INTRODUCTION
A bishop in France told this
story.
A group of rowdy students,
who had long since given up any pretense of faith, were passing by a church in
Paris. Suddenly, one of them dared another to go in, seek out a priest and
offer to make a confession—and then tell the priest that he had no confession
to make, and that he didn’t believe a word of the Christian message.
The student went in, found the
priest and entered the confessional booth—and then blurted out that he really
wasn’t serious. He had simply acted on a dare.
The priest said to him, “Son,
since you like to accept a challenge, I’ll give you one. I dare you to go over
to that crucifix hanging there, look up into the face of Christ and say slowly:
‘You died for me—and I don’t give a damn.’”
The young man went to the
foot of the cross and looked up for a moment or two. No words came. Then he
returned and said to the priest: “Father, I now want to make my confession.”
The bishop who told the story
paused at the end of it and said, “I know the story is true—for I was that
young man.”
There’s a reason why the central symbol of our faith is a
cross.
There’s a reason why the central sacrament of our faith is
the Communion Service, or Lord’s Supper, or, in Catholic Churches, the Mass.
There’s a reason why Good Friday and Easter are the holiest
times in the church calendar.
When St. Paul wrote his letter to the Church at Corinth, he
wrote of his earlier visit to their city: “When I came to you, brothers and
sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or
wisdom. For I decided to know nothing
among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2.:2).
And when he came to the end of the same letter St. Paul
wrote, “I handed on to you as of first
importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in
accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried and that he was raised
on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).
I regret that in these services I have spoken so seldom on
this central fact of the Christian faith. In your churches the importance of
Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is kept front and center by the regular
celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
Because each of your denominations has different rules about
who is to minister communion, the words the minister is to read, and the form
of the bread and wine or grape juice, we can’t serve communion here.
Some of your churches have pastors or laypeople who regularly
come to places like this to serve Communion to you. You might ask about that.
But we can do the next best thing. We can review the story
of the Cross and remind ourselves of the this most fact of our Faith.
Recently I have been considering some of the statements
Jesus’s enemies made that unwittingly
went to the heart of the deep meaning of the death of Jesus on Good Friday more
than 2000 years ago.
Sometimes we say the opposite of what we intend—for
emphasis. An example might be: a long-suffering mother opens the door to her
teen-aged son and exclaims, “What a beautiful room! You get the prize!” But
what she really means is that the room is a hopeless mess and the only prize
the kid deserves is the booby-prize.
English teachers call this “irony.” Sometimes we say the
opposite of what we mean for humor, and sometimes we use irony for emphasis.
Sometimes the irony is unintended.
Three times in the story of the crucifixion Jesus’s enemies
made bitter statements of condemnation that actually opened up the deep meaning
of the Cross.
I. My first example is in John 11. Jesus’s enemies,
alarmed at Jesus’s influence with the crowds, feared that Jesus’s popularity
would cause an uprising against the Romans, which would upset the comfortable
order of things.
The nation’s leaders—the chief priests and scribes—said,
“If we let him go on like this, everyone
will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place
and our nation.”
But one of
them Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing
at all. You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for
the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”
John adds, “He
did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that
Jesus was about to die for the nation.”
Actually, the nation was destroyed 40 years later, but it was because the nation had rejected Jesus. The irony was that one
man did die for the people. Jesus’s
death didn’t save the nation from the Romans as Caiaphas intended, but his
death was the way of salvation, not only for the nation of Israel, but for the
whole world.
So John tells us that Caiaphas’s words were an
unintended prophecy of the meaning of Jesus’s death.
II. My second example is in Mark 15 (verses 16-20). We
read that after Jesus was condemned by the council the soldiers took him to the
courtyard of the palace and called together the whole company of soldiers. “They stripped him and put a purple robe on
him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head.”
Then Roman soldiers mocked Jesus, bowing down and
shouting, “Hail, king of the Jews!” Matthew adds that they gave him a stick to
hold, pretending it was a “scepter.” Then they spit on him in a pretense of
“kissing” him. In this way they nor only show their contempt for Jesus but also
for the Jewish nation.
But the reader knows that—in spite of the soldiers’
intention to ridicule Jesus, he is, in
truth the king. The ignominy of his death actually enhances Christ’s glory because the glory of our Savior is not his
almighty power but his humility and self-giving love.
The Medieval believers had a saying: “He
reigns from the Cross.” In the glorious medieval cathedrals we saw in Europe,
at the front of the worship area there would be, high up, a fresco or mosaic of
Christ Almighty in Glory. But below that—even more prominent was a crucifix—Christ
on the Cross—paying the price for our redemption.
So the purple
robe, the crown of thorns, the stick scepter and the kneeling before him in the pretense of worshiping—although
intended to ridicule him—really represented homage to Christ’s kingship and his
greatest glory.
When believers wanted to be reminded of God’s great
love and the cost of their redemption, they looked to the cross.
That is why it was the custom in medieval times, that
when a believer came to die, a priest or loved one would hold a cross before the
dying person’s eyes so that it would be the last thing they would see in this
world.
III. My third example of irony at the Cross that held
deep meaning is also in Mark 15 (vv31-32).
As Jesus hung on the cross for those six hours, from nine in the morning
until three in the afternoon, we read, “The
chief priests, along with the scribes were also mocking him among themselves
and saying, “He saved others; he cannot
save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross
now, so that we may see and believe.”
A. The taunt, “He saved others; he cannot save himself”
was actually the deepest truth about the meaning of the crucifixion of our
Lord. Salvation could only come through the self-giving of the Son of God, who
bore in his own body the sin of the world.
The Cross of Christ is at the heart of our faith. We
put it on our church buildings and wear it around our necks.
The Cross is at the heart of the central service of
our worship—the Lord’s Supper, Communion, or, as Catholics call it, the Mass.
We take the bread and the wine as the body and blood of Jesus our
Savior, who gave himself for us.
“He saved
others; he could not save himself,”
his enemies taunted, speaking a deeper truth than they imagined.
Jesus paid an awful price for our salvation. We know
that Jesus faced his death with dread. He begged his heavenly Father to spare
him that death. In the Garden, in the hours before he was arrested, he sweat as
it were great drops of blood, and he prayed, “Let this cup pass from me...”
And then he went bravely to his death—his death that
you and I might live.
B. In the early days of history of our faith made it
clear, over and over, that salvation comes through the death of Jesus.
In Romans (5:6), St. Paul wrote: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ
died for us.”
St. Peter also put the Cross at the center of the
faith. In 1 Peter (2.24) we read, “He
himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might
live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”
And St. John writes (in 1 John 1.7): “If we walk in the light as he himself is
in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus his
Son cleanses us from all sin.”
CONCLUSION
During the war between the Red Army and the White
Russian Army, after the Russian Revolution, a young woman whose husband was in
the White Army found herself trapped behind the Red Army lines with her two
children. She found a little hut on the outskirts of town where she hid herself
and her children.
One night she heard a knock on the door. It was a
neighbor who she hardly knew, a young woman named Natalie. The woman told her
she must flee because she had been betrayed. The Red Army would be there in the
morning and would kill her.
The young mother told Natalie that she couldn’t go
because as soon as they found the hut empty they would be after her and with
her two children.
“Go!” Natalie said, “I will stay. When they, come they
will find me.”
“But then they will kill you?” the woman said.
“It is all right,” Natalie said, “I have no children;
you do. Now go!”
And the mother and her children went, leaving Natalie
behind. They escaped, and in the morning when the Red Army came Natalie opened
the door. She was instantly shot.
Sometimes it is costly to love…
For God it is costly to love.
What Natalie did for the young mother and her children
is only a dim reflection of what it meant for Jesus to die for the sins of the
world. Theologians have written big books to explain how Jesus’s death could
pay the penalty for all the sin that has infested the world from the beginning
until now and until the end of the world.
I have read some of those books, but I still have
questions. But this is the truth we believe and hold in our hearts and live out
in our lives.
Somehow in those hours while Jesus hung on the cross
at Golgotha and suffered and died, all the sin and evil of the world burnt
itself out in him.
A Catholic theologian put it this way: “The most inward and most fiery suffering
of Christ’s passion was not what he suffered directly in what befell him
personally; but what he tasted of the ocean of all human suffering by the
fullness of divine insight and divine depth of compassion—the whole detailed
record, past, present, future, being unrolled before his gaze while he hung on
the cross” (George Tyrrell, Oil and
Wine, page 328).
Almost 1000 years ago a godly monk wrote a hymn in
Latin that contained these words:
What thou,
my Lord, hast suffered
was all for
sinner’s gain.
Mine, mine
was the transgression,
but thine
the deadly pain.
Lo, here I
fall my Savior;
tis I
deserve thy place
What
language can I borrow
to thank
thee, dearest Friend
for this thy
dying sorrow,
thy pity
without end.
O make me
thine for ever
and should I
fainting bem
Lord, let me
never, never
outlive my
love for thee.
(Hymn: “O
Sacred Head Now Wounded,”
Latin hymn,
attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century)
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