Sermon for April 22nd (Good Friday)

Why did Jesus have to die? For our sins. That’s the answer you learned in confirmation at least. He died because, as part of our fallen humanity, we make bad choices. We do evil things. We lie, we cheat, we steal. We commit adultery in our minds if not with our very bodies. We treat others like dirt and speak of them in trashy ways. We become angry quickly and sometimes find it very hard, if not impossible, to forgive. That’s why Jesus had to die, right? Of course.

But that’s not the whole story, not according to what we just read in John. It wasn’t just our bad temperments that put Jesus on the cross. Our godliest virtues put him up there as well. Think about this for a moment. Who wanted Jesus dead? Was it the unbelievers, you know, the one’s who didn’t know about God? Nope. The text says that Pilate, the Roman Gentile, became afraid when he heard that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” proverbs says and yet the chief priests and the religious officials were yelling, “Crucify! Crucify Him!” The text says that Pilate tried to set Jesus free, but the Jews kept shouting at him to kill Jesus. Set anyone else free, but not THAT man. Not Jesus. Crucify Him!

That doesn’t seem like a very virtuous attitude, but wasn’t it? If you saw some guy walking around Fontanelle calling himself both one with God and the President of the United States, wouldn’t you feel like an upstanding citizen for calling the police? You want some guy that like hanging around the park with YOUR kids! You’d probably sleep better at night if you knew he was somewhere locked up. Well, Jesus was calling himself God! AND the King of the Jews! I mean, he was right, but that’s not my point. The people yelling “Crucify Him!” thought they were acting very religiously. They thought they were following the law! They believed that Jesus should be punished for blasphemy and that punishment was death. They were just trying to be faithful, stubbornly committed and lawful Jews.

There are two ways that we fight God. The first is obvious to us; it’s lawlessness. We break God’s laws and the laws of the land. We are not forced to make bad choices, we do it willfully. But the other way we fight God is easy to miss because it’s sounds so right; it’s lawfulness. By following the God’s laws and the laws of the land, we can very easily use our sense of righteousness to protect ourselves from having to trust in God’s mercy. We’d rather try to follow God’s laws than trust in God’s love. We become so good in our own minds that we feel we have no need of a Savior. Sure, we know, we aren’t perfect, but we’re trying! We’re doing the best we can! That’s all God could ask for, right? This pious attitude, moreso than lawlessness, is what threatens to destroy your relationship to God. If Jesus were walking around today, he would be hanging out in the bars and the jails while the good Christians like us and pastors, like me, would be screaming at the top of their lungs, “Crucify! Crucify Him!”

But doesn’t that bother you? We all like to hear that Jesus came not for the righteous, but for sinners. But when push comes to shove, we don’t want to be called a sinner ourselves. We don’t want people to think badly of us. We don’t want to think badly of ourselves. But Jesus doesn’t seem to be leaving us any room for good works! He always attacking us with his words—the religious people—and calling us hypocrites . . . and he’s right, of course, but shouldn’t he at least TRY to keep us motivated? Affirm our attempts at righteousness? No.

Martin Luther once said, “The remedy for curing desire does not lie in satisfying it, but in extinguishing it.” Think about it. Have you ever wanted a potato chip and thought, I’ll just have a couple. Then, half an hour later, the whole bag is gone. You think, I’ll just watch a little of this movie and then you stay up the whole two hours and get to bed late. We are addicted to things worse than movies and potato chips and we can’t expect our desire for sin to be quenched by doing them just every once in awhile—doing the best we can. We need to admit that we are powerless to stop. Jesus’ death on the cross kills all our hopes to make it all better. We either have to trust in his death and admit that we are sinners without any hope of recovery or we’ll have to keep trying to make ourselves right with God on our own and continue to yell, “Crucify Him!”

Just like the Pharisees, the chief priests and the scribes, we don’t WANT a Savior, we want to do it on our own. We don’t want cheap grace! We wouldn’t want to take advantage of God after all. We want a little more time to fix things up ourselves. People don’t call a therapist when they feel depressed for a few months, they called suicide hotlines when they are just about to pull the trigger a year later. Why? Because they thought they could handle it on their own. People don’t come for marriage counseling until their marriages are only holding on by a thread 10 years after the problems have started. Why? Because they don’t want to be embarrassed and have people think that their marriage is struggling. We don’t want to admit our failures to God, we’d rather read a self-help book and feel better about ourselves. At least we’re trying to get better. The cross is God’s judgment on this way of thinking. He’s not giving you any more time to fix this relationship.

Jesus’ death on the cross tells us that God knew we’d never make it up to heaven on our own. He destroyed our last hopes that we could somehow make our failures right. No matter how many times you’ve read or heard that you are saved by grace alone and not by works, everybody still believes that as long as you live a good life and try your best you’re going to heaven! That’s why Jesus had to die! You couldn’t believe in God’s forgiveness, by grace alone, any other way! He had to give up his life to show you that there WAS no other way, no other truth, and no other way you could live your life to satisfy God’s demands. It was by grace or not at all. I don’t care how much of a saint you are, you are still a sinner and sinners cannot stand in the congregation of the righteous. If you hope to stand before God based on your life as a Christian, you will find no need for having a Savior. You’ll bury Jesus’ gruesome death under your aspirations for a “good looking life”.

When you have nothing to fall back on—that’s where the hope begins. When you feel threatened by a God who doesn’t want your sins or your virtues to separate him from you then you’ve come close to understanding what His mercy means. Jesus’ death more your entire salvation project is in danger. What will you fall back on if God doesn’t want your good works, your good deeds or your positive Christian attitude? Where will you look for hope if even being a good person has no eternal possibilities? He’s not looking for the righteous, but for sinners. When your good life, good looks and good works only lead to condemnation where will you put your trust? Look to the cross, where Jesus hangs suffering and ashamed—where the one who knew no sin became sin for you. Look to the cross, wide-eyed and shocked at your Savior dead on a tree—where he became a curse for you. What will God do with his dead, cursed and broken son? Only the broken, the cursed and the sinners, dead in their sins, will care about that answer. Only a sinner, with no other hope for salvation, will find hope in Jesus’ death on a cross.

Why did Jesus have to die? To answer that question, you’ll have to answer this for yourself: why did Jesus have to die for you?