Again the teacher told him to take off his coat. Reluctantly he slowly removed his coat and to
the teacher’s surprise, he had no shirt.
About this time there was movement in the back of the
class room. As the teacher looked in
that direction she was Big Ed standing to his feet. “Miss Cobb”, he said. “Stop right were you are!” At that she stopped as Ed walked slowly to
the front of the class. Ed picked up
Little Johnny’s coat and helped him to put it back on. Then he instructed Johnny to go back to his
seat as he turned and look down at Miss Cobb.
“Miss Cobb, I’ll take Johnny’s whipping and he can have my lunch”.
Do you see the Easter story here? I hope you do because we are Little Johnny
and we have broken the rule. The penalty
for what we have done is not just a whipping but it is death. What we have done it called “SIN” and the
wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal live through Jesus
Christ. Jesus is our Big Ed and He gave
His life to pay the price for our sins.
Thank you Jesus.
Jesus is alive, alive forever more! Praise His Holy Name! Have a blessed
Easter.