Recently, I watched a movie that played an important part of my youth, the Adventures of the Baron Munchausen, directed by Terry Gilliam (the guy who did the cartoons for Monty Python, if that means anything to you). The movie takes place in “The Age of Reason” where a French town is under siege from the Turkish army. The leader of the city (played by Johnathan Pryce) insists that everything needs to be reasonable and according to logic. This logic compels him to have a soldier (a cameo by Sting) executed for repeatedly going above and beyond the call of duty, killing the enemy and rescuing his fellow soldiers because it would demoralize people who want to lead quiet, ordinary lives by their rocking of the boat.
At one point the Baron Munchausen interrupts a farcical performance, supposedly based on his life, because he says it is making a mockery of him and that he would not have it. The leader of the city says that the Baron has no grasp of reality. The response is “Your ‘reality’ is lies and balderdash and I am grateful to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever” (or words to that effect).
The reason that the Baron is claimed to be irrational and illogical is because he speaks of grand adventures, with magnificently talented servants, one who could run around the world in a matter of minutes, one who could carry all the gold out of the Grand Turk’s treasury, one who had exceptional hearing and powerful lungs who could blow over an entire army with one breath, and one who could hit a bullseye from halfway around the world. He spoke of visiting the king of the moon and of Cyclops in the South seas and of being eaten by giant whales.
The trick, according to the movie, is that these things actually happen. Not only does the Baron go on these adventures once again, but takes a member of the town with him (more accurately, she stows away on his hot air balloon made of women’s knickers).
I think that this entire movie raises the question of what is rational and what is irrational. Out understanding of rationality seems to be very closely related to our understanding of science. Are scientific formulae (such as Einstein’s E=mc2) actually rooted and grounded in how things actually are (that is, are matter and energy actually different expressions of the same thing, where what we call matter is really super-concentrated “knots” of energy), or are they just convenient ways to organize and manipulate our sense data?
If there really is a world outside of the human mind, and if we can actually have any kind of experience of that reality, then rationality cannot be determined before actually experiencing that reality. It is only after the fact, in light of all the possible investigations that we can really decide if someone is behaving rationally or not. To devise an understanding of what is “rational” independently of actual reality and then declaring that anything that does not fit into that understanding is “irrational” is itself irrational. It is behaving out of accordance with what actually is the case, because it automatically rules as impossible anything that violates those presuppositions.
This is where the example from the Adventures of the Baron Munchausen helps us to see this point. According to the movie (which, admittedly, is meant to be fantastic and not claiming that what it portrays is an accurate picture of the real world), the problem with the way that the “enlightened” leaders understood reality is because it did not allow for the fantastic adventures of someone like the Baron. The reason why this turned out to be a problem is because, according to the movie, all those things actually happened. According to the facts as they stood independently of the people, the Baron, and those who agreed with him were the only rational people, the only people who actually had a grasp on how things were in reality. It did not fit the “logic” or “reason” of the city leaders, but that logic and reason were declared to be false by what actually was the case.
My point is that it is not “rational” to behave in accordance with a strictly empiricist or positivist notion of reality where nothing can be considered to be “real” unless it has been directly experienced by the senses. The reason why this is not rational is that, first of all, nobody actually behaves that way in real life. Most of our decisions are made, not because we have either direct experience that proves something or is the result of logical deduction of that sense experience. Most of the time, we do what we do because we feel like it, we want to do it, because it seems right to us. If everything must be based on empirical data or strictly logical deduction in order to be rational, anything that we do on a whim, anything that we cannot give a strict account of using logic (and only logic), is irrational behavior.
The second major reason that strict empiricism or positivism is finally irrational is that our modern sciences (at least the purer sciences like physics and chemistry) do not actually operate using only their direct sense perception. A famous story from the world of science is when Ernst Mach, perhaps the most famous of modern positivists, was having a discussion about the existence or non-existence of atoms with Max Planck. Planck gave many reasons why the atomic theory made sense, and made more sense than competing theories and that, through carefully designed and controlled experiments, the existence of atoms could be more than reasonably asserted, even if not directly perceptible. Mach’s response was, “Show me one.” The argument is, if it is not possible to take a single atom to observe directly with the eyes (or even a microscope) and to touch with the hands, it must not be real.
As it turns out, our understanding of exactly what atoms are and exactly how they function has changed over the years, but nobody seriously questions the atomic theory anymore. Evidence is too completely on its side. However, if rational behavior is determined, not by what really is the case, but by clamping predetermining presuppositions onto reality, atomic theory would be completely irrational and our lives would be radically different today.
As everyone probably already knows, I have religious convictions at stake in this, that I believe that there are indeed things that we cannot touch with our hands or see with our eyes that are nonetheless very real, perhaps even more real than what we can touch or see or taste. However, I think that asking the skeptical questions with the intention that they will tear down any kind of theological understanding of the world will actually also tear down natural science as well. No science that exists after people like David Hume can affirm that we really only know things that we directly experience or what we can logical deduce from that experience without being terribly naïve. In spite of all the critical, post-modern attacks on every field of knowledge, natural science has remained, not because it is stubborn, but because it has a grasp on reality that is so deep and profound that it would be the height of irrationality to deny it because it would mean that their reason would have become unhinged from reality.
If rationality is determined by behaving in accordance with what really is the case, then the one who lives as if there is a God because they believe that this God exists is not intrinsically any less rational than the one who behaves as if there were no God at all because they were convinced that this was the case. The question is whether God actually exists or not. However, to insist that God must be subject to our ordinary means of investigating the universe is to make the same kind of mistake as Ernst Mach did. We cannot tell what color something is with our ear, we cannot tell if something smells good or bad with our eye. We cannot understand the purpose of a machine, simply by analyzing it on a physico-chemical level. We cannot understand God by using tools and methods for investigating very different things. God must be investigated on his own ground, according to his own self-revelation. To say that God must conform to our scientific conventions means that those conventions have priority even over reality itself, which is to lapse once again back to irrationality.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Colossians 2:1-12
This is a sermon that I preached for my class in "Expository Preaching," rather than at the church I serve. The second sermon for that class (which is on the rest of Colossians 2) will be coming up a little before Thanksgiving.
10/21/10
Colossians 2:1-12
Expository Preaching
Jesus is the answer. It might sound cheesy, it might remind you, like it does me, of bumper stickers you may have seen, but I assure you, that Jesus is indeed the answer. At least, that is what Paul is proclaiming to the Colossian church, which seems to be being torn apart over the best way to discover “the mystery of God.” It seems that the Colossian Christians are not all that different from you and me. Some of them think that the mystery of God is to be found one way, some think that it is to be found in another, very different way. Conflicts arise because of differences of opinions and it seems the only thing that everyone can agree on is that the other group is wrong.
It is in the midst of this kind of situation that Paul speaks a word. “For I want you to know how much I am struggling for you, and for those in Laodicea, and for all who have not seen me face to face. I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Paul is not the one who has planted this church, but his heart yearns for them, and everyone else, to know that it is Christ himself who is the mystery of God and that, if they can just grasp this, they will have all the riches of assured understanding.
“I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments.” This fact, that Jesus is the mystery of God, is not just one among a series of facts that Paul thinks that he and the Colossian Christians can take or leave as they wish. Paul is not writing to give a helpful way of thinking that may or may not have any bearing on reality at all. No, Paul is asserting with all of his strength, that this is a crucial point, something not to be ignored or brushed aside but accepted and confirmed in the depths of every believer. To treat Christ as anything but utterly central is to be deceived, led astray by arguments that have been thought up by human beings; clever human beings, but human beings nonetheless.
After encouraging the people, Paul continues. “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.” It seems that the error that Paul wants to correct has a Jewish form and a Gentile form. The Jewish form is somewhat more clear because Paul speaks more directly about it, as we will see next week. There seems to be a revival of ancient Jewish practices in Colossae. Some of the people are observing distinctively Jewish dietary restrictions and taking care not to touch certain things because they will make them unclean.
The Gentile form of this Colossian error is spoken of as being taken captive “according to the elemental spirits of the universe.” In ancient Greece, there was an obsession with what the world was made out of. It was more or less universally accepted that everything was made up of four elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire. The question that remained was, “How do these four things make up everything else?” And perhaps the more pressing question was, “Which of these four things is the very most basic?” For example, if fire is the simplest of the elements, then Earth, Water and Air could be said to be made up of fire. This whole way of thinking intended to cut behind what we can see and touch and penetrate into the mysteries of the world, or, perhaps, the mysteries of God.
A related but somewhat later use of the term “elementary spirits of the universe,” but still in pre-Christian Greece, was in scientific works. Euclid’s geometry was praised for it simplicity and its beauty. It started with five postulates, that were thought to be self-evident, and then the rest of geometry was simply deduced logically from them. It was simple, it was beautiful, and it was the most rigorous discipline anyone knew. The goal in science was to find out the small number of “first principles” upon which everything else depended, like Euclid’s postulates. Then, it would be possible to use our deductive skills and understand the universe in a way we couldn’t before.
Paul, of course, is not saying that observing human tradition, like that of the ancient Jews, or studying the universe is intrinsically evil. However, there is a problem in both of these ways of thinking. Paul’s real problem is that people are doing these things and being taken captive by them and not thinking “according to Christ.” If we remember this, we can understand why Paul is concerned. The problem is not that the people are being careful about what they eat or what they touch; the problem is that they are saying by their actions that those things are more important than Jesus. The problem is not that the people are interested in what makes the world work; the problem is that, by doing so in this way, they hope to get a glimpse into how things really are that somehow goes deeper and further than Jesus does.
There is good reason that Paul thinks that this is a problem. To him, we need to always be thinking according to Christ. The reason is because “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” But this is not just an interesting fact about Jesus, but should resonate with the people because Paul goes on to say, “And you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.” Here is the simple truth for Paul. In Christ, we do not just meet with a human being, but with the very being of God. It is in Christ that God has met with us in a definitive and decisive way. If we by our actions say, “I want to know God, but I don’t want to do it in and through Christ and Christ alone,” Paul would say that we are trying to find God by going behind God’s back, that we have been taken captive through philosophy and empty deceit.
In finishing out this passage, Paul reminds the people that, because of what Christ has done, they are no longer pagans, they are no longer under the ancient Jewish law, but are renewed in Christ. “In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.” He is reminding the people of their very most basic Christian experience. In their conversion and baptism they died with Christ to everything but Christ. To do all these other things to seek the mystery of God is to say that Christ, for all that he has done, is simply not good enough.
This is really not all that different from our situation today. The temptation to behave as though Christ were not good enough is everywhere. We are pressured by some to find our status as Christians in the moral acts that we do, staying as separated as possible from the world that is so corrupt. At the same time, we are pressured by others to appeal to some kind of standard other than Christ and, presumably, better than Christ. One side says, “Jesus taught us to live lives devoted to God, so what really matters is that we are holy and not like the sinners of the world.” The other side says, “Jesus taught us to love and have mercy and so it is really love and mercy that matters.” Is a holy life important? Certainly. Ought we to love one another and show mercy? Absolutely. However, when we allow them to take Christ’s central place, we ought to hear Paul’s words. “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit…and not according to Christ.”
Someone might say, “But pastor, it just makes sense that we should live lives of holiness or that we should love one another.” Of course it does. If the things that we are tempted to put in Christ’s place didn’t make sense, there would be no danger. After all, Paul was concerned that people would be deceived, not by what seemed to be foolish, but by “plausible arguments.” Paul, an apostle who had lived long in the Word of God, who had encountered the risen Christ, and was dedicated, as one from a Jewish background, to help Gentiles live for God through Christ and in the Spirit, knows that, at the end of the day, it is Christ who is the mystery of God, it is Christ in whom God meets us face to face, it is Christ who gives us all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and it is Christ in whom you and I come to fullness. Let us rejoice in the fact that we do not need to look for God behind Christ’s back, for, in Christ, the fullness of deity dwells bodily. Let us pray.
AMEN
10/21/10
Colossians 2:1-12
Expository Preaching
Jesus is the answer. It might sound cheesy, it might remind you, like it does me, of bumper stickers you may have seen, but I assure you, that Jesus is indeed the answer. At least, that is what Paul is proclaiming to the Colossian church, which seems to be being torn apart over the best way to discover “the mystery of God.” It seems that the Colossian Christians are not all that different from you and me. Some of them think that the mystery of God is to be found one way, some think that it is to be found in another, very different way. Conflicts arise because of differences of opinions and it seems the only thing that everyone can agree on is that the other group is wrong.
It is in the midst of this kind of situation that Paul speaks a word. “For I want you to know how much I am struggling for you, and for those in Laodicea, and for all who have not seen me face to face. I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Paul is not the one who has planted this church, but his heart yearns for them, and everyone else, to know that it is Christ himself who is the mystery of God and that, if they can just grasp this, they will have all the riches of assured understanding.
“I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments.” This fact, that Jesus is the mystery of God, is not just one among a series of facts that Paul thinks that he and the Colossian Christians can take or leave as they wish. Paul is not writing to give a helpful way of thinking that may or may not have any bearing on reality at all. No, Paul is asserting with all of his strength, that this is a crucial point, something not to be ignored or brushed aside but accepted and confirmed in the depths of every believer. To treat Christ as anything but utterly central is to be deceived, led astray by arguments that have been thought up by human beings; clever human beings, but human beings nonetheless.
After encouraging the people, Paul continues. “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.” It seems that the error that Paul wants to correct has a Jewish form and a Gentile form. The Jewish form is somewhat more clear because Paul speaks more directly about it, as we will see next week. There seems to be a revival of ancient Jewish practices in Colossae. Some of the people are observing distinctively Jewish dietary restrictions and taking care not to touch certain things because they will make them unclean.
The Gentile form of this Colossian error is spoken of as being taken captive “according to the elemental spirits of the universe.” In ancient Greece, there was an obsession with what the world was made out of. It was more or less universally accepted that everything was made up of four elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire. The question that remained was, “How do these four things make up everything else?” And perhaps the more pressing question was, “Which of these four things is the very most basic?” For example, if fire is the simplest of the elements, then Earth, Water and Air could be said to be made up of fire. This whole way of thinking intended to cut behind what we can see and touch and penetrate into the mysteries of the world, or, perhaps, the mysteries of God.
A related but somewhat later use of the term “elementary spirits of the universe,” but still in pre-Christian Greece, was in scientific works. Euclid’s geometry was praised for it simplicity and its beauty. It started with five postulates, that were thought to be self-evident, and then the rest of geometry was simply deduced logically from them. It was simple, it was beautiful, and it was the most rigorous discipline anyone knew. The goal in science was to find out the small number of “first principles” upon which everything else depended, like Euclid’s postulates. Then, it would be possible to use our deductive skills and understand the universe in a way we couldn’t before.
Paul, of course, is not saying that observing human tradition, like that of the ancient Jews, or studying the universe is intrinsically evil. However, there is a problem in both of these ways of thinking. Paul’s real problem is that people are doing these things and being taken captive by them and not thinking “according to Christ.” If we remember this, we can understand why Paul is concerned. The problem is not that the people are being careful about what they eat or what they touch; the problem is that they are saying by their actions that those things are more important than Jesus. The problem is not that the people are interested in what makes the world work; the problem is that, by doing so in this way, they hope to get a glimpse into how things really are that somehow goes deeper and further than Jesus does.
There is good reason that Paul thinks that this is a problem. To him, we need to always be thinking according to Christ. The reason is because “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” But this is not just an interesting fact about Jesus, but should resonate with the people because Paul goes on to say, “And you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.” Here is the simple truth for Paul. In Christ, we do not just meet with a human being, but with the very being of God. It is in Christ that God has met with us in a definitive and decisive way. If we by our actions say, “I want to know God, but I don’t want to do it in and through Christ and Christ alone,” Paul would say that we are trying to find God by going behind God’s back, that we have been taken captive through philosophy and empty deceit.
In finishing out this passage, Paul reminds the people that, because of what Christ has done, they are no longer pagans, they are no longer under the ancient Jewish law, but are renewed in Christ. “In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.” He is reminding the people of their very most basic Christian experience. In their conversion and baptism they died with Christ to everything but Christ. To do all these other things to seek the mystery of God is to say that Christ, for all that he has done, is simply not good enough.
This is really not all that different from our situation today. The temptation to behave as though Christ were not good enough is everywhere. We are pressured by some to find our status as Christians in the moral acts that we do, staying as separated as possible from the world that is so corrupt. At the same time, we are pressured by others to appeal to some kind of standard other than Christ and, presumably, better than Christ. One side says, “Jesus taught us to live lives devoted to God, so what really matters is that we are holy and not like the sinners of the world.” The other side says, “Jesus taught us to love and have mercy and so it is really love and mercy that matters.” Is a holy life important? Certainly. Ought we to love one another and show mercy? Absolutely. However, when we allow them to take Christ’s central place, we ought to hear Paul’s words. “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit…and not according to Christ.”
Someone might say, “But pastor, it just makes sense that we should live lives of holiness or that we should love one another.” Of course it does. If the things that we are tempted to put in Christ’s place didn’t make sense, there would be no danger. After all, Paul was concerned that people would be deceived, not by what seemed to be foolish, but by “plausible arguments.” Paul, an apostle who had lived long in the Word of God, who had encountered the risen Christ, and was dedicated, as one from a Jewish background, to help Gentiles live for God through Christ and in the Spirit, knows that, at the end of the day, it is Christ who is the mystery of God, it is Christ in whom God meets us face to face, it is Christ who gives us all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and it is Christ in whom you and I come to fullness. Let us rejoice in the fact that we do not need to look for God behind Christ’s back, for, in Christ, the fullness of deity dwells bodily. Let us pray.
AMEN
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
John 19:31-42
10/10/10
John 19:31-42
Hudson UMC
Our passage for this morning is absolutely unique in the Gospel according to John, and there are only a few texts like it in the other Gospels. In this text, we have Jesus in the action, clearly involved, but He doesn’t do anything. In the passage before this, He is still alive, but actively dying on the cross; in the next passage He is raised from the dead, but that is getting ahead of ourselves. The reason why Jesus does absolutely nothing, not a word, not a miracle, not any action at all, is because He is dead. It is the deadness of Christ that I want to focus on this morning.
The preaching professors at the Seminary I attend feel strongly that modern Mainline preachers tend to avoid the passion narrative, where Jesus faces betrayal and death. I told the professor for the preaching class I am in right now that we were going all the way through John and he commended us, not only for sticking with this passage by passage approach, but for actually spending time in the passion narrative. There are many modern Christian leaders who seem to want to transform the Christian message into nothing more than a way to find meaning in life. The primary purpose for attending church, for reading the Bible, for prayer, is so that we can feel that our lives have meaning, that we think that our lives are full.
However, the cross shows us that the new life that God promises us is not, and cannot be reduced to the power of positive thinking. There are realities born witness to in the Bible that challenge us, that overturn our ways of thinking, that shoot the legs out of “the ways we’ve always done things.” Jesus not only makes promises about having abundant life, loving God and neighbor, and even doing greater things than He did, but also suffers and dies and assures us that we, as His disciples are so far from being exempt from similar treatment, that He says, “The servant is not greater than the master.”
All of this is to say that here, where we have Jesus, God in flesh, who is dead, we are firmly outside of our normal comfort zone. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, do we come face-to-face with the absolute seriousness of our calling as Christian believers. Churches across the country are worried about finances, declining membership, a lack of passion for outreach. All of these things are serious, but I sometimes wonder if we allow those things to get us worked up because we have forgotten the astonishing seriousness of the fact that, for us and our salvation, Jesus died!
First, it seems important to look at what our passage tells us about Jesus and see that, according to the New Testament, Jesus really died. We read that, because a festival day was coming up, the Jews did not want the people to stay hanging on the crosses. This is because there is a command in Deuteronomy that says that it is a curse for someone to hang on a tree overnight. The problem is that crucifixion is not exactly a quick way to die. There were times that people would take up to a day to die. So, the Roman government was not in the business of letting people down who were meant to be executed, so they had to speed up the deaths of those on the cross. When someone is crucified, they die by asphyxiation, that is, they are not longer able to breathe. They are nailed in such a way that it makes it extremely difficult to breathe and needed to push themselves up on the cross with their legs, all with tremendous pain. In fact, the word “excruciating” literally means “from the cross,” and was invented to express the uniquely painful experience of crucifixion.
This is why the soldiers came up and broke the legs of those who were crucified with Jesus. If your legs are broken, you cannot push yourself up on your cross, which means you cannot breathe and so you die in a matter of minutes, instead of hours. It sounds somewhat cruel, but it was probably seen as a tremendous mercy to those on the cross, because it meant that their pain was ended quickly and relatively painlessly. The point is that, when they came to Jesus, they did not break His legs. The reason they did not break His legs is because they did not need to; He was already dead. Just to be sure, they poked Him with a spear. If Jesus was still alive, He would have moved when poked, but, instead of that, water and blood poured out. All the liquid in Jesus’ body had begun to pool, a sign of death.
Then, they take Jesus down from the cross and put Him in a tomb. There have been some who have said that the resurrection was just a very natural phenomenon. They argue that Jesus was not really dead when He came down and, after given a chance to rest, came to and freed Himself from the tomb. The problem is that it claims that Jesus, who had lost most of His blood by being flogged, had been crucified, and had lost even more of His blood, was able to, after just a little bit of rest, free Himself from a tomb. It also presupposes that the people of the day would not have been able to identify a dead body. This is simply not the case. Death was very much a common occurrence in the ancient world. Everyone could recognize a dead body. There was absolutely no question in the minds of the people involved. Jesus was truly and utterly dead.
It is this sheer deadness of Christ that causes some serious problems for our thinking, because it challenges some of our most basic preconceptions about God and it forces us to think very carefully about the very nature of Christian faith. How do we interpret the fact that this man, Jesus, died? Is it no more significant than when any other human dies, or is there more to it?
The Nicene Creed, first written in 325 AD, then expanded in 381 and reaffirmed at every major gathering of Christian leaders ever since, is the single most ecumenically affirmed statement of faith in the history of the church. There have been many who have said that the contents of the Nicene Creed can be seen to frame the very most basic definition of Christian faith. This incredibly important document begins with these words. “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us and our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried.” It goes on from there, speaking of the resurrection, but I want to stop here so we can take the death of Christ seriously.
The basic conviction that is given formal expression in the Nicene Creed, that goes back to the very beginning, is that the human being Jesus of Nazareth, is not only a real human being, but is also of the same being of God the Father, absolutely fully human and absolutely fully God. This is the truly central conviction of all Christian faith; with it, everything hangs together, without it everything falls apart. If there is not a real bond of being between Jesus and God, then the whole Gospel falls apart. If Jesus is not truly God, His words of forgiveness, love and compassion are merely human words without true divine authority. He can make us feel better with His kindness, but if He is not God, all He is doing is a powerful form of guidance for us to help ourselves, not actually doing anything that has real meaning.
This helps us make sense out of the words and actions of Christ. When Jesus speaks, it is God who speaks; when Jesus acts, it is God who acts; when Jesus shows us love and compassion, it is God who shows us love and compassion. It is only if Jesus really is God that we can say anything with any kind of confidence about the nature of God. However, texts like ours for this morning point to something that might very well make us squirm. Jesus died. Does that mean that God died?
I have found that there is a tremendous resistance to this idea, even by Christian leaders, but I want us to spend some time with it so we can really see what is at stake. What would it mean if God were to die? This is the same God who, when He spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, said that His name was “I am who I am and I will be who I will be.” God’s very essence as He has revealed it to us is that He exists, that He lives. If we even begin to contemplate the thought that, in Christ, God could die, does that mean that we deny the godness of God?
It is something of a dilemma. What if we were to say, as many thinkers, and even some very great ones, have done, that on the cross, the human nature of Jesus died, but His divine nature remained untouched? That seems to solve the problem, right? We can do justice to the obvious fact that Jesus died and yet can still affirm our conviction that God cannot suffer and die. But if that is so, then we have Jesus doing something that does not bear in any way on the being of God. In spite of the fact that, if the Gospel is not to fall apart, we have to affirm that, as Jesus told His disciples, to see Him is to see the Father, that the Father and the incarnate Son are one, we would be saying that, when Jesus died, it has no real impact on God at all, but is merely a human act.
What has happened? We have driven a deep wedge between Jesus and God. If Jesus cannot really show us God in death, what good is everything else He has said and done? If here, at the crucial moment, we say that Jesus tells us nothing about God, then on what grounds can we assure people that, in Christ we see the love of God for us and our salvation; after all, it seems that God and Jesus don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. If the death of Christ does not have some real impact on the life of God, what is the crucifixion but the suffering of an innocent man, a tragedy, far less than the powerful act of an almighty God?
Martin Luther, the man most commonly associated with the Protestant Reformation, was not willing to give up the conviction that, in Jesus, from cradle to grave, we have a true revelation of God in human flesh. He unflinchingly made the argument, Jesus is God, Jesus died, therefore, God died, and rejoiced that God would even enter death rather than give us up to death and destruction. I won’t presume to say that I have any idea whatsoever about what it means for God to die in this sense, but I think we have to take it seriously. We like to think about God as this aloof, emotionless being who watches over us and is just as unaffected by what happens in this world of space and time as a human being is by what happens in an ant farm. And yet, in Christ, we simply cannot come to that conclusion. It must be torn up by the roots.
The concern that gets raised whenever we speak of the possibility of God dying, regardless of exactly what that might mean, is that it seems to limit God and make Him rather less powerful. I disagree; in fact, I think the opposite is the case. I think that, by entering fully and willingly into death, taking our sin and death upon Himself and truly facing the threat of non-being that so frightens us shows us that God is revealed to be far more amazing, far more powerful, and far more loving than we ever would have imagined. It forces us to break out of the difficult way of thinking where we imagine that our redemption is accomplished merely by a wave of the divine hand, a snap of God’s fingers and shows us that, when we say that God loves us and we can see that most completely in the cross, we mean that God was willing to endure real pain and suffering and pay a real price that is real even to God for our salvation.
I think that Charles Wesley, the great hymnist of early Methodism and brother of John Wesley, had a profound grasp on this. Listen to the words of the second verse to his hymn, “And Can It Be That I Should Gain.” “’Tis Mystery all, the immortal dies. Who can understand his strange design? In vain the firstborn Seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. ‘Tis mercy all, let earth adore. Let angel minds inquire no more.”
It will be two weeks before I have the privilege of bringing the word of God to you again, so it will be two weeks before we really get a chance to resolve this issue. Think about it as something like the time that Jesus spent in the tomb, His disciples wondering if and how the work of God in their midst would be completed. What I want to leave you with today is not only the tension that is set up when we take the death of Christ very seriously without immediately resolving it into the resurrection. I want to impress upon you as strongly as I can the real point of focusing on the astonishing nature of the death of Christ and that is that whether or not you and I always understand why, whether or not we always agree with God, God felt that we were worth really suffering and dying for. We cannot begin to understand all of what that means, but it does mean that God loves us so much, that He loves us more even than He loves Himself. Let us pray.
AMEN
John 19:31-42
Hudson UMC
Our passage for this morning is absolutely unique in the Gospel according to John, and there are only a few texts like it in the other Gospels. In this text, we have Jesus in the action, clearly involved, but He doesn’t do anything. In the passage before this, He is still alive, but actively dying on the cross; in the next passage He is raised from the dead, but that is getting ahead of ourselves. The reason why Jesus does absolutely nothing, not a word, not a miracle, not any action at all, is because He is dead. It is the deadness of Christ that I want to focus on this morning.
The preaching professors at the Seminary I attend feel strongly that modern Mainline preachers tend to avoid the passion narrative, where Jesus faces betrayal and death. I told the professor for the preaching class I am in right now that we were going all the way through John and he commended us, not only for sticking with this passage by passage approach, but for actually spending time in the passion narrative. There are many modern Christian leaders who seem to want to transform the Christian message into nothing more than a way to find meaning in life. The primary purpose for attending church, for reading the Bible, for prayer, is so that we can feel that our lives have meaning, that we think that our lives are full.
However, the cross shows us that the new life that God promises us is not, and cannot be reduced to the power of positive thinking. There are realities born witness to in the Bible that challenge us, that overturn our ways of thinking, that shoot the legs out of “the ways we’ve always done things.” Jesus not only makes promises about having abundant life, loving God and neighbor, and even doing greater things than He did, but also suffers and dies and assures us that we, as His disciples are so far from being exempt from similar treatment, that He says, “The servant is not greater than the master.”
All of this is to say that here, where we have Jesus, God in flesh, who is dead, we are firmly outside of our normal comfort zone. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, do we come face-to-face with the absolute seriousness of our calling as Christian believers. Churches across the country are worried about finances, declining membership, a lack of passion for outreach. All of these things are serious, but I sometimes wonder if we allow those things to get us worked up because we have forgotten the astonishing seriousness of the fact that, for us and our salvation, Jesus died!
First, it seems important to look at what our passage tells us about Jesus and see that, according to the New Testament, Jesus really died. We read that, because a festival day was coming up, the Jews did not want the people to stay hanging on the crosses. This is because there is a command in Deuteronomy that says that it is a curse for someone to hang on a tree overnight. The problem is that crucifixion is not exactly a quick way to die. There were times that people would take up to a day to die. So, the Roman government was not in the business of letting people down who were meant to be executed, so they had to speed up the deaths of those on the cross. When someone is crucified, they die by asphyxiation, that is, they are not longer able to breathe. They are nailed in such a way that it makes it extremely difficult to breathe and needed to push themselves up on the cross with their legs, all with tremendous pain. In fact, the word “excruciating” literally means “from the cross,” and was invented to express the uniquely painful experience of crucifixion.
This is why the soldiers came up and broke the legs of those who were crucified with Jesus. If your legs are broken, you cannot push yourself up on your cross, which means you cannot breathe and so you die in a matter of minutes, instead of hours. It sounds somewhat cruel, but it was probably seen as a tremendous mercy to those on the cross, because it meant that their pain was ended quickly and relatively painlessly. The point is that, when they came to Jesus, they did not break His legs. The reason they did not break His legs is because they did not need to; He was already dead. Just to be sure, they poked Him with a spear. If Jesus was still alive, He would have moved when poked, but, instead of that, water and blood poured out. All the liquid in Jesus’ body had begun to pool, a sign of death.
Then, they take Jesus down from the cross and put Him in a tomb. There have been some who have said that the resurrection was just a very natural phenomenon. They argue that Jesus was not really dead when He came down and, after given a chance to rest, came to and freed Himself from the tomb. The problem is that it claims that Jesus, who had lost most of His blood by being flogged, had been crucified, and had lost even more of His blood, was able to, after just a little bit of rest, free Himself from a tomb. It also presupposes that the people of the day would not have been able to identify a dead body. This is simply not the case. Death was very much a common occurrence in the ancient world. Everyone could recognize a dead body. There was absolutely no question in the minds of the people involved. Jesus was truly and utterly dead.
It is this sheer deadness of Christ that causes some serious problems for our thinking, because it challenges some of our most basic preconceptions about God and it forces us to think very carefully about the very nature of Christian faith. How do we interpret the fact that this man, Jesus, died? Is it no more significant than when any other human dies, or is there more to it?
The Nicene Creed, first written in 325 AD, then expanded in 381 and reaffirmed at every major gathering of Christian leaders ever since, is the single most ecumenically affirmed statement of faith in the history of the church. There have been many who have said that the contents of the Nicene Creed can be seen to frame the very most basic definition of Christian faith. This incredibly important document begins with these words. “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us and our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried.” It goes on from there, speaking of the resurrection, but I want to stop here so we can take the death of Christ seriously.
The basic conviction that is given formal expression in the Nicene Creed, that goes back to the very beginning, is that the human being Jesus of Nazareth, is not only a real human being, but is also of the same being of God the Father, absolutely fully human and absolutely fully God. This is the truly central conviction of all Christian faith; with it, everything hangs together, without it everything falls apart. If there is not a real bond of being between Jesus and God, then the whole Gospel falls apart. If Jesus is not truly God, His words of forgiveness, love and compassion are merely human words without true divine authority. He can make us feel better with His kindness, but if He is not God, all He is doing is a powerful form of guidance for us to help ourselves, not actually doing anything that has real meaning.
This helps us make sense out of the words and actions of Christ. When Jesus speaks, it is God who speaks; when Jesus acts, it is God who acts; when Jesus shows us love and compassion, it is God who shows us love and compassion. It is only if Jesus really is God that we can say anything with any kind of confidence about the nature of God. However, texts like ours for this morning point to something that might very well make us squirm. Jesus died. Does that mean that God died?
I have found that there is a tremendous resistance to this idea, even by Christian leaders, but I want us to spend some time with it so we can really see what is at stake. What would it mean if God were to die? This is the same God who, when He spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, said that His name was “I am who I am and I will be who I will be.” God’s very essence as He has revealed it to us is that He exists, that He lives. If we even begin to contemplate the thought that, in Christ, God could die, does that mean that we deny the godness of God?
It is something of a dilemma. What if we were to say, as many thinkers, and even some very great ones, have done, that on the cross, the human nature of Jesus died, but His divine nature remained untouched? That seems to solve the problem, right? We can do justice to the obvious fact that Jesus died and yet can still affirm our conviction that God cannot suffer and die. But if that is so, then we have Jesus doing something that does not bear in any way on the being of God. In spite of the fact that, if the Gospel is not to fall apart, we have to affirm that, as Jesus told His disciples, to see Him is to see the Father, that the Father and the incarnate Son are one, we would be saying that, when Jesus died, it has no real impact on God at all, but is merely a human act.
What has happened? We have driven a deep wedge between Jesus and God. If Jesus cannot really show us God in death, what good is everything else He has said and done? If here, at the crucial moment, we say that Jesus tells us nothing about God, then on what grounds can we assure people that, in Christ we see the love of God for us and our salvation; after all, it seems that God and Jesus don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. If the death of Christ does not have some real impact on the life of God, what is the crucifixion but the suffering of an innocent man, a tragedy, far less than the powerful act of an almighty God?
Martin Luther, the man most commonly associated with the Protestant Reformation, was not willing to give up the conviction that, in Jesus, from cradle to grave, we have a true revelation of God in human flesh. He unflinchingly made the argument, Jesus is God, Jesus died, therefore, God died, and rejoiced that God would even enter death rather than give us up to death and destruction. I won’t presume to say that I have any idea whatsoever about what it means for God to die in this sense, but I think we have to take it seriously. We like to think about God as this aloof, emotionless being who watches over us and is just as unaffected by what happens in this world of space and time as a human being is by what happens in an ant farm. And yet, in Christ, we simply cannot come to that conclusion. It must be torn up by the roots.
The concern that gets raised whenever we speak of the possibility of God dying, regardless of exactly what that might mean, is that it seems to limit God and make Him rather less powerful. I disagree; in fact, I think the opposite is the case. I think that, by entering fully and willingly into death, taking our sin and death upon Himself and truly facing the threat of non-being that so frightens us shows us that God is revealed to be far more amazing, far more powerful, and far more loving than we ever would have imagined. It forces us to break out of the difficult way of thinking where we imagine that our redemption is accomplished merely by a wave of the divine hand, a snap of God’s fingers and shows us that, when we say that God loves us and we can see that most completely in the cross, we mean that God was willing to endure real pain and suffering and pay a real price that is real even to God for our salvation.
I think that Charles Wesley, the great hymnist of early Methodism and brother of John Wesley, had a profound grasp on this. Listen to the words of the second verse to his hymn, “And Can It Be That I Should Gain.” “’Tis Mystery all, the immortal dies. Who can understand his strange design? In vain the firstborn Seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. ‘Tis mercy all, let earth adore. Let angel minds inquire no more.”
It will be two weeks before I have the privilege of bringing the word of God to you again, so it will be two weeks before we really get a chance to resolve this issue. Think about it as something like the time that Jesus spent in the tomb, His disciples wondering if and how the work of God in their midst would be completed. What I want to leave you with today is not only the tension that is set up when we take the death of Christ very seriously without immediately resolving it into the resurrection. I want to impress upon you as strongly as I can the real point of focusing on the astonishing nature of the death of Christ and that is that whether or not you and I always understand why, whether or not we always agree with God, God felt that we were worth really suffering and dying for. We cannot begin to understand all of what that means, but it does mean that God loves us so much, that He loves us more even than He loves Himself. Let us pray.
AMEN
Monday, October 4, 2010
John 19:16-30
10/03/10
John 19:16-30
Hudson UMC
“It is finished” is not a phrase that we think about too often. When we are talking about a work of art or even just an ordinary task around the house, we often will say, “It is finished,” to let everyone know that there is nothing more to do. However, when a man actively dying on a cross in extreme pain says “It is finished” it seems a little different. There are some who have said that Jesus was nothing more than an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who expected to bring in the golden age of God through their ministry. Dying on the cross would have put an end to all of that. Instead of saying, “It is finished,” it would seem that it would be more appropriate to say, “I am finished,” or “My ministry is finished,” in the sense that it is done away with. But this does not seem to be what Jesus is saying, and if we remember the entirety of Jesus’ ministry, we can see for sure that Jesus means something else.
If we really allow the intense significance of these simple words from the mouth of Christ, “It is finished” to penetrate into our hearts, minds and lives, we would realize that they are incredibly important. They do not only tell us something about God, but something very important about ourselves. It is mainly this aspect that I want to focus on this morning.
There are people in the world, even in the Western world like in Europe and America who would say that human beings do not need to be forgiven and redeemed, that humanity does not have any problems that we cannot solve. However, if we can agree for a moment that humanity needs some help to make it what it ought to be, how would we go about doing that, or rather, how would we think that we should go about doing it? Well, modern human history has shown us that, if we were to set ourselves to redeeming human nature, we would try to do it through improving the information that people have; that is, we would tend to try to solve the problem through education; teaching people what is right and what is wrong, showing people how to make good choices. And, if that does not work for everyone, we would imprison them.
Now, if we wanted to be distinctly religious in our thinking about this problem, we might even go so far as to say that God needs to help us out. After all, we are finite, but God is infinite. We do not have the understanding of context or the wisdom to choose the very best option that God does. However, what would we think God should do in order to redeem us? Again, we in the Western world tend to think in terms of information. God should send a great teacher or a prophet, someone who can tell us what we need to do to fix our situation. We need people who will tell us that, at the end of the day, love is a better option than hate, that working together is more effective than destroying others.
Now, if this is the case, we can understand, at least to a certain extent, why Jesus came among us. We needed to be taught the ways of God, we needed to see examples of love, we needed to hear the word of forgiveness from the mouth of a great man. In Jesus, we hear the word of the Lord and, in our own lives, we realize that we are not self-sufficient, that we need God, the one who is greater than we are, to rest on. Without Jesus we would still not know the wisdom of His teaching, we would still be ignorant of what we needed to know.
However, in my opinion, there are two major problems with understanding God’s redemption primarily in terms of information. First of all, it doesn’t seem to work all that well. We have a history of people in the church who continually act as if the teachings of Jesus have no impact on them whatsoever. How many holy wars, how many crusades, how many inquisitions, how many persecutions, have been launched in the name of the one who said, “love your enemies?” How many people have heard the call of Christ to care for the widows, orphans and the poor in the land and then go their merry way as if they had not heard anything? How many people use their religious convictions, supposedly rooted in Jesus, as a stick with which to beat those who disagree with them? We can’t get out of this problem by saying that the people probably just didn’t know the teaching of Jesus because that isn’t true, either. We can see that the religious leaders since the beginning have known the text of the Bible very well indeed. The people have always known the basic teaching of Christ and yet have behaved terribly in spite of it.
The other issue with understanding redemption primarily as receiving information is that, if we think about faith mainly as knowledge, or, more exactly, “knowing the right thing to do,” we can make absolutely no sense of the crucifixion. If Jesus was primarily meant to be a teacher, who could show us right from wrong, who could give us the information we need to live the right kind of life, why did He need to die? What purpose could that possibly have served? After all, by dying in His early thirties, Jesus’ teaching ministry was radically cut short. If He had not died, He could have spent so much more time teaching. The fact that Jesus was crucified and that both He and the disciples make such a big point out of the fact that He had to be crucified should show us that there is something more to Jesus than just His teaching. Some people like to call Jesus a great human teacher like a Ghandi or a Mother Theresa or a Mohammed, or a Martin Luther King Jr., but neither Jesus nor the apostles will let us rest here. There is much more.
In many ways, the significance of this is shown so well in Jesus’ last words on the cross in the Gospel of John, “It is finished.” Over and over again, Jesus has been saying that He is not doing His own work, but is doing the work of His Father and that He will not be done until that work is finished. Here, Jesus says that the work He had come to do, the work for us and our salvation, is finally finished. After several years, after difficult times, after a tiring ministry, and now, finally, in death, the work of God is completed.
The point that I want to raise is that Jesus says, “It is finished” here and not before. This is extremely important. It is not as though Jesus had actually completed His Father’s work earlier and just forgot about it, nor is it the case that Jesus had not realized that He had done so and it was only now, hanging on the cross, that He could see that His work really had been done. Jesus did not declare that His work was finished earlier simply because it wasn’t finished earlier. Only in death, an innocent death at the hands of the religious leaders who hated Him, the very act and being of God in their midst, that His work was completed. There is something deeply important about His death in the plan of God.
What does it mean that Jesus only says that “it is finished” here on the cross? It means that our problem as human beings is not simply informational; it cannot be solved merely by education, regardless of how well we are educated. After all, the ones who orchestrate the world’s greatest disasters are not usually the ones who have had no education, but those who, because of their education, are able to coordinate evil on a large scale. If our problem could be overcome simply by hearing the wise words of God, Jesus’ work would have been finished after Jesus spent time teaching the multitudes, but this is not the case. Jesus does not say His work is finished until He is all but dead.
This outcry shows us that there is something much deeper and much more profound that needs to be overcome by the power of God. It shows us that, at the end of the day, we are not always the best judges of what is wrong with us, if indeed we ever are. We think that we need to be taught, to be guided in a better way. In Christ, God shows us that the entirety of our humanity needs to be dealt with and dealt with in such a way that does not stop short of death.
Think about what this means. It means that our condition outside of God is somewhat more dire than we often like to think. We almost always think about sin according to what it is that we do. We commit sin. When we say that we are sinners, we almost always mean primarily that we do sin, that we do not go even a day without committing sin in one form or another. This is, of course, reinforced by the way our legal system works where you get punished more or less depending on what you do and, if you don’t do anything wrong, you do not get punished at all. In fact, even many preachers who emphasize our need for grace will point out the sin that we do in order to show us that we need God. We look first at the things we have done, then we compare them to the laws, then we realize that we have done wrong and so we feel guilty.
The point is, though, that this does not go nearly deep enough. When Jesus says, “It is finished” while He is on the cross and not beforehand, we begin to understand that His death was not just an accident, it was not merely a tragedy. The putting to death of the innocent man Jesus shows us that He did not just come to teach us and to be an example of the godly life; indeed, we see that Jesus came to die for us, on our behalf and, perhaps more importantly, in our place. We see that sin is not only lodged in what we do but in who we are. At one point, Jesus says that all the sins that we commit flow from the heart, from our inner selves. Sin is not just not knowing what is right and what is wrong and so we accidentally choose the wrong, but knowing full well between right and wrong and choosing wrong anyway because we like doing wrong. We like calling the shots, we like being in charge and we like to do things our own way.
This fact, that our sin is rooted deep in our very being and not just in our acts, is very important. If sin was only what we do and not also who we are, we might say that, when we die, our death could pay the penalty for everything we have done wrong. After all, what more can we pay? In places where capital punishment is still legal, the death of the criminal marks the end of what the law can demand. However, what good is our death at atoning for our sin if sin is not just what we do put part of who we are? How can the death of someone who is a sinner atone for their sins? By the fact that God thought it was necessary to die on our behalf and in our place, we see that sin is a much bigger problem than we often like to admit.
But there is another sense of the phrase, “It is finished” that I want to emphasize because it is equally important, if not even more so, for our Christian lives. We always need to remember that the redemption that God has worked for us in Christ did not stop short of death. We do not sacrifice animals in our worship service, but Christianity does not have a bloodless forgiveness. Our redemption has cost God dearly and was bought at the price of His own innocent blood given up for us out of sheer love. However, as important as that is to remember, we also need to remember that our redemption is indeed finished, it is absolutely completed.
Our redemption is finished, the work of God is completed in the sense that nothing else needs to be added to the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ to make it “good enough.” All our love and obedience, all our faith and praise, does not add the smallest bit to the work that Christ has done for us and in us. We cannot make God love us any more by what we do. The burden has been lifted off of our shoulders and placed onto Christ’s, the only one who can bear it. The work of God is so complete that any attempt that we make to try and improve upon it, or earn our standing in God’s eyes, is actually a denial of Christ. Jesus’ life and death of obedience were not just on our behalf but also in our place. Jesus provided the one response that is acceptable to God and so it would be utter foolishness to say, “Pardon me, God, but I don’t feel like I was consulted about how you would rescue me. I want to help out because, in fact, I think I can do it better.”
Some might worry that for me to say that Christ has so completely finished the work of God for us and our salvation is to say that there is no need to live a godly life. That doesn’t bother me. People said that about Paul, they said it about Luther, and they said it about Wesley. However, nothing could be further from the truth. If it is Christ’s response that is pleasing to God, our lives cannot fall into irresponsibility or laziness. The only rational response is to join in Christ’s human response to God. When we see that only Christ has lived a life of complete faith and obedience, we don’t respond by living a life in contradiction to God, but by living like Christ lived. To use the language of the gospel, we renounce ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Christ in every way.
In a moment, we are going to celebrate Holy Communion, we will feast at the table of our God. It is a wonderful morning to do so for a few reasons. First, it is always good to celebrate the Lord’s Supper as it is one of the main ways that we remember and join in with the work of Christ. Second, Communion is not just a nice ritual that we do, but one that was instituted by Christ to remember His death on a cross, which is the subject of our text today. There can be nothing greater than remembering the death of Christ, not just by words and preaching, but by an act of communion as a body with Christ. Finally, because it reminds us that, when Jesus said, “It is finished,” He really meant it. The work has been done. We do not ask you to be worthy before you come forward to receive; if we did, nobody would ever partake. We do not ask you to be good enough, because only Christ is good enough. We ask only that you come forward, willing to receive whatever Christ will give you, knowing that He never gives us gifts apart from, but only in and with, himself.
“It is finished.” It was finished two thousand years ago, long before you were born. Christ died before you ever committed sin, and long before you ever knew Him. When we gather around this table, we are reminded that Christ did not die for us after we proved ourselves to Him but, as the New Testament says, while we were yet sinners. The issue of worthiness is indeed an issue at communion, but it is not our worthiness, but Christ’s worthiness and He is indeed worthy. Our faith is not good or bad depending on how much faith we think we have, but depending on the object of that faith. We do not trust in faith because we are faithful, but because God is faithful. Let us always remember, but especially today, that God’s love is not something that we earn or somehow twist God into giving, but something that is freely and selflessly given, with nothing asked in return. Let us pray.
AMEN
John 19:16-30
Hudson UMC
“It is finished” is not a phrase that we think about too often. When we are talking about a work of art or even just an ordinary task around the house, we often will say, “It is finished,” to let everyone know that there is nothing more to do. However, when a man actively dying on a cross in extreme pain says “It is finished” it seems a little different. There are some who have said that Jesus was nothing more than an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who expected to bring in the golden age of God through their ministry. Dying on the cross would have put an end to all of that. Instead of saying, “It is finished,” it would seem that it would be more appropriate to say, “I am finished,” or “My ministry is finished,” in the sense that it is done away with. But this does not seem to be what Jesus is saying, and if we remember the entirety of Jesus’ ministry, we can see for sure that Jesus means something else.
If we really allow the intense significance of these simple words from the mouth of Christ, “It is finished” to penetrate into our hearts, minds and lives, we would realize that they are incredibly important. They do not only tell us something about God, but something very important about ourselves. It is mainly this aspect that I want to focus on this morning.
There are people in the world, even in the Western world like in Europe and America who would say that human beings do not need to be forgiven and redeemed, that humanity does not have any problems that we cannot solve. However, if we can agree for a moment that humanity needs some help to make it what it ought to be, how would we go about doing that, or rather, how would we think that we should go about doing it? Well, modern human history has shown us that, if we were to set ourselves to redeeming human nature, we would try to do it through improving the information that people have; that is, we would tend to try to solve the problem through education; teaching people what is right and what is wrong, showing people how to make good choices. And, if that does not work for everyone, we would imprison them.
Now, if we wanted to be distinctly religious in our thinking about this problem, we might even go so far as to say that God needs to help us out. After all, we are finite, but God is infinite. We do not have the understanding of context or the wisdom to choose the very best option that God does. However, what would we think God should do in order to redeem us? Again, we in the Western world tend to think in terms of information. God should send a great teacher or a prophet, someone who can tell us what we need to do to fix our situation. We need people who will tell us that, at the end of the day, love is a better option than hate, that working together is more effective than destroying others.
Now, if this is the case, we can understand, at least to a certain extent, why Jesus came among us. We needed to be taught the ways of God, we needed to see examples of love, we needed to hear the word of forgiveness from the mouth of a great man. In Jesus, we hear the word of the Lord and, in our own lives, we realize that we are not self-sufficient, that we need God, the one who is greater than we are, to rest on. Without Jesus we would still not know the wisdom of His teaching, we would still be ignorant of what we needed to know.
However, in my opinion, there are two major problems with understanding God’s redemption primarily in terms of information. First of all, it doesn’t seem to work all that well. We have a history of people in the church who continually act as if the teachings of Jesus have no impact on them whatsoever. How many holy wars, how many crusades, how many inquisitions, how many persecutions, have been launched in the name of the one who said, “love your enemies?” How many people have heard the call of Christ to care for the widows, orphans and the poor in the land and then go their merry way as if they had not heard anything? How many people use their religious convictions, supposedly rooted in Jesus, as a stick with which to beat those who disagree with them? We can’t get out of this problem by saying that the people probably just didn’t know the teaching of Jesus because that isn’t true, either. We can see that the religious leaders since the beginning have known the text of the Bible very well indeed. The people have always known the basic teaching of Christ and yet have behaved terribly in spite of it.
The other issue with understanding redemption primarily as receiving information is that, if we think about faith mainly as knowledge, or, more exactly, “knowing the right thing to do,” we can make absolutely no sense of the crucifixion. If Jesus was primarily meant to be a teacher, who could show us right from wrong, who could give us the information we need to live the right kind of life, why did He need to die? What purpose could that possibly have served? After all, by dying in His early thirties, Jesus’ teaching ministry was radically cut short. If He had not died, He could have spent so much more time teaching. The fact that Jesus was crucified and that both He and the disciples make such a big point out of the fact that He had to be crucified should show us that there is something more to Jesus than just His teaching. Some people like to call Jesus a great human teacher like a Ghandi or a Mother Theresa or a Mohammed, or a Martin Luther King Jr., but neither Jesus nor the apostles will let us rest here. There is much more.
In many ways, the significance of this is shown so well in Jesus’ last words on the cross in the Gospel of John, “It is finished.” Over and over again, Jesus has been saying that He is not doing His own work, but is doing the work of His Father and that He will not be done until that work is finished. Here, Jesus says that the work He had come to do, the work for us and our salvation, is finally finished. After several years, after difficult times, after a tiring ministry, and now, finally, in death, the work of God is completed.
The point that I want to raise is that Jesus says, “It is finished” here and not before. This is extremely important. It is not as though Jesus had actually completed His Father’s work earlier and just forgot about it, nor is it the case that Jesus had not realized that He had done so and it was only now, hanging on the cross, that He could see that His work really had been done. Jesus did not declare that His work was finished earlier simply because it wasn’t finished earlier. Only in death, an innocent death at the hands of the religious leaders who hated Him, the very act and being of God in their midst, that His work was completed. There is something deeply important about His death in the plan of God.
What does it mean that Jesus only says that “it is finished” here on the cross? It means that our problem as human beings is not simply informational; it cannot be solved merely by education, regardless of how well we are educated. After all, the ones who orchestrate the world’s greatest disasters are not usually the ones who have had no education, but those who, because of their education, are able to coordinate evil on a large scale. If our problem could be overcome simply by hearing the wise words of God, Jesus’ work would have been finished after Jesus spent time teaching the multitudes, but this is not the case. Jesus does not say His work is finished until He is all but dead.
This outcry shows us that there is something much deeper and much more profound that needs to be overcome by the power of God. It shows us that, at the end of the day, we are not always the best judges of what is wrong with us, if indeed we ever are. We think that we need to be taught, to be guided in a better way. In Christ, God shows us that the entirety of our humanity needs to be dealt with and dealt with in such a way that does not stop short of death.
Think about what this means. It means that our condition outside of God is somewhat more dire than we often like to think. We almost always think about sin according to what it is that we do. We commit sin. When we say that we are sinners, we almost always mean primarily that we do sin, that we do not go even a day without committing sin in one form or another. This is, of course, reinforced by the way our legal system works where you get punished more or less depending on what you do and, if you don’t do anything wrong, you do not get punished at all. In fact, even many preachers who emphasize our need for grace will point out the sin that we do in order to show us that we need God. We look first at the things we have done, then we compare them to the laws, then we realize that we have done wrong and so we feel guilty.
The point is, though, that this does not go nearly deep enough. When Jesus says, “It is finished” while He is on the cross and not beforehand, we begin to understand that His death was not just an accident, it was not merely a tragedy. The putting to death of the innocent man Jesus shows us that He did not just come to teach us and to be an example of the godly life; indeed, we see that Jesus came to die for us, on our behalf and, perhaps more importantly, in our place. We see that sin is not only lodged in what we do but in who we are. At one point, Jesus says that all the sins that we commit flow from the heart, from our inner selves. Sin is not just not knowing what is right and what is wrong and so we accidentally choose the wrong, but knowing full well between right and wrong and choosing wrong anyway because we like doing wrong. We like calling the shots, we like being in charge and we like to do things our own way.
This fact, that our sin is rooted deep in our very being and not just in our acts, is very important. If sin was only what we do and not also who we are, we might say that, when we die, our death could pay the penalty for everything we have done wrong. After all, what more can we pay? In places where capital punishment is still legal, the death of the criminal marks the end of what the law can demand. However, what good is our death at atoning for our sin if sin is not just what we do put part of who we are? How can the death of someone who is a sinner atone for their sins? By the fact that God thought it was necessary to die on our behalf and in our place, we see that sin is a much bigger problem than we often like to admit.
But there is another sense of the phrase, “It is finished” that I want to emphasize because it is equally important, if not even more so, for our Christian lives. We always need to remember that the redemption that God has worked for us in Christ did not stop short of death. We do not sacrifice animals in our worship service, but Christianity does not have a bloodless forgiveness. Our redemption has cost God dearly and was bought at the price of His own innocent blood given up for us out of sheer love. However, as important as that is to remember, we also need to remember that our redemption is indeed finished, it is absolutely completed.
Our redemption is finished, the work of God is completed in the sense that nothing else needs to be added to the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ to make it “good enough.” All our love and obedience, all our faith and praise, does not add the smallest bit to the work that Christ has done for us and in us. We cannot make God love us any more by what we do. The burden has been lifted off of our shoulders and placed onto Christ’s, the only one who can bear it. The work of God is so complete that any attempt that we make to try and improve upon it, or earn our standing in God’s eyes, is actually a denial of Christ. Jesus’ life and death of obedience were not just on our behalf but also in our place. Jesus provided the one response that is acceptable to God and so it would be utter foolishness to say, “Pardon me, God, but I don’t feel like I was consulted about how you would rescue me. I want to help out because, in fact, I think I can do it better.”
Some might worry that for me to say that Christ has so completely finished the work of God for us and our salvation is to say that there is no need to live a godly life. That doesn’t bother me. People said that about Paul, they said it about Luther, and they said it about Wesley. However, nothing could be further from the truth. If it is Christ’s response that is pleasing to God, our lives cannot fall into irresponsibility or laziness. The only rational response is to join in Christ’s human response to God. When we see that only Christ has lived a life of complete faith and obedience, we don’t respond by living a life in contradiction to God, but by living like Christ lived. To use the language of the gospel, we renounce ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Christ in every way.
In a moment, we are going to celebrate Holy Communion, we will feast at the table of our God. It is a wonderful morning to do so for a few reasons. First, it is always good to celebrate the Lord’s Supper as it is one of the main ways that we remember and join in with the work of Christ. Second, Communion is not just a nice ritual that we do, but one that was instituted by Christ to remember His death on a cross, which is the subject of our text today. There can be nothing greater than remembering the death of Christ, not just by words and preaching, but by an act of communion as a body with Christ. Finally, because it reminds us that, when Jesus said, “It is finished,” He really meant it. The work has been done. We do not ask you to be worthy before you come forward to receive; if we did, nobody would ever partake. We do not ask you to be good enough, because only Christ is good enough. We ask only that you come forward, willing to receive whatever Christ will give you, knowing that He never gives us gifts apart from, but only in and with, himself.
“It is finished.” It was finished two thousand years ago, long before you were born. Christ died before you ever committed sin, and long before you ever knew Him. When we gather around this table, we are reminded that Christ did not die for us after we proved ourselves to Him but, as the New Testament says, while we were yet sinners. The issue of worthiness is indeed an issue at communion, but it is not our worthiness, but Christ’s worthiness and He is indeed worthy. Our faith is not good or bad depending on how much faith we think we have, but depending on the object of that faith. We do not trust in faith because we are faithful, but because God is faithful. Let us always remember, but especially today, that God’s love is not something that we earn or somehow twist God into giving, but something that is freely and selflessly given, with nothing asked in return. Let us pray.
AMEN
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