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?
Showing posts with label Good Friday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Good Friday. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Sermon for Good Friday
A little girl at my dinner table recently asked me a question about Jesus over supper, “Why did Jesus choose to die?” It’s a good question spoken at an age where this issue becomes important. You see, most of her life, her mom and I have been trying to express how when we talk about God we are talking also talking about Jesus and when we talk about Jesus we are also talking about God We remind her again and again that Jesus died to forgive her sins and that since Jesus loves her, then God loves her. The lesson must at least be making some headway or else this question, at dinnertime, might not have come up.
When you hear about a murder in the newspaper, on the internet, on the radio or on TV, do you ever ask this question, “Why did that person choose to die?” No. Most of the time, nobody deliberately chooses to die. Especially at the hands of somebody else. Ernest Becker explains in his book, “The Denial of Death” that even those heroes who choose to fight in wars by jumping out of boats and running out into the line of fire can only do so because they feel pity for the person running next to them because they are worried that the other person might get hit by a stray bullet. If we could possibly be aware enough to truly consider our own death, no one would ever get out of the boat. No one would ever step out of their house. But when Jesus dies on the cross, there is a need within all of us to ask this question,:”Why did Jesus choose to die?”
We are driven to ask this question only when we realize somewhere within us that Jesus is more than just one of us, he is God himself. And for God himself to be on that cross, the creator of heaven and earth, well, there must be more to it than a simple homicide that you’d hear about on the news. Unfortunately, this also betrays something even more interesting about both that little girl at my table, and about all of us in fact: she is already trying to wiggle out of her responsibility regarding the cross, just like the rest of us sinners. “Why did Jesus choose to die?” it’s a question we sinners like to ask, because if we can explain to ourselves and to each other why God wanted to die then it gets us off the hook. Then we can sing the hymn, “Were you there when they crucified my lord,” and smirk to ourselves that “no, we weren’t there.” We can place the blame of Jesus’ death on someone else.
Our reading this evening from the book of Isaiah references this way of thinking, “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for OUR transgressions, crushed for OUR iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” We like to put the blame on God for Jesus’ death. The gospels tell us that Jesus knows he is heading for Jerusalem to suffer and die, so how can we be culpable? Why would it be our fault? Jesus must have chosen to die and we had nothing to do with it. We weren’t even there!
In fact, as Isaiah writes down a few verses later, “It was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain.” If God wanted his son Jesus to die, who was really going to stop him, not I. Yes indeed, none of us would have stopped the death of Jesus. We would have run away like the rest of the disciples, looked on from a distance, or deny Jesus in the heat of the moment.
“He was wounded for OUR transgressions, crushed for OUR iniquities.” Why did Jesus choose to die?” It wasn’t that Jesus chose to die as if he didn’t want to rather live, but Jesus had to die, it was necessary for him to die as scripture puts it, because you and I would have it no other way. He came to earth forgiving sins, casting out demons and healing the sick and so he was killed for it. Jesus didn’t whip himself to the point of death, hammer nails into his body and raise himself up on the cross—sinners like you and me did this to him. Perhaps the only good answer to the question, “Why did Jesus choose to die?” is this, “Because there was no other way to get through to you and me.” He had to choose to give us the choice to kill him, so that when he was resurrected from the dead, we would realize what we had done. So that we might realize the length and depth and breadth of our sin and then, finally, understand the full extent of what he had done on the cross.
Jesus chose to die for you, by being born on Earth and letting you kill him, so that you might realize that even though you are completely responsible for his death, just as much as any person alive 2000 years ago, Jesus has wiped your sins away in the blood of his cross. You made you choice to kill Jesus Christ and now he has made his choice to give you eternal life.
Ironically, as Jesus is dying, he says, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But the truth is, sinners back then and sinners today know exactly what we are doing, given the choice, sinners want Jesus dead. What we don’t know, is that by making our choice, God can finally make his choice once and for all in a way that we might all understand and believe. We cannot hide our sins any longer, Jesus’ blood is on our hands and on our children’s children. Thankfully, though, that same blood washes us clean in the sight of God. We have made our choice and God has made his choice. By his bruises we are healed. Amen.
When you hear about a murder in the newspaper, on the internet, on the radio or on TV, do you ever ask this question, “Why did that person choose to die?” No. Most of the time, nobody deliberately chooses to die. Especially at the hands of somebody else. Ernest Becker explains in his book, “The Denial of Death” that even those heroes who choose to fight in wars by jumping out of boats and running out into the line of fire can only do so because they feel pity for the person running next to them because they are worried that the other person might get hit by a stray bullet. If we could possibly be aware enough to truly consider our own death, no one would ever get out of the boat. No one would ever step out of their house. But when Jesus dies on the cross, there is a need within all of us to ask this question,:”Why did Jesus choose to die?”
We are driven to ask this question only when we realize somewhere within us that Jesus is more than just one of us, he is God himself. And for God himself to be on that cross, the creator of heaven and earth, well, there must be more to it than a simple homicide that you’d hear about on the news. Unfortunately, this also betrays something even more interesting about both that little girl at my table, and about all of us in fact: she is already trying to wiggle out of her responsibility regarding the cross, just like the rest of us sinners. “Why did Jesus choose to die?” it’s a question we sinners like to ask, because if we can explain to ourselves and to each other why God wanted to die then it gets us off the hook. Then we can sing the hymn, “Were you there when they crucified my lord,” and smirk to ourselves that “no, we weren’t there.” We can place the blame of Jesus’ death on someone else.
Our reading this evening from the book of Isaiah references this way of thinking, “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for OUR transgressions, crushed for OUR iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” We like to put the blame on God for Jesus’ death. The gospels tell us that Jesus knows he is heading for Jerusalem to suffer and die, so how can we be culpable? Why would it be our fault? Jesus must have chosen to die and we had nothing to do with it. We weren’t even there!
In fact, as Isaiah writes down a few verses later, “It was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain.” If God wanted his son Jesus to die, who was really going to stop him, not I. Yes indeed, none of us would have stopped the death of Jesus. We would have run away like the rest of the disciples, looked on from a distance, or deny Jesus in the heat of the moment.
“He was wounded for OUR transgressions, crushed for OUR iniquities.” Why did Jesus choose to die?” It wasn’t that Jesus chose to die as if he didn’t want to rather live, but Jesus had to die, it was necessary for him to die as scripture puts it, because you and I would have it no other way. He came to earth forgiving sins, casting out demons and healing the sick and so he was killed for it. Jesus didn’t whip himself to the point of death, hammer nails into his body and raise himself up on the cross—sinners like you and me did this to him. Perhaps the only good answer to the question, “Why did Jesus choose to die?” is this, “Because there was no other way to get through to you and me.” He had to choose to give us the choice to kill him, so that when he was resurrected from the dead, we would realize what we had done. So that we might realize the length and depth and breadth of our sin and then, finally, understand the full extent of what he had done on the cross.
Jesus chose to die for you, by being born on Earth and letting you kill him, so that you might realize that even though you are completely responsible for his death, just as much as any person alive 2000 years ago, Jesus has wiped your sins away in the blood of his cross. You made you choice to kill Jesus Christ and now he has made his choice to give you eternal life.
Ironically, as Jesus is dying, he says, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But the truth is, sinners back then and sinners today know exactly what we are doing, given the choice, sinners want Jesus dead. What we don’t know, is that by making our choice, God can finally make his choice once and for all in a way that we might all understand and believe. We cannot hide our sins any longer, Jesus’ blood is on our hands and on our children’s children. Thankfully, though, that same blood washes us clean in the sight of God. We have made our choice and God has made his choice. By his bruises we are healed. Amen.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Sermon for March 21st (Good Friday)
I would like to repeat just one verse again from the psalm we just read, “The Lord did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.” The Lord did not hide his face from me, the psalm says. And yet, hear what the prophet Isaiah wrote, a reading which is often understood to speak about Jesus’ death and crucifixion, “He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.” He was as one from whom others hide their faces.
Why do we hide our faces from Jesus on the cross? Why? Because we did this to Jesus. Jesus hangs from nails because of us. It’s probably the same reason that I have more trouble looking at a dead cow carcass than a dead raccoon on the side of the road—I know that cows are killed because I really like hamburgers. I realize that I am partly responsible for cattle yards and slaughterhouses, but racoons just die sometimes, and, at most, I might just feel sorry for them . . . or pity them. It is so easy to pity Jesus on the cross and forget that we are the ones that put him there. That we are responsible.
“He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.” We do not hide our faces because Jesus looks so awful, but because he makes us look so awful. He is disgusting to us, how he hangs there on the cross like a limp noodle. The Son of God, dangling from a piece of wood with no fight left in him. You can hear the soldiers mocking him to come down, “If you’re the Son of God then come down!” We all want him to come down, to prove us wrong, to forget that we just crucified him, Jesus our Savior. It’s our last chance at vindication, as if Jesus coming down off the cross would somehow save our rear ends in the sight of God.
But as psalm 22 says, while we hide our faces from Jesus’ suffering, God does not hide his face. And so, we even use this as our defense. We are only human, of course, we do some bad things. We sin sometimes, we swear sometimes, we gossip sometimes we nail people to crosses to die sometimes. Sure, ok, so we make mistakes! That’s just who we are! Thank goodness God is still there, so that Jesus doesn’t have to suffer all alone.
But we are all wrong. All wrong. God does not hide his face from this suffering, the suffering of his Son on a cross. But, with his mouth pointed directly at Jesus Christ, looking at his beloved Son face to face, God curses Jesus. He leaves him there to die. God forsakes him there. And so Jesus screams, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!” Jesus dies alone. Completely alone.
Christ became a curse. He was cursed by God, his Father. “Christ became a curse for us. Chapter 23 in the book of Deuteronomy says it very clearly, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” That’s the law. And Jesus is condemned by that law. Jesus did not only suffer, but he was cursed by God. So, we hide our faces not just because of what we have done, but because of what God has done because of us. He has made our sin even worse. We did not just kill Jesus, but allowed him to be cursed by his Father.
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” Paul writes in the book of Galatians. This is the final reason we hide our faces. We realize that we are no different than Jesus. We realize that we have as little hope for salvation as Jesus does, hanging dead on that wooden cross. The light of the world has gone out. Hope has become despair. Jesus’ death means that all have died.
What is there left to do then? Only wait. We wait and hide our faces. We wait with the disciples behind closed, locked doors, scared that someone will find us out. We wait in the darkness with Peter, crying at our betrayal. We wait to find out what God will do. What will God do with a dead, cursed Jesus? Because in God’s answer, you will discover what he intends on doing with a dead and cursed you. Amen.
Why do we hide our faces from Jesus on the cross? Why? Because we did this to Jesus. Jesus hangs from nails because of us. It’s probably the same reason that I have more trouble looking at a dead cow carcass than a dead raccoon on the side of the road—I know that cows are killed because I really like hamburgers. I realize that I am partly responsible for cattle yards and slaughterhouses, but racoons just die sometimes, and, at most, I might just feel sorry for them . . . or pity them. It is so easy to pity Jesus on the cross and forget that we are the ones that put him there. That we are responsible.
“He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.” We do not hide our faces because Jesus looks so awful, but because he makes us look so awful. He is disgusting to us, how he hangs there on the cross like a limp noodle. The Son of God, dangling from a piece of wood with no fight left in him. You can hear the soldiers mocking him to come down, “If you’re the Son of God then come down!” We all want him to come down, to prove us wrong, to forget that we just crucified him, Jesus our Savior. It’s our last chance at vindication, as if Jesus coming down off the cross would somehow save our rear ends in the sight of God.
But as psalm 22 says, while we hide our faces from Jesus’ suffering, God does not hide his face. And so, we even use this as our defense. We are only human, of course, we do some bad things. We sin sometimes, we swear sometimes, we gossip sometimes we nail people to crosses to die sometimes. Sure, ok, so we make mistakes! That’s just who we are! Thank goodness God is still there, so that Jesus doesn’t have to suffer all alone.
But we are all wrong. All wrong. God does not hide his face from this suffering, the suffering of his Son on a cross. But, with his mouth pointed directly at Jesus Christ, looking at his beloved Son face to face, God curses Jesus. He leaves him there to die. God forsakes him there. And so Jesus screams, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!” Jesus dies alone. Completely alone.
Christ became a curse. He was cursed by God, his Father. “Christ became a curse for us. Chapter 23 in the book of Deuteronomy says it very clearly, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” That’s the law. And Jesus is condemned by that law. Jesus did not only suffer, but he was cursed by God. So, we hide our faces not just because of what we have done, but because of what God has done because of us. He has made our sin even worse. We did not just kill Jesus, but allowed him to be cursed by his Father.
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” Paul writes in the book of Galatians. This is the final reason we hide our faces. We realize that we are no different than Jesus. We realize that we have as little hope for salvation as Jesus does, hanging dead on that wooden cross. The light of the world has gone out. Hope has become despair. Jesus’ death means that all have died.
What is there left to do then? Only wait. We wait and hide our faces. We wait with the disciples behind closed, locked doors, scared that someone will find us out. We wait in the darkness with Peter, crying at our betrayal. We wait to find out what God will do. What will God do with a dead, cursed Jesus? Because in God’s answer, you will discover what he intends on doing with a dead and cursed you. Amen.
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