“The Crucified God”

A Sermon Based Upon Mark, 15: 1-20, NRSV

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Passion/Palm Sunday,  March 25th, 2018

Chris Keller tells of his Father’s slow death to Alzheimer ’s disease.  It was a dreadful end to a long, good life.  The worst part of it, Chris says, was two or three years into the decline, when his Dad realized something terrible was happening, but could no longer fathom what it was.  One night, as his son was visiting, his father paced back and forth from wall to wall, anxiously insisting that there was somewhere else that he was supposed to be; a forgotten meeting or appointment.  Desperately, he pleaded, "Can you help me?"   Chris responded, "Dad, I wish I could, but I don't know how."  “For the very first time,” Chris said, “my father looked at me with something like contempt.”  

At breakfast the next morning with my mother, just the two of us, I said, "We are living in a nightmare."  As the disease progressed, it became easier to live with--until death came, finally, as a friend.   

At his Father’s funeral, Chris said: "Alzheimer's slips in on cat feet.  Dad never quite knew what got him. This disease is as fully terrible as advertised.  Then Chris quoted Scripture, which comes from the cross, right after our text for today:  “When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.  At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk. 15:33-34 NRS).

Here in the midst of this kind of darkness; the darkness of human suffering accompanied by feelings of forsakenness, we find the core of the Christian mystery, where darkness turns to light.   Hope comes from the man who suffers the nightmare of the cross.

THEY BOUND JESUS… (1)

Today, on this Passion/Palm Sunday we approach again the ‘nightmare’ of the cross once again.  The cross invites us into the divine mystery.   Here, in Mark’s gospel, we find the Jesus who could ‘rebuke the wind’ and ‘still’ the waves (4:39), being ‘bound, and led away and handed over’ to the Governor, Pilate.  

      “Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asks.  “You say so.”   This ambiguous answer makes religious leaders accuse him more.  But Jesus doesn’t defend himself with a single word.  

       “Have you no answer?” Pilate says.  “See how many charges they bring against you.”   We read that, “Jesus made no further replay.”  Pilate was amazed.   He knows what this means.  This man is signing his own death warrant.  

Everyone knows that Jesus was crucified on a cross.  The Romans crucified thousands.  This is a terrible fact of recorded history.  We know that of all the thousands who were cruelly crucified, only this one had gospels written about him, had a following that developed almost immediately, and has impacted human history more than any other person.  What is not recorded anywhere, except in the New Testament, is what this means.   What is it about this dying, suffering, and crucified Jesus that made his dying and death, the most significant religious symbols filled with meaning and redemptive hope?

Once a pastor asked a group of children what God looked like? The kids rounded up the usual visual images of God: old man with white beard, king on throne, etc. Then a shy little girl, almost too afraid to answer, slowly raised her hand. She said, "I think of God as the one who has a thorn in his head."     When we think of Jesus death, what kind of image pops up our heads?   How many of us think about God dying on the cross?    We think about Jesus, God’s Son dying for us, and we preach, as the Apostle Paul said, “Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:2), but what about God dying for us?   Paul said: “in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5:19), but a ‘crucified God’?  How can the eternal God die?   If you try to explain something like this to a child, you realize what it means to enter the deep, dark, and divine mystery of the cross. 

But let’s enter another way.   Back in 1966, when I was only nine years old, Time Magazine's Easter cover story posed a shocking question on its cover with red letters posted on black: "Is God Dead?" I was too young to read or understand the article, but I do remember hearing preachers talking and even joking about it in sermons.  They quipped: “If God is dead, then who was it I talked to when I prayed this morning!” 

At that time, most churches were alive, vibrant, and Spirit-filled.  Everyone laughed at the preacher’s joke.  Today, churches are not laughing so much.   As congregations face decline and challenges, some tottering on the edge of death themselves, this question invites sincere conversation: "Is God really dead?"  Was this just a bunch of ‘liberal’ mumbo-jumbo, or was it an attempt to have an honest discussion about this coming reality, which is now here?

Several years later, when I was in college, I learned that the term ‘death of God’ was first formulated by the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.   Nietzsche’s father was a pastor in a small German village.   When Nietzsche became a philosopher, he wrote about what he observed taking place in modern culture, as the belief and thought of God had lost its power.  We should see his point.    Now, in universities, and even in lower education, talk about God has been banished from science and history, and is widely ignored in ethics and philosophy.  Secular knowledge rules the modern mind, leaving religion "to the priest, the pastor, or to personal opinion."  It may not be true to say that God has fully died, but as Chris Keller said, when Alzheimer’s, the disease of forgetfulness took over his father, we can see that in our society, ‘the death of God’ has also ‘slipped in on cat’s feet’.

These are not nice thoughts, just like the cross is not very pretty to look at.   What has happened in our world, and our public lives, is not that different from what happened when Mark’s gospel tells us how Jesus was ‘bound,’ ‘led away’ and ‘handed over to Pilate’.   Just as Jesus was betrayed, denied and accused, people today blame the world’s problems on religious faith, and demand that faith prove itself, defend itself, or make some convincing argument, but many too, hear no definite answer.   Just as people had enough of Jesus then, modern-minded folks have had enough of religion and church now.   Many walk away, busying themselves elsewhere, and some are downright anti-religious.  They see religion as just too dangerous or senseless.   They think the world will be better off without any belief that can’t be proven.   The only belief that matters now is only what I want or choose to believe. 

When the modern world first began to remove God from the center of western culture, way back in the 1800’s, there was an British Anglican Priest, who became a catholic Cardinal, named John Henry Newman, who first started to warn that when God is forgotten in public places, and not talked about or reverenced in schools, there would be an unwholesome trickledown effect everything else--- on education, on morality, on science, and also on economics.  "If there be Religious Truth at all,” he said, “we cannot shut our eyes to it without it having a bearing upon all truth….” What bearing might this be?   

Cardinal Newman’s warning came about the same, when Nietzsche also predicted the rise of the ‘mad man’ or the ‘supermench’; that is the prideful, power-hungry human who thinks they can replace God.   While Nietzsche himself was agnostic about God, he found no cause for celebration in announcing God’s death.   Nietzsche doubted that civilization would endure very long without God.  His thoughts about the ‘mad man’ practically predicted the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and the Nuclear Warhead, though no one saw it coming.   The Russian Dostoevsky also saw it, when he wrote that “without God, everything is permitted."   Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, one an atheist and the other Christian, agreed that God's death was dangerous for humanity.   If God does not matter, it will not be long until nothing else matters; nothing except what a hungry, hurting, evil human wants.   Nietzsche feared, it will only be the human with the most money, the most power, and the most madness, and who has lost all reverence for God, who will be the one who determines our future.     

 

THEY SHOUTED BACK, “CRUCIFY HIM!” (13)

This talk of God’s death in our culture is certainly heavy talk; perhaps too heavy for a sermon.  But folks, this is the week before Easter!   This is Passion Week when we remember, commemorate, and sometimes re-enact what the world did to Jesus, when Jesus was falsely accused and crucified.   And Jesus told his followers to ‘remember’ him and not to forget.  So, isn’t Passion Week an invitation for us to think about what the world does to Jesus now?   Even the book of Hebrews observed only a few years after Jesus was crucified, that people who were falling away from the faith,  were ‘crucifying again the Son of God and…holding him up to contempt’ (Heb. 6:6).  How do we keep practicing our faith in a world that keeps on killing God?   One thing must do is keep holding on to our faith.   Strangely enough, it is the cross and the death of Jesus that stands at the beginning, and remains at the center of our faith, not at the end of it.  In other words, the more the world betrays, denies, accuses and even crucifies Jesus again and again, the more we should realize how Jesus’ death is the key to understanding who God is and what faith and life should mean.    

In one of his very first letters, the apostle Paul called the cross ‘the wisdom of God’ that is ‘foolishness’ to the world, but that it is also ‘the power of God to us who are being saved’ (1 Cor. 1: 18ff).  This interpretation by Paul was original, incredible, and unique.   However, Peter was already on to it, only 50 days after Jesus crucifixion, when he preached: ‘…this man, (was) handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed….’ (Acts. 2:23).  This means that the very first disciples were already on to the saving and redemptive truth about the cross, even while Jesus’ own killers were still around and holding power.   

Today, and I mean this very week, on the same dark Friday commemorating when the crowd screamed out ‘Crucify Him!” and Pilate ‘handed him over to be crucified’, we will call this day, of all days---and I mean this dark and most depressing day---we will, in fact, call this Friday “Good Friday!”   Why in the world would anyone want to call the the day Jesus died, good?   Might the naming of Christ’s crucifixion as good, mean that something ‘good’ might still come out of a culture that wants God dead?   

Of course, Jesus’ death was not ‘good’, at least from face of it.   My very first book of Theology was written by the great Baptist theologian, Frank Stagg.  Dr. Stagg taught me that Jesus’ crucifixion and death always had two sides to it.   This is exactly what Peter was talking about in his sermon on Pentecost, when he says that Jesus was ‘crucified and killed’, but that this was also ‘according to the definite plan … of God’ (Acts 2:23).  Looking at it from one side, Dr. Stagg said, the cross was a ‘life taken’, but looking at it another way, the cross was ‘a life given’.   The bad way of looking at the cross will always be before us, as people still despise and reject the truth that Jesus spoke and lived, which includes the truth about Jesus himself.  But the good side of the cross is always before us too, that is, how Jesus lived and taught what is truth, just as he himself said ‘he was the way, the truth, and the life’, no matter what people did to him.  Jesus never gave up on the truth!   But what is this truth?   In other words, what is truth about Jesus’ crucifixion that gets better, even when people are at their worst?

Could the heart of the truth still be right here, not just at the cross, but also on the cross, since ‘God was in Christ…’, even there, even here, on this ugly cross?   Let me explain.   Long before Nietzsche, a very religious Martin Luther, the great German reformer, had also said that God was dead, but Luther meant something else entirely.  Luther meant that in Jesus Christ the Lord above had descended into history.  As a human being, God lived by history's rules.  One of those rules of life is that, in one way or another, everybody dies.  Jesus Christ was no exception.  But on the cross, it wasn’t just that Jesus the man died, but through Jesus Christ the man, God also died.  God gave himself up for us.   God himself pain for our sins.  God showed his love for us.   In other words, Jesus the revealing of  “The Crucified God.”  

So, rather than doom or gloom, Luther meant that the ‘death of God’ is gospel, which is ‘good news’.  Echoing the apostle Paul, Luther meant that in Jesus’s rejection and crucifixion, God suffers and dies, gives himself up for us, so that he can ‘reconcile us to himself’ (2 Cor. 5:19).  As Paul later explained it to the Romans, ‘God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.’ (Rom. 8.32).  But now, how does this ‘plan of God’ work out?  How can killing God in the flesh, or even our own ‘modern’ killing of God too, which God allows, also turn out to be the ‘wisdom of God’  which might give us ‘the power of salvation’, rather than the power to simply destroy ourselves?

HE HANDED HIM OVER… (15)

I want to point you to the answer, by drawing your attention to a Jewish Rabbi.  But this is not the Jewish Rabbi named Jesus, but a present-day Jewish Rabbi, who today leads the oldest Synagogue in Los Angeles; a reformed Synagogue with over 10,000 active members.   Rabbi Stephen Leder recently appeared on the news because he wrote a book about human suffering entitled, “More Beautiful Than Before”.  The subject of that book is to explain that when we humans face our pains, our hurts, our suffering, and even our wrongs or innocence too---facing them with both honesty and courage,  Rabbi Leder claims that even the most negative experiences of pain and suffering could make us better people than we were before.  

Where did that Jewish Rabbi, get an idea like that?   We know, don’t we.  We all know that this can be true, don’t we?  This is the truth that was revealed in Jesus Christ, and in his redemptive suffering on the cross.   When we look at the cross, just like the Israelites were told to look at the ‘serpent in the wilderness’, we can find life.   When we look straight into the pain, the evil, and the ugliness, we not only see what people did to Jesus, but we might also see what God does, and how we can change, with God’s help.   For with God’s help, not only can our suffering be redeemed, but our sin can be redeemed too.   By looking straight at the ‘snake on the pole’ or at ‘the crucified on the cross’ we finally, and fully see what we can overcome, what we must learn, and how God can save.  We would never see what matters most or what we might more beautifully become, had we not gone through the wrong, endured the suffering, or even caused the pain.   At the cross, we still “see the light….”

For example, let's think for a moment about biology.  Many Christian still struggle with whether or not traditional Christian faith is compatible with evolution.  One of the great problems some evolutionary people have with faith is that God allows suffering.   One of the problems some Christians have with evolution is that it leaves us to suffer without hope.   But what if we could look this again, and see evolution pointing us to faith, and see faith discovering an evolving journey through pain and suffering that enables us to be ‘more beautiful than before’?   

In a book entitled Genes, Genesis and God, the philosopher Holmes Rolston studied Christian faith and evolution by side.  Rather than conflict, he found harmony.  In both faith and science, the problem of pain and suffering is important.  In both, we see that pain, while it can be terrible, can also be creative and redemptive.  As theologians have long known,  much of the good in the world would be lost, or have never come about, if all evil, suffering, pain had been prevented (Aquinas).  

Across the board, nature "uses pain for creative advance”, Rolston discovered.   Physical and emotional suffering are unexpected gifts in evolution, and perhaps the ability to suffer is a gift of God too, because they increased creatures' chances of survival in life.   If you didn’t feel pain, you would die quicker.  People who lose the ability to feel pain, whether it be emotional or physical, don’t thrive or survive very long.   Pain serves a ‘purpose’, as an evolutionary progress, and as a divine purpose,  giving us eventually the ability to think and to love.   In short, we can’t learn to love fully, unless we also suffer fully.   The person who learns to love, lives to love.   Or, as the Tennyson wrote: ‘It is better to have loved and to have lost, than to never have loved at all.’   We could not love at all, if evil and suffering had been prevented.   Even what the world did to Jesus, is what it took to fully release God’s love in the world.

All natural suffering in life is religious, and it can be creative.   In this way, all life is Christ-like; or "cruciform"—that is cross-like.   Human life has been given, through the natural processes, the ability to suffer evil; even the capacity to do evil, so that we also gain the ability to learn, to heal, to be saved, and most of all, the ability of love.  This also why, at the center of our faith, just like at the center of all life, is the suffering and painfully creative death of Jesus, who reveals God and his love to us as the center of the ‘good news’. As Isaiah wrote, it is ‘by his stripes, that we are healed."

The cross is exactly what it seems--terrible and evil, red and black--the nightmare. Nothing in the gospel dissipates the nightmare; rather, but this is also a nightmare that serves God's purpose as the way to reconciliation and redemption.  Without the evil of the cross, great good would have been prevented.  Without the rejection of truth at the cross, the truth of God would not have been fully revealed.  This is why Paul called the darkness of the cross the foolishness that is also wisdom and the weakness of the cross,  also its power’.  

By the light that shines in the darkness of God’s cross, that we find our way home.  In the suffering and rejected Jesus, we face our own pain, know our own sin, and we turn toward the God who loves and heals us, who can make us more ‘beautiful than before’.  As the scholar Rolston concludes, "the secret of life is that life is a passion play."

Isn’t this why Jesus allowed himself to be ‘handed over to be crucified?’ When Jesus submitted himself to the cross, by his suffering he revealed more fully, the loving, saving and redeeming God, who lives in Christ, dies in Christ, but still lives in Christ, because God raised Jesus from the dead.  "The mystery hidden throughout the ages has been revealed,” Paul told the Colossians (1.26).   A non-preacher said it better,  "Surely this man was God’s Son." 

So we, when we look again at Jesus on the cross,  we should also see a God who is so loving and strong, that he will allow himself to be crucified again and again,  so he can always return and we can see the ‘way, the truth, and the light’.   Because God’s love can be killed, but doesn’t stay dead, we still have choice.   We can either decide for the hopeless future, as Nietzsche imagined it, and live as if “God is dead”, or we can go with the gospel, which says, that ‘God was in Christ, (on the cross, and in the suffering too),  reconciling the world to himself… and proving his love for us. When we choose this Christ who reveals the loving, suffering, saving God, we choose good news, because we choose this God who will love us, through thick and thin, even if it kills him.   And it did.  He died, to show you his undying love.  Amen.