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