The Night The Devil Laughed
Sermon
CALLED TO JERUSALEM: SENT TO THE WORLD
Sermons For Lent And Easter
I. Darkness At Noonday
Darkness had come at noonday! It lasted for hours, as if the sun were hiding its face.
Well it should have! The events of this day were the deeds of the night, not deserving the light of day. A hurried arrest and trial had consumed the night. Before dawn a mob had gathered. By noonday that mob and its leaders had intimidated an officer of justice, agreed to the release of a notorious criminal and crucified an innocent man.
The whole creation seemed repulsed and angered. At noonday darkness covered the earth, and the earth shook. Rocks split, graves opened and the veil of the temple was torn violently (Matthew 27:51-53). A Roman centurion, hardened by many crucifixions and not likely to have been much moved by Jewish teachings concluded, albeit too late, what had to be obvious: "Truly this was the Son of God (Matthew 27:54)."
Now it was evening. Darkness had come another time. The crowds had gone home and their angry shouts and taunts had gone with them. Gone too were the screams and cries of the dying. With the darkness, there came also a stillness. Three men were dead. The world has probably never been - before or since - quite so quiet as when the voice of God fell silent, captured in the clutches of the death of a crucified man named Jesus.
It was like the stunning Good Friday sermon at a service I once attended. As we sat in darkness after the last candle had been extinguished, the pastor preached his sermon. "God is dead! Our sins have crucified him!" Then came five minutes of the most disturbing silence this preacher can ever remember.
No one had won. Surely not Pilate. Blackmailed with threats of treason, he acted against his best judgment in the matter, and against the urgent counsel of his wife (Matthew 27:19). The high priests and religious authorities could not have rested easily. The torn temple veil had opened the Holy of Holies to all. At the very least it was a serious violation of the sacred place. At the worst, it was a sign of God's judgment. The crowd, no longer gathered and charged by the mounting emotion, was now reduced to individuals in the quiet of their homes coming to terms with a second look at the day and its events. No one could have slept very well that night. There must have been an eerie uneasiness over the city, even in the season of Passover!
On the other hand, we can imagine that the hallways of hell rocked with the raucous laughter of those who were sure they had won. The lintels must have shaken with the sound. What had failed so terribly on the Mount of the Temptations had worked on the mount called Calvary. "They did it! They did it! Pilate, Caiphas, the priests, and the crowd did it. We got him! The Son of God is dead!"
Satan surely roared - elated in the laughter of victory. The parable of the Wicked Tenants of the Vineyard had been fulfilled. As a last resort the owner of the vineyard - in this case, the creator of the cosmos - had sent his son to reestablish the contractual covenant. Instead, hoping to inherit the vineyard finally and fully, the tenants killed the son (Matthew 21:33-41, Mark 12:1-8 and Luke 20:9-16).
This is today's story. "This is the outline of the official story - the tale of the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the ...
terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero."1
Darkness came to the earth twice that day! With it there came a stillness that could come only from the death of God himself. The rafters of hell must have rung with laughter! At the close of Good Friday, it looked to all the world as if the powers of evil had done their worst, and that they had prevailed.
II. Rediscovering The Gospel Of The Old Testament
"All the world" included the disciples of Jesus! Even the early experiences of Easter and the days following could not wholly set aside the impact of a senseless crucifixion, the "ignominous end of the story of Jesus."2
For today's hearers, believers and nonbelievers alike, the cross has been for 20 centuries the symbol of our salvation. It has become an artistic inspiration for costume jewelry and for the architecture and decoration of our churches. In the first century it was a wholly other matter.
For the first people of the first century, their cross was their electric chair, hangman's noose, or lethal gas chamber. It was scandalous because it was the maximum penalty for the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes. It was terrifying because it was "one of the most abominable, most painful means of death that man had invented to make death as terrible as possible ... It was a public affair to torture a man to death."3 Truly it could be said of the crucified that "He poured out his soul to death (Isaiah 53:12)." In the midst of the severest pain imaginable, death comes slowly from "the lack of breath and the loss of blood. It comes from exposure from the sun and the wind. It comes from the attacks of the vultures and wild dogs that wait nearby, hungry. Sometimes, death comes from going mad."4
If we are going to grasp the impact of the cross upon the disciples of Jesus and upon the hearers of the preaching of the apostles, we must consider firsthand the trauma of our being called upon to witness a public execution. With no hint of disrespect, we might well consider, perhaps only for this day, the removal of the cross (already sanitized in most Protestant traditions by the removal of the corpus of Christ). In its place let there be a replica of an electric chair, a gas chamber or another contemporary appliance of legal execution. Let us consider how ready we would be to receive and accept an invitation from the governor to be present and to witness the "relatively painless" and quietly routine execution of one found guilty and worthy of death by a just and due process. Only in such a way may we begin to have a grasp on that first Good Friday and the impact that day had upon all who heard the gospel in that day.
To all of these shared horrors, add the taunts, the jeers and the elongated time of pain and terror. Add the overwhelming sense of the innocence of the man. Hear the words of compassion, in the midst of his indescribable pain. Mary, the mother of our Lord, and John stood at the foot of the cross - through it all! The other disciples fled.
It should be no surprise that the good news of Easter could not in a day remove the trauma of the Friday that preceded it. The New Testament gospels tell us repeatedly of the disbelief of the early reports of the resurrection. Later, when confronted by the risen Lord, Jesus' followers "disbelieved for joy, and they wondered (Luke 24:41)!" Even after Thomas' moving confession at the feet of the risen Lord, Peter says: "I am going fishing (John 21:3)." In that short phrase Peter speaks the disappointment and bewilderment of all the disciples.
Jesus had sought to prepare the disciples for the cross. He had spoken of the cross of discipleship and of his death on the cross repeatedly. He urged the disciples to believe in him in spite of the events that were about to unfold. One such text is universally known and loved: "Let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me ... (John 14:1-14)." Nevertheless, nothing he said quite prepared them for "Good Friday."
Further, the first-century expectations of the Messiah's coming were not connected during that period with the servant passages of the Old Testament. Where examples of such interpretations can be found, there is no indication that prior to Christianity the Messiah was expected to suffer after installation into office, or that his suffering was viewed as atoning in light of Isaiah 53.5
Nevertheless, this linkage of understandings is at the heart of the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus on the afternoon of the first Easter Day. Dejected and unconvinced by the reports of the resurrection, they explained to their companion, the yet unrecognized Lord himself, the terrible events of the three days past.
"Some of those who were with us went to the tomb, and found it just as the women had said; but him they did not see." And he said to them, "O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:24-27)."
This story reports what happened again and again as the early church discovered the Old Testament anew. It was the Bible of the Early Church.6 The "gospel of the suffering servant and God's work of redemption" would be found in seven of the Old Testament prophets, two historical books and 14 of the Psalms, one of which Jesus quotes from the cross.7 In view of these texts, the passion of Christ is neither the story of a criminal's execution nor the miscarriage of judicial systems. It is the story of the cost of our salvation. It is the story of the fearful price of our rebellion and alienation from God.
Consider again Isaiah 53. The trial of Christ, the physical abuse, the desertion of the disciples, the passive posture of the servant of the Lord, the criminal associations, and much more are all there: "Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? ... He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.... By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.... Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isaiah 53:1, 3, 8-9, 12)."
III. Why Must It Be This Way?
If the cross was a problem in the first century because of its shame, it is more of a problem in the 20th century because of its senselessness in the value structures of our contemporaries. Self-centered and masters of the charge cards of instant gratification, proponents of individual rights and suspicious of institutions and authority, we seek self-fulfillment as our goal. Worshiping in "the churches of the sanitized cross," as most of us do, we have rejected meditation upon suffering in favor of the empty cross of victory.
Triumphalism is the mark of our popular theology. It is pandered like snake oil by television evangelists: "Love Jesus and everything will be fine!" Implied are promises of rewards and riches. There is no call to community, to service or to stewardship. Our humorous "Are we having fun yet?" betrays an expectation of something far less than a lifestyle of sacrifice, of crosses and of suffering servants. The late President John F. Kennedy, in his Inaugural Address, suggested another way: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Clearly we revere his memory more than his message.
So alien are the values of our contemporaries to the themes of suffering and redemption that the cross is - for very different reasons - as offensive and senseless today as it was in the first century. To speak of Christ's death and of his bearing our sins make the Lord God who demands such a price for forgiveness sound like an ancient pagan tribal deity still demanding a pound of flesh. This same image occurred to Micah centuries ago: "With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" "He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:6-8)?"
Then, why the cross? Why this senseless cruelty and crucifixion? For what purpose does Isaiah write: "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 63:4-5)."
IV. The Meaning Of The Cross
In Christ's cross we find the judgment of God, the grace of God and the means of reconciliation both with God and with one another.
In the judgment of the cross we face head on the nature and the cost of our sin. In the grace of the cross we encounter the living God who hungers for the reconciliation of his creation and its creatures. In the suffering of the cross we encounter the price and the process of our reconciliation.
The Judgment Of The Cross
The cross of Christ presents us with basic understandings of the role of sin in making crosses necessary. Apart from the fact that Jesus was innocent and the principals knew it, the simple, most obvious truth is that "his contemporaries just did not like him, and so they decided that his career must be brought to a swift end. He came into the world as the great disturber. He interrupted people and he interfered ... he upset the ecclesiastics because he criticized them.... But God is a critic - this is the meaning of judgment - and never more so than of his own people."8
All of which brings us to the core of what it means to be "God's people." Called by God, we enter a covenant, a relationship of mutual and shared trust and responsibility. For Christians, it's the first question of baptism: "Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil and all his empty promises?"9 This is to say: "When push comes to shove, whose side are you on? On which team will you be playing?"
This question carries us all the way back to the first commandment. It is the commandment from which the other nine logically flow. They are but commentaries to the first. "I am the Lord your God ... You shall have no other Gods before me (Deuteronomy 5:6-7)."
Martin Luther liked to say: "Love God and do as you please." If we be "for God," then what pleases God will also be pleasing to us. We would be of one mind with God, and of one spirit. Our lives would feed upon knowing and doing God's will. In our parents we would see a pattern of our heavenly parent - the life of giving, providing and sustaining. We would discover fulfillment in being for others rather than ourselves, just as God has been for us. We would never count persons as objects or status as a preemptive goal. The first of our baptismal questions is definitive: "Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil and all his empty promises?"10
The cause of Jesus' crucifixion on Good Friday - and countless others on other days - rests in our answer to this baptismal question. "Whose side are you on?"
God is the God of righteousness, justice and truth. The religious authorities placed political pragmatism and the security of professional status ahead of justice. Pilate sneered at truth. Judas, like a Zealot, sought to force the hand of God for his own political purposes. Peter denied. The disciples fled. "We have turned away, each to his own way (Isaiah 53:6)."
Jesus came asking the question and issuing the invitation of repentance. In so doing, the criticisms of Jesus threatened the religious authorities, the kingdom of Jesus threatened the political authorities, and the morality of Jesus threatened the people. "The life of Jesus showed up the deeds of men in the dazzling light of sheer goodness. It compelled choice. They could either repent or cry 'crucify.' "11
The issue: "Do you renounce the forces of evil, the devil and all of his empty promises?" "Whose side are you on?" That was and is yet the issue and the choice. The late Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: "God was executed by people painfully like us in a society very similar to our own - in the over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen. In a nation famous for its religious genius and under a government renowned for its efficiency, he was executed by a corrupt church, a timid politician and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators. His executioners made vulgar jokes about him, called him filthy names, taunted him, smacked him in the face, flogged him with the cat and hanged him on a common gibbet - a bloody, dirty, sweaty and sordid business.... It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all."12
The cross confronts us with the judgment of God. It is God's indicative. He reveals himself. Once so confronted, we must always choose. That's God's imperative. Repent or crucify. Those are the two choices - the only two choices - we have. Christ died because of that choice. The cross was not an accident. It was not the mechanical demand of an ancient tribal deity for human sacrifice. It is the price of sin. With sin come alienation and death - always!
The Grace Of The Cross
In the grace of the cross we encounter the living God who hungers for our reconciliation. From the cross, we see ourselves and we see God. God has choices, too! While we do not always choose for God, God always decides "for" us.
How else can we comprehend the depth of the parable of the waiting father (Luke 15:11-14)? In the waiting and the loving that mark the father's hunger for the return of his son, even though the son's behavior has wasted the fortune and disgraced the family, the father enters into the suffering with his child.
Contrary to the ancient belief that suffering was the direct result of the displeasure of God, the curse does not always lie upon those who suffer. "Indeed, the one who is cursed may not recognize his own curse in the person who bears it.... Because he suffers the pain of others, others are released from pain."13 "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:5)."
Like that ancient Palestinian father in Jesus' parable, God enters, through his Son, into our life and into our suffering. Herein is the contradiction with most of what other traditions and secular "Christians" call religion. We think always of the religious life as our ascent into holiness, perfection. We even sing of climbing Jacob's ladder as if we are climbing up to heaven. The good news is that God descends to us and becomes one with us, carrying our guilt and our suffering with us and, ultimately, for us. It began in the Christmas incarnation and it came to its fullest expression in Good Friday's crucifixion. He emptied himself and became like us, he descended to earth to dwell among us. On Good Friday, he descended into hell with us! "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani!" "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Psalm 22:1)?"
Forsaken! The healed bear him no witness. The disciples have fled. In the terrifying pain, humiliation and stress of the tortured death, it is as if God is gone too. With Jesus' cry he has begun the descent into the very reality of hell itself ... with us and for us. With this cry we begin to grasp, with the breath catching in our throats, Jesus' descent from heaven and into hell, into the hopeless loneliness of divine abandonment. Emil Brunner writes that in this cry "for the first time the incarnation of God's Son had come to his goal."14
In the cross of Christ we see the grace of God. "Father, forgive." "Today you will be with me in Paradise." "Woman, behold your son." "It is finished." Even the deceit of humankind, when the sun hides its face and the earth quakes, cannot deter the gracious purposefulness of God. "He poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isaiah 53:12b)." Or, as Paul wrote: "God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8)."
The Reconciliation Of The Cross
Alienation is self-perpetuating. The forces that pull and drive us apart - anger, hurt, suspicion, rejection and fear - work always to keep us apart. Long after the root cause or the emotion of an incident of alienation has passed, we are hesitant to offer either an initiative or an apology. Alienation is by definition a distancing. As this distancing increases, we know one another less and less, and we become more and more unwilling to risk that move which would lead to reconciliation. If reconciliation is to happen, someone must interrupt the perpetual cycle that alienation establishes. There needs to be the "prime mover." The cross is that act of reconciliation for us, and the symbol of our call to join in the work of reconciliation.
Such moments of risking reconciliation are the moments when we are the most vulnerable. It is in the offer to share the suffering of others, to bear their travail with them, that reconciliation can take place. The cross is more than a symbol. It is in principle the vehicle. Lives are changed and hurts reconciled when we join with others in their suffering with the intent to heal.
Hurricane Agnes swept through Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a fierce vengeance. Whole neighborhoods were flooded and some homes were inundated and covered with the raging flood waters. Days later people sat in their washed-out homes, stunned and immobile.
After the early morning Eucharist, teens from Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Lancaster armed themselves with buckets, brooms, shovels and garden hoses. They entered home after home, spraying the walls and washing out tons of mud left on the floors. A man watched as they cleaned his home. "Why are you doing this for me?" he asked. "I never met you before." A stunned teen-aged girl struggled for an answer. Finally she blurted out: "Jesus sent us!" The man wept. A few weeks later he stood tall in a new members' class, embracing again the faith he had once thought was gone forever.
In the early darkness of the evening, when the door of the tomb was sealed in place and the Christ had been buried, the Devil must have roared with laughter. But he was wrong again. On the cross, God had set into motion his plan to reconcile the world.
End Notes
1. Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed and Chaos, (New York, Harper and Row, 1946), p. 3.
2. Hans-Ruedi Weber, The Cross: Traditions and Interpretations, Elke Jessett, Translator, (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979), p. 30.
3. Emil Brunner, I Believe In The Living God, John Holden, Translator and Editor, (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1961), p. 76.
4. Paul F. Hegele, When Messiah Comes, (Lima, Ohio, C.S.S. Publishing Company, 1986), p. 49.
5. Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis, (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1988), p. 127. Donald Juel in this work and Hans-Ruedi Weber in the work already cited provide extended and challenging treatments of the early church's process in finding the explanation of the cross in the prophets, the psalms and the historical books. This same idea of God's suffering servant and the discussion of vicarious suffering for redemption comes later in Jewish literature, according to Donald Juel, perhaps after such folk heroes as Simon bar Kokhba, after 135 C.E.
6. Hans-Ruedi Weber, op. cit., p. 31.
7. Ibid., pp. 3 1-40.
8. Douglas Webster, In Debt to Christ, (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1957), p. 73.
9. Holy Baptism, The Lutheran Book of Worship, (Minneapolis, Augsburg Publishing House, 1978), p. 123, reprinted by permission.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 75.
12. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born To Be King, (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1943), p. 23. This book was reprinted by Eerdmans in 1990.
13. John L. McKenzie, S.J., Second Isaiah, The Anchor Bible Series, Vol. 20, (Garden City, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968), p. 133.
14. Emil Brunner, op. cit., p. 78.
Darkness had come at noonday! It lasted for hours, as if the sun were hiding its face.
Well it should have! The events of this day were the deeds of the night, not deserving the light of day. A hurried arrest and trial had consumed the night. Before dawn a mob had gathered. By noonday that mob and its leaders had intimidated an officer of justice, agreed to the release of a notorious criminal and crucified an innocent man.
The whole creation seemed repulsed and angered. At noonday darkness covered the earth, and the earth shook. Rocks split, graves opened and the veil of the temple was torn violently (Matthew 27:51-53). A Roman centurion, hardened by many crucifixions and not likely to have been much moved by Jewish teachings concluded, albeit too late, what had to be obvious: "Truly this was the Son of God (Matthew 27:54)."
Now it was evening. Darkness had come another time. The crowds had gone home and their angry shouts and taunts had gone with them. Gone too were the screams and cries of the dying. With the darkness, there came also a stillness. Three men were dead. The world has probably never been - before or since - quite so quiet as when the voice of God fell silent, captured in the clutches of the death of a crucified man named Jesus.
It was like the stunning Good Friday sermon at a service I once attended. As we sat in darkness after the last candle had been extinguished, the pastor preached his sermon. "God is dead! Our sins have crucified him!" Then came five minutes of the most disturbing silence this preacher can ever remember.
No one had won. Surely not Pilate. Blackmailed with threats of treason, he acted against his best judgment in the matter, and against the urgent counsel of his wife (Matthew 27:19). The high priests and religious authorities could not have rested easily. The torn temple veil had opened the Holy of Holies to all. At the very least it was a serious violation of the sacred place. At the worst, it was a sign of God's judgment. The crowd, no longer gathered and charged by the mounting emotion, was now reduced to individuals in the quiet of their homes coming to terms with a second look at the day and its events. No one could have slept very well that night. There must have been an eerie uneasiness over the city, even in the season of Passover!
On the other hand, we can imagine that the hallways of hell rocked with the raucous laughter of those who were sure they had won. The lintels must have shaken with the sound. What had failed so terribly on the Mount of the Temptations had worked on the mount called Calvary. "They did it! They did it! Pilate, Caiphas, the priests, and the crowd did it. We got him! The Son of God is dead!"
Satan surely roared - elated in the laughter of victory. The parable of the Wicked Tenants of the Vineyard had been fulfilled. As a last resort the owner of the vineyard - in this case, the creator of the cosmos - had sent his son to reestablish the contractual covenant. Instead, hoping to inherit the vineyard finally and fully, the tenants killed the son (Matthew 21:33-41, Mark 12:1-8 and Luke 20:9-16).
This is today's story. "This is the outline of the official story - the tale of the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the ...
terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero."1
Darkness came to the earth twice that day! With it there came a stillness that could come only from the death of God himself. The rafters of hell must have rung with laughter! At the close of Good Friday, it looked to all the world as if the powers of evil had done their worst, and that they had prevailed.
II. Rediscovering The Gospel Of The Old Testament
"All the world" included the disciples of Jesus! Even the early experiences of Easter and the days following could not wholly set aside the impact of a senseless crucifixion, the "ignominous end of the story of Jesus."2
For today's hearers, believers and nonbelievers alike, the cross has been for 20 centuries the symbol of our salvation. It has become an artistic inspiration for costume jewelry and for the architecture and decoration of our churches. In the first century it was a wholly other matter.
For the first people of the first century, their cross was their electric chair, hangman's noose, or lethal gas chamber. It was scandalous because it was the maximum penalty for the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes. It was terrifying because it was "one of the most abominable, most painful means of death that man had invented to make death as terrible as possible ... It was a public affair to torture a man to death."3 Truly it could be said of the crucified that "He poured out his soul to death (Isaiah 53:12)." In the midst of the severest pain imaginable, death comes slowly from "the lack of breath and the loss of blood. It comes from exposure from the sun and the wind. It comes from the attacks of the vultures and wild dogs that wait nearby, hungry. Sometimes, death comes from going mad."4
If we are going to grasp the impact of the cross upon the disciples of Jesus and upon the hearers of the preaching of the apostles, we must consider firsthand the trauma of our being called upon to witness a public execution. With no hint of disrespect, we might well consider, perhaps only for this day, the removal of the cross (already sanitized in most Protestant traditions by the removal of the corpus of Christ). In its place let there be a replica of an electric chair, a gas chamber or another contemporary appliance of legal execution. Let us consider how ready we would be to receive and accept an invitation from the governor to be present and to witness the "relatively painless" and quietly routine execution of one found guilty and worthy of death by a just and due process. Only in such a way may we begin to have a grasp on that first Good Friday and the impact that day had upon all who heard the gospel in that day.
To all of these shared horrors, add the taunts, the jeers and the elongated time of pain and terror. Add the overwhelming sense of the innocence of the man. Hear the words of compassion, in the midst of his indescribable pain. Mary, the mother of our Lord, and John stood at the foot of the cross - through it all! The other disciples fled.
It should be no surprise that the good news of Easter could not in a day remove the trauma of the Friday that preceded it. The New Testament gospels tell us repeatedly of the disbelief of the early reports of the resurrection. Later, when confronted by the risen Lord, Jesus' followers "disbelieved for joy, and they wondered (Luke 24:41)!" Even after Thomas' moving confession at the feet of the risen Lord, Peter says: "I am going fishing (John 21:3)." In that short phrase Peter speaks the disappointment and bewilderment of all the disciples.
Jesus had sought to prepare the disciples for the cross. He had spoken of the cross of discipleship and of his death on the cross repeatedly. He urged the disciples to believe in him in spite of the events that were about to unfold. One such text is universally known and loved: "Let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me ... (John 14:1-14)." Nevertheless, nothing he said quite prepared them for "Good Friday."
Further, the first-century expectations of the Messiah's coming were not connected during that period with the servant passages of the Old Testament. Where examples of such interpretations can be found, there is no indication that prior to Christianity the Messiah was expected to suffer after installation into office, or that his suffering was viewed as atoning in light of Isaiah 53.5
Nevertheless, this linkage of understandings is at the heart of the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus on the afternoon of the first Easter Day. Dejected and unconvinced by the reports of the resurrection, they explained to their companion, the yet unrecognized Lord himself, the terrible events of the three days past.
"Some of those who were with us went to the tomb, and found it just as the women had said; but him they did not see." And he said to them, "O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:24-27)."
This story reports what happened again and again as the early church discovered the Old Testament anew. It was the Bible of the Early Church.6 The "gospel of the suffering servant and God's work of redemption" would be found in seven of the Old Testament prophets, two historical books and 14 of the Psalms, one of which Jesus quotes from the cross.7 In view of these texts, the passion of Christ is neither the story of a criminal's execution nor the miscarriage of judicial systems. It is the story of the cost of our salvation. It is the story of the fearful price of our rebellion and alienation from God.
Consider again Isaiah 53. The trial of Christ, the physical abuse, the desertion of the disciples, the passive posture of the servant of the Lord, the criminal associations, and much more are all there: "Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? ... He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.... By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.... Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isaiah 53:1, 3, 8-9, 12)."
III. Why Must It Be This Way?
If the cross was a problem in the first century because of its shame, it is more of a problem in the 20th century because of its senselessness in the value structures of our contemporaries. Self-centered and masters of the charge cards of instant gratification, proponents of individual rights and suspicious of institutions and authority, we seek self-fulfillment as our goal. Worshiping in "the churches of the sanitized cross," as most of us do, we have rejected meditation upon suffering in favor of the empty cross of victory.
Triumphalism is the mark of our popular theology. It is pandered like snake oil by television evangelists: "Love Jesus and everything will be fine!" Implied are promises of rewards and riches. There is no call to community, to service or to stewardship. Our humorous "Are we having fun yet?" betrays an expectation of something far less than a lifestyle of sacrifice, of crosses and of suffering servants. The late President John F. Kennedy, in his Inaugural Address, suggested another way: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Clearly we revere his memory more than his message.
So alien are the values of our contemporaries to the themes of suffering and redemption that the cross is - for very different reasons - as offensive and senseless today as it was in the first century. To speak of Christ's death and of his bearing our sins make the Lord God who demands such a price for forgiveness sound like an ancient pagan tribal deity still demanding a pound of flesh. This same image occurred to Micah centuries ago: "With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" "He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:6-8)?"
Then, why the cross? Why this senseless cruelty and crucifixion? For what purpose does Isaiah write: "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 63:4-5)."
IV. The Meaning Of The Cross
In Christ's cross we find the judgment of God, the grace of God and the means of reconciliation both with God and with one another.
In the judgment of the cross we face head on the nature and the cost of our sin. In the grace of the cross we encounter the living God who hungers for the reconciliation of his creation and its creatures. In the suffering of the cross we encounter the price and the process of our reconciliation.
The Judgment Of The Cross
The cross of Christ presents us with basic understandings of the role of sin in making crosses necessary. Apart from the fact that Jesus was innocent and the principals knew it, the simple, most obvious truth is that "his contemporaries just did not like him, and so they decided that his career must be brought to a swift end. He came into the world as the great disturber. He interrupted people and he interfered ... he upset the ecclesiastics because he criticized them.... But God is a critic - this is the meaning of judgment - and never more so than of his own people."8
All of which brings us to the core of what it means to be "God's people." Called by God, we enter a covenant, a relationship of mutual and shared trust and responsibility. For Christians, it's the first question of baptism: "Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil and all his empty promises?"9 This is to say: "When push comes to shove, whose side are you on? On which team will you be playing?"
This question carries us all the way back to the first commandment. It is the commandment from which the other nine logically flow. They are but commentaries to the first. "I am the Lord your God ... You shall have no other Gods before me (Deuteronomy 5:6-7)."
Martin Luther liked to say: "Love God and do as you please." If we be "for God," then what pleases God will also be pleasing to us. We would be of one mind with God, and of one spirit. Our lives would feed upon knowing and doing God's will. In our parents we would see a pattern of our heavenly parent - the life of giving, providing and sustaining. We would discover fulfillment in being for others rather than ourselves, just as God has been for us. We would never count persons as objects or status as a preemptive goal. The first of our baptismal questions is definitive: "Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil and all his empty promises?"10
The cause of Jesus' crucifixion on Good Friday - and countless others on other days - rests in our answer to this baptismal question. "Whose side are you on?"
God is the God of righteousness, justice and truth. The religious authorities placed political pragmatism and the security of professional status ahead of justice. Pilate sneered at truth. Judas, like a Zealot, sought to force the hand of God for his own political purposes. Peter denied. The disciples fled. "We have turned away, each to his own way (Isaiah 53:6)."
Jesus came asking the question and issuing the invitation of repentance. In so doing, the criticisms of Jesus threatened the religious authorities, the kingdom of Jesus threatened the political authorities, and the morality of Jesus threatened the people. "The life of Jesus showed up the deeds of men in the dazzling light of sheer goodness. It compelled choice. They could either repent or cry 'crucify.' "11
The issue: "Do you renounce the forces of evil, the devil and all of his empty promises?" "Whose side are you on?" That was and is yet the issue and the choice. The late Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: "God was executed by people painfully like us in a society very similar to our own - in the over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen. In a nation famous for its religious genius and under a government renowned for its efficiency, he was executed by a corrupt church, a timid politician and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators. His executioners made vulgar jokes about him, called him filthy names, taunted him, smacked him in the face, flogged him with the cat and hanged him on a common gibbet - a bloody, dirty, sweaty and sordid business.... It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all."12
The cross confronts us with the judgment of God. It is God's indicative. He reveals himself. Once so confronted, we must always choose. That's God's imperative. Repent or crucify. Those are the two choices - the only two choices - we have. Christ died because of that choice. The cross was not an accident. It was not the mechanical demand of an ancient tribal deity for human sacrifice. It is the price of sin. With sin come alienation and death - always!
The Grace Of The Cross
In the grace of the cross we encounter the living God who hungers for our reconciliation. From the cross, we see ourselves and we see God. God has choices, too! While we do not always choose for God, God always decides "for" us.
How else can we comprehend the depth of the parable of the waiting father (Luke 15:11-14)? In the waiting and the loving that mark the father's hunger for the return of his son, even though the son's behavior has wasted the fortune and disgraced the family, the father enters into the suffering with his child.
Contrary to the ancient belief that suffering was the direct result of the displeasure of God, the curse does not always lie upon those who suffer. "Indeed, the one who is cursed may not recognize his own curse in the person who bears it.... Because he suffers the pain of others, others are released from pain."13 "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:5)."
Like that ancient Palestinian father in Jesus' parable, God enters, through his Son, into our life and into our suffering. Herein is the contradiction with most of what other traditions and secular "Christians" call religion. We think always of the religious life as our ascent into holiness, perfection. We even sing of climbing Jacob's ladder as if we are climbing up to heaven. The good news is that God descends to us and becomes one with us, carrying our guilt and our suffering with us and, ultimately, for us. It began in the Christmas incarnation and it came to its fullest expression in Good Friday's crucifixion. He emptied himself and became like us, he descended to earth to dwell among us. On Good Friday, he descended into hell with us! "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani!" "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Psalm 22:1)?"
Forsaken! The healed bear him no witness. The disciples have fled. In the terrifying pain, humiliation and stress of the tortured death, it is as if God is gone too. With Jesus' cry he has begun the descent into the very reality of hell itself ... with us and for us. With this cry we begin to grasp, with the breath catching in our throats, Jesus' descent from heaven and into hell, into the hopeless loneliness of divine abandonment. Emil Brunner writes that in this cry "for the first time the incarnation of God's Son had come to his goal."14
In the cross of Christ we see the grace of God. "Father, forgive." "Today you will be with me in Paradise." "Woman, behold your son." "It is finished." Even the deceit of humankind, when the sun hides its face and the earth quakes, cannot deter the gracious purposefulness of God. "He poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isaiah 53:12b)." Or, as Paul wrote: "God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8)."
The Reconciliation Of The Cross
Alienation is self-perpetuating. The forces that pull and drive us apart - anger, hurt, suspicion, rejection and fear - work always to keep us apart. Long after the root cause or the emotion of an incident of alienation has passed, we are hesitant to offer either an initiative or an apology. Alienation is by definition a distancing. As this distancing increases, we know one another less and less, and we become more and more unwilling to risk that move which would lead to reconciliation. If reconciliation is to happen, someone must interrupt the perpetual cycle that alienation establishes. There needs to be the "prime mover." The cross is that act of reconciliation for us, and the symbol of our call to join in the work of reconciliation.
Such moments of risking reconciliation are the moments when we are the most vulnerable. It is in the offer to share the suffering of others, to bear their travail with them, that reconciliation can take place. The cross is more than a symbol. It is in principle the vehicle. Lives are changed and hurts reconciled when we join with others in their suffering with the intent to heal.
Hurricane Agnes swept through Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a fierce vengeance. Whole neighborhoods were flooded and some homes were inundated and covered with the raging flood waters. Days later people sat in their washed-out homes, stunned and immobile.
After the early morning Eucharist, teens from Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Lancaster armed themselves with buckets, brooms, shovels and garden hoses. They entered home after home, spraying the walls and washing out tons of mud left on the floors. A man watched as they cleaned his home. "Why are you doing this for me?" he asked. "I never met you before." A stunned teen-aged girl struggled for an answer. Finally she blurted out: "Jesus sent us!" The man wept. A few weeks later he stood tall in a new members' class, embracing again the faith he had once thought was gone forever.
In the early darkness of the evening, when the door of the tomb was sealed in place and the Christ had been buried, the Devil must have roared with laughter. But he was wrong again. On the cross, God had set into motion his plan to reconcile the world.
End Notes
1. Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed and Chaos, (New York, Harper and Row, 1946), p. 3.
2. Hans-Ruedi Weber, The Cross: Traditions and Interpretations, Elke Jessett, Translator, (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979), p. 30.
3. Emil Brunner, I Believe In The Living God, John Holden, Translator and Editor, (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1961), p. 76.
4. Paul F. Hegele, When Messiah Comes, (Lima, Ohio, C.S.S. Publishing Company, 1986), p. 49.
5. Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis, (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1988), p. 127. Donald Juel in this work and Hans-Ruedi Weber in the work already cited provide extended and challenging treatments of the early church's process in finding the explanation of the cross in the prophets, the psalms and the historical books. This same idea of God's suffering servant and the discussion of vicarious suffering for redemption comes later in Jewish literature, according to Donald Juel, perhaps after such folk heroes as Simon bar Kokhba, after 135 C.E.
6. Hans-Ruedi Weber, op. cit., p. 31.
7. Ibid., pp. 3 1-40.
8. Douglas Webster, In Debt to Christ, (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1957), p. 73.
9. Holy Baptism, The Lutheran Book of Worship, (Minneapolis, Augsburg Publishing House, 1978), p. 123, reprinted by permission.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 75.
12. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born To Be King, (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1943), p. 23. This book was reprinted by Eerdmans in 1990.
13. John L. McKenzie, S.J., Second Isaiah, The Anchor Bible Series, Vol. 20, (Garden City, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968), p. 133.
14. Emil Brunner, op. cit., p. 78.
