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April 24, 2005
Jesus, Crucified for our Sake
Jesus, Crucified for our Sake
Psalm 22 / Isaiah 53
Matthew 27: 11-26
April 24th, 2005
Good Friday came just last month but it is time to think again of the cross. I chose to preach on the cross today because we have come to that part of the Nicene Creed, which tells us, “Jesus was crucified for us also under Pontius Pilate.” But it wouldn’t matter if I had preached on this for the past fifty-two Sundays in a row because Jesus crucified is at the heart of our faith.
In fact the Apostle told the people in Corinth, “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Nothing but this? Wouldn’t this get a bit old? Paul knew the Old Testament well. He said it was written for our benefit. What about “the whole council of God,” good expositional sermons that we were taught in seminary were needful for the nourishment of the faith of our people? “Unlock the treasures of the whole Bible,” we were taught.
Yes, but if we all become encyclopedias of knowledge about the Bible and miss the message of the cross, the Bible has become a red herring to us. The heart of our faith is found in Jesus Christ crucified—for me. This message is at the core of my faith, or our faith.
If you and I remember that Jesus was crucified for our sake we may well be overcome with horror at the brutality of His death. This is a natural feeling. But the lasting response I need is to remember it was my sin that put Him there. The great Swedish New Testament scholar, Kristor Stendahl responded to Jews who believed Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” incited anti-Judaism: “No, what that movie stirred in me was awareness of my sin that made Jesus suffer on that cross.”
What is my sin? The Westminster Catechism defines sin as “any transgression of or violation of the law of God.” And so it is. But sin lurks in that unconquerable view of the centrality of myself that now presides in the Western world. Hidden under our demand for rights and personal gratification that we protect with great determination is a self-centeredness that undermines the effect of the Gospel. Let me take stock of this self-centeredness in me, this insistence on being personally gratified, so that I do not deliberately hang on to what compelled Jesus to hang on the cross.
Thus, from person to person a church can be made up of people aware of why Jesus died, and grateful for His grace so lavishly displayed—so that we may lavishly live under the spell of grace. Grace should be on dominant exhibit in the life of a congregation.
The Apostle Paul wrote, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me.” It is the only workable foundation for the Christian life. It tells of what God has done that we could not do, but also of what we can do as a consequence. “The life that I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Here is the Christian life explained, a life lived in gratitude for the love of God to us exhibited at such cost on the cross.
We don’t have a cross in this sanctuary not because we don’t believe the cross is relevant to our faith, but because it is at the heart of our faith.
Our Reformed forebears lived in a day when images festooned the churches. There were crosses with garish statues of a dead Jesus in every church. Statues of saints stood on pedestals everywhere. And all at great expense paid for by poor people who gave their meager income, afraid of hell. The cross was a magic shape for them to be traced in the air, across the chest, or worn around the neck.
Perhaps in over-reaction, the Reformers in whose heritage we come set out to cure the problem cold turkey. No crosses. No images. Nothing ornamental to distract from the majesty of the grace of God that operates within the human heart. Though the cross has deep attraction to me, and to many of you, this is the reason why there is no cross prominent in this sanctuary.
The Reformers who launched our sector of the Reformation were convinced the cross was so important it should never become a religious ornament. The meaning of symbols easily fades when they become commonplace. Perhaps there will be a cross in this sanctuary some day, but not because it is a popular ornament for churches.
The cross was God’s antidote for sin. Sin has been a dreadful blight on humanity since the beginning. Before the foundation of the world God planned to send His Son to absorb the sin of all people of all time. The Son of God spent His short life on this earth experiencing the sin of people. He saw it. He saw its effects on personality, on communities, on synagogues, on religious leaders, on nations. He experienced it in its most cold and brutal form in the ways of the Romans who occupied Palestine. And then, having experienced the sin of others, fellow Jews and Romans, He died by crucifixion as though He were guilty of having committed all those sins, even though He never did, said, or thought one wrongful thing.
Today sin is a dreadful problem. We have airbrushed it but behind nearly every problem you and I have personally, or in society, or in the home, or in our communities, or between nations, or in church sin is the cause. It is a disease of the soul spread by unprotected self.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth words that have kept echoing down through the ages of the church. “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” That simple message has echoed down through time’s corridors as the great corrective when Christian community life lost focus. If this were the subject of every sermon, maybe we’d catch on eventually.
Let me trace the line from the prophet Isaiah, through the Gospels, the life of the Apostle Paul, and the Creed so that it may find its way into my heart and yours.
Isaiah 53 at first lured many people to Jesus in the days after He suffered and died. Jewish people who knew their Bibles read this chapter, wondering what it meant. Then the disciples of Jesus pointed out that what happened on that Passover during the tenure of Pontius Pilate was foretold by Isaiah. We don’t read in the Gospels that Jesus ever called this to their attention before He died. Sometimes Jesus told how He was fulfilling a prophecy, but He let the most forceful prophecy speak for itself at the time it was fulfilled.
The prophet began by asking a question I read from the Jewish Publication Society translation: “Who can believe what we have heard?” It was a question laden with shock. “I can’t believe it!” We sometimes say this in shock.
The prophet went on: “He was despised, shunned by men.” Who was so despised and shunned? Why was he despised and shunned? What terrible offense made him a disgrace to the nation? Was this one a traitor perhaps?
Nobody, not even the prophet knew to whom he referred. Isaiah was treated badly by his people, but it wasn’t him. So was Jeremiah but he wasn’t the one. The prophet repeats himself, sick at heart, “He was despised, we held him of no account. Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing, our suffering that he endured.”
The picture painted by Isaiah brims with injustice. “It was for our sickness that this one suffered?” What kind of sickness? Not cancer or leprosy; something much deeper. It was a deep sickness of soul, a disease infecting the soul.
When the disciples of Jesus pointed out these words to people in light of what all knew happened to Jesus, it hit home. In Acts 8 we read of a Jewish visitor from Ethiopia reading Isaiah’s words as he rode in a chariot. He asked Philip what it meant. When he realized the prophet spoke of Jesus who was crucified not long before, he trusted his life to Jesus and was baptized on the spot.
Those words that Isaiah wrote about Jesus echo in my mind. “He was wounded because of our sins, crushed because of our iniquities.” Such correspondence between a specific prophesy in the Hebrew Bible and the life of Jesus!
All four Gospels have been called Passion narratives with long introductions. The Gospel of Matthew from which we read this morning shows us Jesus standing before Pilate. Pilate asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” We cannot hear his tone of voice. Was he mocking? Was he curious? His wife had dreamed nightmares about this moment. She told him, “Have nothing to do with this just man!” Pilate tried to wriggle out of the problem by offering to release another man named Jesus, whose last name was Barabas, a well-known very bad man. Perhaps they would for their own safety choose this Jesus instead of the Jesus of Nazareth. When they wouldn’t allow this he tried to wash his hands of responsibility. He claimed innocence by washing his hands. The people yelled, “His blood be on us and on our children,” in the frenzy of a moment as political appointees among the Jews who hated Jesus incited them.
Many Jews have been tormented because of that line. But Christians who persecuted the Jews diverted their attention from their own sin that put Jesus on the cross. They violated the Gospel in turning on the Jews, forgetting the warning of Scripture addressed to Christians that in doing this they “crucified the Son of God afresh.”
The Apostle Paul wrote Christians in Corinth who had given him fits, ““I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Forget this and the fabric of the faith dissolves. Forget the cross and the Christian faith dissolves into just another philosophy, a world-view about which all sorts of clever, opinionated people can express an opinion.
The church in Corinth was ridden with strife and immorality. It reflected the life of the bustling city in which it found itself. It was a sports-conscious city, well to do, a great trading center situated on an isthmus with an overland route to pull ships across. It was intellectually alive. Paul had to warn the Christians there, “The wisdom of God is the wisdom of the cross that is foolish to people who think they are wise.” In the church there folk sure had their opinions—about speaking in tongues, about who was the best leader, about how to keep one another in their place, even about how deeply one could go into sexual sin and get away with it.
Things had become so distracted from the basic fact without which Christianity is nothing at all that Paul confessed to being afraid, feeling weak. He felt tongue-tied. “How did it come to this, when it began with the simple preaching of the cross to which you were drawn because of the sheer grandeur of the love of God poured out in Jesus?” “He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” And you want to concentrate on the things that are tearing you apart, shredding your character, and destroying your credibility in Corinth?!!
A like setting faced the Christians in Alexandria, Egypt three hundred years later. One of the clever and out-spoken elders named Arius claimed to know better than the historic teaching about Jesus. The One on the cross on Good Friday was not really God at all. He was a good man, to be sure, a very honorable man, in fact, given a high task by God. But he was just a man. The divisiveness of this unruly elder who had lost the irreplaceable quality of humility, stopped listening, and began speculating on things no one can comprehend, led to a crisis that reached far beyond the city. And so the emperor had to call a worldwide council to solve the problem.
But thank God at this Council of Nicea they pieced together the Bible’s teaching and claimed again its teaching that the Jesus who died for our sins on the cross was indeed God, indeed man. Here was the capstone of God’s remedy for the problem of human sin. And thus Christians ever since have confessed, “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.”
One of the questions from the Heidelberg Catechism we ask often here during our morning worship is, “What is true faith?” And the answer to that question pinpoints that true faith applies to me, to you, to each of us personally the truth of the gift of salvation. This salvation offers my life now that re-ordering grace that it needs, so that I can live my life exhibiting the kindness, the mercy, the justice, goodness, and truth of God.
I pray that each of us may not only stand looking up at that cross, aghast at the cost of God’s love displayed there, or even that it was our sin that put Jesus there. Rather let us probe with all our hearts to understand the wisdom the Apostle Paul understood when he said, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
O Lord God, how do I speak adequately of the wonder of Your Holy Son Crucified for me? Take and seal to us this great message of love, and grant that its claim on us may not be lost. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at April 24, 2005 09:30 AM