Psalm 22.1-11
Isaiah 45.21-25
Philippians 2.5-11
Mark 14.32-15.47
This week is the center of the Church year; in it we mark the death of Jesus our Savior and Lord. Jesus lived, Jesus died, and he was raised from the dead. That's nice; that's extremely interesting, but so what? What, personally, does that have to do with us? What did Jesus do then that matters now? What real-world help and healing still flows from that cross? What is the present power of the crucified Jesus?
Historically, the Christian Church never came up with an official answer to the question: What did Jesus do when he died? If Christianity is true then whatever happened on that cross when Jesus of Nazareth died is the true meaning and center of all history, yet Christians have never found themselves able to say exactly what it is that happened. There is no theory of the cross on a par with the precise theological formulations of the nature of the Trinity, or the Incarnation, that we find in the creeds.
What we have instead is a cluster of metaphors, stories, pictures, analogies. In the earliest years of the Church, metaphors from the battlefield were used to portray Jesus as dying so as to engage in conflict with the cosmic forces of evil to which humans are in bondage; by placing himself at the mercy of the 'Evil One' Jesus defeats him and ransoms us from his power. We also find Jesus dying on the cross compared to the atoning sacrifices of the ritual religion of ancient Israel, where a blood sacrifice propitiates God. Jesus' death is described in terms of the death of the Passover lamb in the Exodus, the sacrifice that initiates the deliverance of God's people from slavery. Drawing on the context of the law courts, Jesus' death is described as a penal substitution, in that he accepted a punishment deserved by us. In another metaphor, this drawn from the context of civil, rather than criminal, law, Jesus is portrayed as paying on our behalf a debt we are incapable of paying. Turning from the courts to the slave market, we see Jesus as dying on the cross to redeem us, to buy us back and set us free. And from the slave market to the classroom: Jesus dies on the cross to demonstrate and exemplify God's love for human beings who are incapable of learning it in any less dramatic way.
These are not mutually exclusive, competing theories. They are intertwined and overlapping pictures or stories, each illuminating some strand of what happened, none of them, nor all of them taken together, fully capturing the reality of the Cross. What took place on that first Good Friday, this event, this act in which God shows himself most fully, goes deeper than our understanding. It eludes the grasp of our concepts and categories. There is no one right and final way to describe the meaning of what Jesus did for us. No matter how long the Church lasts, it will never exhaust its long meditation on the meaning of that cross. This, I think, is a good thing. We need to make this death our own. We are left with room to think here, with freedom to describe, to appropriate this death, to connect our thoughts, our feelings, our lives to it. To let them be remade in light of it.
What I want to do this morning, as we begin this week of remembrance, is to focus our attention on a few facts about the cross of Christ. First, it needed to happen. Human need, then and now, everyones' and yours and mine, is real. We find ourselves cut off from God, self-reliant, always ready to be gods to ourselves, too proud, too fearful, too insecure to trust God and let him be God. We are what the Bible calls sinners. And it really did happen. God answers the reality of human need with a real event. 'He suffered under Pontius Pilate' The death of Jesus takes place at a real time, in a real place. The cross is not safely located in mythology; scholars can argue about the year, the day of the week on which it occurred. We are not dealing here with a symbol of some moral or religious truth. God's response to our need is not to teach us the principle of sacrificial love. No principle could help us; no moral lesson, no matter how wonderful, could save us. We witness a real event, a saving act of God breaking into the ordinariness of human lives like ours.
Second, we should remember that it did not just happen. It wasn't an accident. When we recall the death of Jesus we're not talking about one of the many tragic episodes of history in which a good man or woman dies and becomes an inspiring martyr. The gospels portray Jesus as seeing the crucifixion as the inevitable outcome of his life. He knew what he was doing, that he was challenging the power of Rome and the piety of Israel. He new he was putting himself into the hands of fearful and angry sinners. Jesus knew the tendencies in people then -- no different from those in people now -- and he knew how people would respond to him, that is, he knew he had come into this world to die. Jesus was not killed because of a misunderstanding. Obviously, the people who were directly involved in his execution did not act in full knowledge, but they did not kill him by accident. They had their reasons: Jesus was executed for sedition and for blasphemy. People, wanting equality with God, desire to be like God as they imagine him to be, knowing good and evil, invulnerable and safe, lording it over everyone else. But God graciously does the opposite, refusing to be the thing human beings in their sin strive to be. The great, amazing, heartbreaking fact is God's response to our rebellion. He doesn't ultimately respond to human ingratitude, stupidity and wickedness with indignant wrath.
God will have his way in the end. He will have his personal, passionate, covenant relationship with the people he has called into being. At all costs. He will break down every power and every structure that destroys those whom he loves. God will defeat even our desire for self-sufficient godhood, forgive us for it, and heal the awful wounds it creates. But he will not forgive us in a cavalier, whimsical, destructive way. He heals and forgives us only after letting our rejection and rebellion reach its terrible conclusion.
It is as though God says to us 'Have it your way...for now, but I will not forsake you in the end, and even before then I will not leave you to your own devices. From the very worst evils of your having things the way you want them I will bring forth your salvation. I will save you despite yourselves, turning what you do for evil to your good, which is your trusting me.' God makes clothes for Adam and Eve, even though their shame is a product of their new-found self-righteousness, a rejection of their 'merely human' status as physical, sexual creatures. God gives his people a law to follow, a law that will preserve and protect them from themselves, though they will use it in a vain attempt to achieve righteousness, as though righteousness could reside in oneself rather than in one's relation to God. But in the end will come the One who fulfils this law and delivers us from sin, death and evil. The people of God demand a king, and a government like that of their neighbors, so God lets them have what they want, despite the fact that in this they will more fully and perniciously manifest their fallenness. Yet from this kingship God will finally bring them their savior-king. And finally, he gives them what they want, the chance to execute God as a threat to their religious and political power. Jesus' death is no accident; it's the awesome culmination of God's struggle to save us.
Finally, we remember that Jesus went to his death with terrible fear and horror, but willingly, because of his love for us. And this love is God's love for us. Our faith says: if someone wants to know what God is like, if someone wants to know God, he needs to look at his man, humiliated, abandoned, broken, dying. The true God is the crucified God. God is not power, not the pure transcendent other, not the disinterested supreme being: God is love, and the meaning and depth and implacable factuality of that love is there on the cross. God is not far off and alien; he is here with us, taking the injustice, the mockery, the lostness and despair and brute suffering of human life into himself, dying to deliver us from the power of death and to save us for fellowship with him.
In doing what he did nailed to that instrument of torture Jesus decisively and forever transformed the relationship of human beings to God. This event divides all time into before and after. Where there was alienation and separation and enmity God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. We do not really understand why the death of Jesus has this effect. The explanation defeats the human intellect. We can only hedge this event about with our inadequate metaphors. We cannot penetrate with clear understanding to the center of reality where God in Christ acts on behalf of his creatures. We are left to trust our crucified Savior. The cross of Christ is the tangible reality to which our faith in God attaches. We are saved by God's grace through faith in the crucified Jesus whose goodness we trust God to count as ours. The story of his death and resurrection becomes our story when, in faith, we are joined to this crucified Jesus.
Amen.