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Sunday, May 17, 2020

“Crucified...God’s Son”

A sermon based upon Mark 15: 21-39
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership, 
Sunday May 24th, 2020 (4/10. How Jesus Saves.)

There’s no disputing that Jesus was crucified as a rejected, humiliated, and failed Jewish Messiah.  John’s gospel put makes that clear: ‘He came to his own, and his own did not accept him...” (1:11).   As a result, Jesus was horribly executed in a manner reserved for rebels and slaves, the lowest of the low. 
But what is so incredible is how within only a few years Christians were ‘boasting Jesus’ humiliating death (Gal. 6:14).  One wonders why they would have even repeated this story at all, let alone recall with such detail.   And why did they dare make the cross, not the resurrection, the focus of the church’s preaching?  The church’s first missionary wrote: ‘...For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.’ (1 Corinthians 2:1–2 NRSV). 
Did you catch that?  The apostle Paul was only interested in preaching the cross.  Why the cross?  He had just admitted how scandalous this is: ‘...we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Corinthians 1:22–23 NRSV).  Have you thought about it?  How did an extreme method of execution become the central image of Christian faith and devotion?  Why isn’t Jesus’ death forgotten like all those thousands of others so cruelly executed by the Romans?  Again, why the cross?
We have 4 gospels telling us the same basic story about Jesus.   Nothing basic to any of those stories is contrary to another.  And what is most remarkable is that none of them try to hide, deny or cover up what happened to Jesus.  They spell it all out with the same, gruesome, horrific and even derogatory detail.   The central, climatic event  shared by all four gospels is the same: after a brief three-year ministry, mostly among the poor and the marginalized, then within one single week, when Jesus from Nazareth came to the big city of Jerusalem to make an argument for his message, he was quickly betrayed, arrested, put on trial, mocked and then cruelly crucified as a blasphemer and the worst kind of criminal, all at the wish of his own people.  
Because Churches have retold this story over and over each year and for centuries, especially at Easter, we tend to forget how strange it really is.   And even stranger still, we still preach that this gut-wrenching, graphically violent, depressing and disgusting event is ‘good news’.   We have called this the ‘most important story ever told’ in all human history, because we claim that this is how God has come to save the world through the death of our Savior, Jesus Christ.   

MY GOD WHY?
At the very center of this story, however, Jesus himself shouts a question that still haunts us: WHY?   Why is the great question from the cross and it is the greatest question about the cross, that we continually ask and confront, if we want to understand ‘why’ Jesus had to die in such a dastardly act of agony and torture. 
We should keep asking why, because it takes us to the heart of everything we should be considering about the cross.  Why did Jesus walk straight into this trap, knowing full-well what would happen  (Mark 8: 31, 14:7)?   Why did Judas, one of his own, betray this well-loved preacher for money, then hang himself (Judas 14:43)?  Why did the Roman governor allow this to happen under his watch, against his wish, realizing how ‘trumped up the charges were (Mark, 15:14)?  How could the crowd celebrate his arrival on Sunday but demand his crucifixion only six days later (Mark 11:9)?  Why did Jesus not speak up for his own defense  (Mark 15:4-5)?  Why did his closest disciples abandon him so quickly (Mark 14:50)? 
There are many other questions about this story, but when you step back from it and consider the whole ordeal, the most questionable part is how and why this God, who is said to be love, would abandon his only son.  Why did the Father allow his ‘beloved Son’ (Mk. 1:11; 9:7) to be mocked, humiliated, and to suffer like he did?   Why would God allow such a horrible, unjust, and demoralizing end to Jesus’ ministry and life?  Even if such a blood sacrifice was necessary to save us from sin (Heb. 9:22), why couldn’t Jesus have died in a more respectable, dignified and distinguished way.  Even sacrificial lambs received more humane treatment than this.
According to gospel accounts, Jesus asked the same question; not once but at least twice.  We are told that in the garden of Gethsemane, during the night just before he was arrested, Jesus prayed to the Father, ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass? (Mark 14:35).  Somehow God’s will was no.  Then later, in his final moments of agony, Jesus is said to have let out a blood curdling scream: ‘My God why?  Why have you forsaken me!  (Mark 15: 34).   Neither on the cross, nor at the cross, are we given any direct answer from God, from Jesus, or from any gospel writer.  In all four accounts Jesus dies without commentary, without explanation, and in utter despair. 
There was nothing pretty, nothing attractive, and nothing glorious or boastful about this cross, so how could Paul dare glory in it (Gal. 4:14, KJV)?  And why did Peter, one of the disciples who denied Jesus, start preaching about the cross in his very first sermon (Acts 2:23)?  How did this horrible symbol of criminal execution, like a hangman’s noose, or electric chair, become the the primary image of the Christian faith?  How did crosses get to be adorned on churches, glorified on altars, and even glamorized on jewelry?  And why in the world did the church come to call the day Jesus was crucified ‘Good Friday when there’s most obviously nothing ‘good’ about it?
It really is ironic, don’t you think?   Some would even say it’s quite morbid too, that at the center of a faith that preaches love and peace stands the cruelest from of human or maybe even divine violence?  Yet, the cross is still proclaimed to be the definitive, saving, redemptive act of God (Eph. 2:16) and to be the way God reconciles himself with the whole world (2 Cor. 5:19).  So, if God did plan it, approve it, or even demand it, then why did God allow the cross?
To raise this question of ‘why’ is even more urgent and necessary for us to take seriously today.  For most faithful believers, the cross has gone unquestioned for centuries, but with so much increasing violence in our world, whether it be increasing public and mass shootings, or be with the constant threat of ‘terror’ in the name of a religion,  now, more than ever, we need to reconsider ‘why’ God allowed the violent way of the cross as the way to pay the cost of human redemption. 
To get the ‘cross’ wrong, would not only lead to more misinformation, it could even make the God of our salvation seem to be a ‘moral monster’ (as some have named him),  who demands violence as the way to save and redeem.  It makes God look like nothing more than one of those primitive ideas that demanded that a beautiful maiden to be thrown into a volcano to placate the anger of the gods.  Is this what the cross of Jesus must be reduced too; God throwing his Son Jesus ‘under the bus’ so that we can be saved?   Isn’t this the kind of misunderstanding we need to correct if the gospel will have a positive and saving impact today?  
A good example of a mistaken, and possibly even dangerous misunderstanding of the cross comes from Tony Jones, a former youth minister who currently teaches Christian Theology.  Jones tells of once taking his youth to a Christian camp where there was a very charismatic preacher.  In his preaching one night, he told them long, detailed story about a poor peasant woman in Russia who lived with her toddler daughter in a dismal, Soviet-era apartment. They had a horrible life, he told, but at least they had each other.
 Then, one night as they were sleeping, the shoddy Communist construction gave way during an earthquake, and the building collapsed on top of them. The mother was pinned beneath a huge piece of concrete. Miraculously, the young girl was unharmed, but they were both trapped in the rubble, with no way of escape.
A day passed, but no one came to their rescue. The little girl began to grow weak, and she complained to her mother that she was hungry and thirsty. Another day passed, and the mother began lapsing in and out of consciousness. She knew that her young child would die of dehydration soon if she didn’t do something.  On the third day, the mother realized that she was going to have to make a sacrifice for her daughter. So she reached out for a piece of broken glass, and she slashed open her palm and directed her daughter to drink her blood in order to survive. The girl did as she was told, and she was finally rescued. The mother died.”

After telling this story, the speaker concluded: “Jesus is like that Russian mother.  He loved you that much!  When Jesus died, he saw your face!  God hated you because of your sin, because when a holy God looks at you, all he sees is your sin.  But on the cross Jesus stood between you and this holy, angry, untouchable God.  Now, when God looks at with holy and righteous anger, he doesn’t see your sin anymore, he only sees Jesus.  But this only happen because Jesus’s blood was shed for you.  Tonight, you have a chance to drink the blood from Jesus’ hand.  You can either stay and pray with a counselor, or there is hot chocolate and popcorn out in the lobby.
”(Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution by Tony Jones, Kindle Ed.  P. 3).

What that youth evangelist preached may have a lot of emotion and sincerity too, but it was also full a lot of misunderstanding and half-truths.  At its heart, this misunderstanding wrongly separates Jesus as God in the flesh from God as the Father, who is in heaven.  When that evangelist claimed that God ‘hated us’ or that God ‘hated Jesus’ on the cross for us, that speaks contrary to the core Christian understanding given by Jesus who said ‘the Father and I (the Son) are one’ (Jn. 10:30).  In perhaps what could be considered the most important word about the cross, Paul said: ‘Even while we were sinners, God proves his love for us (not hate, Rom. 5:8).  This means love is why ‘one has died for all’ (2 Cor. 5:14), not hate.  Again, in the most clarifying word of all, Paul explained about the cross, that ‘all this is from God who reconciled us to himself’ through the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross, for he makes is plan that this was NOT God killing Jesus for himself, nor for us, but that “...in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself and has given us the ministry of reconciliation’ (2 COR. 5:17). 

With God’s love so carefully and concisely explained in Scripture, how could this youth evangelist have overlooked it?  What made him preach that God allowed the cross so he could love sinners, when John 3:16 most clearly states ‘For God’s so loved the world that he gave his only son’?   How could that preacher so carelessly have declared that Jesus had to die such a terrible, bloody, violent death so God can look us in the face and find a way to save ‘dirty rotten scoundrels’ like us?  

Is this really the biblical understanding?   Is this what Paul and the early church found reason to boast about?  Did the cross enable God to love us to save us, or does God save through the cross because God already loves us?    

WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?
         I’m sure some of you are thinking what does this matter.   What does it really matter whether God killed Jesus so he could save us or whether Jesus died because God loves us?   It’s all semantics, right?  It like a bunch of preachers arguing about how many angels can sit on the head of a pin.  It’s a mystery we can’t understand.  Right?
Well, while there is certainly a mystery to the cross that no human can completely fathom, there is also a most basic message to cross we desperately must understand for God’s sake, for goodness sakes, for our own sakes, and for the sake of the world too.  This message is to clearly state why Jesus came as God in the flesh to suffer as a ‘single sacrifice for sins’ (Heb. 10:12) for ‘the forgiveness of sins’ (Acts 5:31, 13:38, Col. 1:14, and to give his life ‘as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45, 1 Tim. 2:6).   
JESUS DIED BECAUSE OF SIN.  If you read just a couple of lines after Paul spoke of God being ‘in Christ’ reconciling the world back to himself and how God now gives us ‘this ministry of reconciliation’, you’ll read something else about the cross.  This line takes behind the ‘bright side’ of ‘love’ at the cross, speaking directly of the cost and even the demand of having such love.   Paul wrote, For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 5:21). 
We come to the fulfilment of Jesus being ‘made’ sin, and paying the cost of God’s love, when on the cross Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me!”     While this was certainly Jesus quoting from the Psalms (22),  Jesus quotes this Psalm that begins in suffering but ends in deliverance not by accident, but Jesus quoted from this Scripture because Scripture was being fulfilled in his experience of suffering and forsakenness in a way that had to happen.   This kind of ‘suffering’ had to happen so that on the cross God’s holy love could be revealed as a suffering love that that is for sinners,  rather than against sinners, so, as Paul said, ‘we might become the righteousness of God’.  
Here, I think, is what that Youth Evangelist was trying express, but did so badly.   When he said ‘God hated you because of your sin’ and that ‘when God looks at you, all he sees is your sin’, he was trying to make a point about how bad sin is.   That’s definitely a point youth everyone still needs to understand.   All of us, not just youth, need to understand what sin does to us.   Sin is not only ‘to fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3:23), but sin is also about what can become evil, what is destructive to us, others, and this world, and what will eventually overtake us as ‘death’.  Sin is indeed, about some very real, painful, and dangerous matters.   We may want to avoid talk about it, facing it, confessing it, and live in denial of it, but sin is, as one person put it, the most objective, verifiable truth in the Bible and in the world.   As the Lord had the first very serious talk with a human about sin, when Cain became jealous of his brother’s sacrifice,  “If you do not do well,  sin is lurking at the door; it’s desire is for you, but you must master it” (Gen. 4:7).
Sin is serious stuff, and it was sin that cost Jesus his life, but is it correct to say that God hates us or hates Jesus because of our sin?   Isn’t this to read Christ’s ‘forsakenness’ in a most negative way?   And isn’t this also a way that could make people think of the God of the Bible as a ‘moral monster’ rather than as the God who is “gracious’ and shows ‘mercy’ (Ex. 33:19), as he revealed himself to Moses?   
In thinking about how people still misunderstand God’s anger at sin, I recall what one of the former communist youth in Germany asked me many years ago.  I was trying to explain the concept of sin to him, for the very first time when he asked: “Why does God hate us, when we are the only people God has?”  That’s how a young person once misunderstood the good news of the gospel, but it’s also how that youth evangelist was misunderstanding, and how many others still misunderstand what it means when the Bible says Jesus ‘was made to be sin for us’ and experienced being ‘forsaken’ by God on the cross.   
In the Scripture we are told that God is holy (Lev. 11:44), and that God demands a ‘holy sacrifice that is pleasing and acceptable (Rom. 12:1).  But God’s demand for holiness isn’t about God hating sinners but God’s holiness is about God’s ‘hate’ of sin and what sin does to us and his creation.   Certainly God ‘hates’ what our sin does to does to our relationship with him and with each other?    Sin is destructive and this is most certainly why God hates sin.  
Furthermore, let’s be clear, it wasn’t God who put Jesus on the cross, it was human sinfulness that put Jesus on the cross, not God.   Thus, it is most correct to say that Jesus died on the cross because of our sin.  It was human sin that put Jesus on the cross.  You can see human sin everywhere around the cross.  You see it in Judas who betrayed him.  You see in in the High Priests who had him arrested and tried him.  You see it in the people who turned on him.   And you see sin in the political power games of the Roman empire, who crucified him.   One way to rightly understand the cross is that the cross is about how a humble, innocent, and blameless life was being taken away and snuffed out by the destructiveness of human sin.
JESUS DIED FOR OUR SINS   It is also important that we understand that Jesus’s death was more than Jesus dying as an innocent victim due to human sinfulness.   This is exactly what lead to the church’s boasting about the cross, and the very key message of the cross, about this “Messiah” or Christ who ‘died for our sins in accordance to the Scriptures’ (1 Cor. 15:3).   How did it move from Jesus dying because of sin, to Jesus dying for our sins?’
You can observe it already happening in Acts 2, when Peter preached the very first Christian sermon on the day of Pentecost.   After Peter preached about God’s saving work in history and he made the most obvious point to the Jewish crowd, that ‘this Jesus, you crucified’ (v. 36); died because of their sin. 
But then, in the very next breath, Peter quickly went on to explain how God ‘raised Jesus up’ (v. 32) and how he now ‘sits at God’s right hand of power (v.33).  Hearing this, being ‘cut to the heart’, fully recognizing their own complicity in this injustice, which was not only against Jesus but against God, they asked the disciples:  What we should do’?  The answer Peter and the disciples gave took them immediately beyond the guilt, shame, blame or remorse, saying: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (2:38).   
Isn’t this the impact God intended the message of the cross to have all along?   After God raised Jesus from the dead, the people came to see their own sins at the cross.   But they were able to understand their sin not because God hated them because of their sins, but here, on the other side of the Resurrection,  people began to understand that even at the cross, even while they were killing Jesus, and even while we were enemies of God,  and we were at our lowest, weakest point, ‘at the right time’, Paul says, ‘God demonstrated his love for us’.   As one theologian has put it, God doesn’t give us the full understanding of sin, until we first begin to grasp how much God loved us when  died for our sins’ or as Paul also says,  when Jesus made the ‘atoning sacrifice’ for our sins on the cross.
JESUS DIED WITH US IN OUR SIN.  What does this mean for us today?  What does it mean and what should it mean that Jesus ‘died for our sins according to the Scripture’, or as Paul explained elsewhere to the Romans,  that ‘God put (Jesus) forward as the ‘atoning sacrifice’ (NRSV, CSB) or the ‘propitiation’ (KJV, NASB), which means something like an appeasing a god, a payment for a debt, or as Jesus himself said, a ‘ransom’ for sin in his own blood (ROM 3:25).   How does this work?  How did it work then, and how does it work now?   If God doesn’t hate us because of our sin, and God desires to forgive us of our sins, why did Jesus have to die to become the final ‘atoning sacrifice’ for sin?
         Interestingly, the New Testament doesn’t tell us that this means anything other than that this is what God did to demonstrate his love for us.  This propitiation or  ransom was being made by Jesus who was God himself reconciling us.  In that moment, at that place and in this person of history, Jesus of Nazareth, we have the ultimate, unmistakable revelation of God’s love for sinners and the God’s own sacrifice to forgive sinners, which is made known in the suffering of God’s son. 
God was not sitting in Heaven with hate for us, demanding that Jesus satisfy God’s thirst for blood, his wrath or his righteous angry heart.  When Jesus gave his sinless life for life lived under the rule of sin, substituting himself to death, so the God’s wrath and the wages of sin do not eternally fall upon us,  Scripture makes is clear that no one, not even God the Father, actually took Jesus’ life, but as Jesus himself explained,  I lay it down of my own accord. ‘I have the power to lay it down,’ Jesus said, ‘and I have the power to take it back up again.  This is the command I have from my Father” (Jn. 10: 18-19).   
According to this, through Jesus, God bore our sins and took our sin and sin’s consequences fully upon himself.  God ‘commanded’ Jesus’ death because God himself came down and was ‘in Christ reconciling the world to himself’.    There must never be any separation between what Jesus does and God does, or you will make God out to be a moral monster.   It is only in Jesus that we know the true nature of this God ‘who loved the world’ and is love in the world   This is what it means to say that Jesus not only died because of our sin and for our sin, but Jesus also died with us in our sin.  Jesus paid it all because, through Jesus, God came to be with to take it all upon himself.    
This suffering and ‘crucifixion’ of God in Christ for us matters because Christian faith is cross-centered.  The cross fulfills what the prophets dreamed of long ago, when they hoped for God to come down and be “Emmanuel”,God with us’.  To be God with us meant that God had to become one of us and suffer sin and death just like we do, even though he was without sin’ (Heb. 4:15).  Through God’s suffering love, the cost and consequences human rebellion and brokenness has been paid by this God who suffers for us, loves the whole ‘world’, and still wills to redeem it.   
 “By his stripes we are healed...” Isaiah prophesied.   The way we receive this healing and salvation, is when you, ‘by grace, through faith’ receive this ‘gift of God’ that you can never give yourself, the gift of God’s forgiving grace and his undying love. 
                    
TRULY THIS WAS GOD’S SON
         I still feel like I haven’t fully explained what this means for us today.   Yes, it means that Jesus died because of our sins too, and Jesus died for our sins, and that Jesus died with us, and we can die with Christ, as the Scripture says.  But since I gave you a story about how a Youth Evangelist got it wrong,  I feel I need to conclude by giving you an example of how we can ‘get it right’; how we can make Jesus’ ‘atoning sacrifice’ mean something to us, that is most practical, for our every-day lives.   
Of course, the cross can mean many things, but this is one thing about bearing sin and changing us with ‘dying love’ that we must know.   The story comes from another youth minister who was teaching a Sunday School class uses three students to point to what Jesus’ death means.
He asks one student to pretend to step on another student’s toes.  “Now, how do you naturally want to respond when someone hurts you?”  He asks.
Of course the answer is that you want to respond by hitting back, getting even, and making the person pay for hurting you, and what happens in most situations is that this can get out of hand really fast.   This is the way sin works.  It happens all the times between individuals, between families, and even between nations.   Normally, this is the stuff of our human brokenness; hurt, anger, revenge and violence which results in ‘wars and rumors of wars’ on and on.    This what we do to each other, and it’s what we do to God too.
“What happens in sin is not so much breaking a rule or a law”, the youth minister explains, but sin is what we do when we hurt somebody.   The same is true of our relationship with God.   We hurt God when we deliberately choose to ignore him and do our own thing.    Adam and Eve’s sin was so much that they disobeyed a rule God set up, but it was that ‘God, we don’t need you, want you and we will do our own thing!’  That’s the heart of what sin is.
But what if, the youth minister says, when these two students are ready for a final showdown and about to hurt each other more, that another student jumps into the middle, protecting them from each other’s blows and taking all the blows upon himself.   Then, after taking all the blows, this third student gets up and embraces the other two.  He loves them.  He forgives them and now they can forgive each other.  This cycle of revenge and violence needs to be put to an end  (From Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross,  Mark Baker, ed,  p. 73-76).    
Jesus loved to the end and came back from the dead and sent his disciples into the world with a message of God’s forgiveness and love, not anger and revenge. Because of what Jesus did on the cross, reconciling us back to God, now we can be reconciled to God and to each other too.
So, where does this leave us as we walk away from Mark’s picture of the cross.   As I said, there’s no real explanation or commentary, except from a by-standing Roman Commander who could not hold back, and after considering everything that just happened before his yes said, ‘Truly, this was the Son of God’. 
Now, this Roman probably didn’t mean how we might mean it.  When he saw God’s suffering love revealed right before his own eyes, he was saying that Jesus died in the same way a god would die?  For you see, the title Son of God was reserved only for Caesars, rulers who were understood to be divine on earth. 
Little did this Centurion realize how he spoke, not just a truth, but the truth, which still the truth that can transform human hearts.   This solider shows us how his own heart was already being transformed by this Jesus, who was not only dying like a god, but who was truly God’s son on the cross.  How and when do you know that a man is dying like a god would die?  The answer is when that man is dying, not because of himself nor for himself, but when this man is dying for something or someone other than himself, then too can be transformed by such undying love. 
What about you?   Have you been transformed by God’s love revealed for you on the cross of Jesus Christ?  God didn’t send Jesus because he ‘hated you’, but God hates what sin does to your relationship with him and with each other.  This is why God allowed Jesus to die in the shape of outstretched arms.  This is God's love in the man dying on the cross.  Amen

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