Palm Sunday: A Service of Lessons and Prayers

For this Palm Sunday, we took a different approach. We combined elements of the Liturgy of the Palms about the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, with elements of the Liturgy of the Passion. This enabled us to move from the joyous crowds which greeted Jesus on his entry into Jerusalem, to the vengeful crowd that cried, “Crucify him!”

We took this approach because many in our congregation will not attend a Maundy Thursday or Good Friday service. If they attended a joyful Palm Sunday service, and then a celebratory Easter service, they might miss the events of Good Friday and the drama surrounding the crucifixion. To solve this problem, here’s what we did:

1. For our first reading early in the service, we read the Gospel story of the triumphal entry into Jersusalem, from Matthew 21:1-11.

2. We sang appropriate Palm Sunday hymns of celebration including All Glory, Laud and Honor, and Hosanna.

3. During our children’s time, the children heard the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Then, they distributed palm fronds to each person in our congregation. When everyone had a palm frond, the entire congregation waved their palm branches and said in unison, “Praise God for the Son of David! Bless the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Praise God to highest heaven!” (Matthew 21:9 – NLT). It was a little chaotic, but then the first Palm Sunday probably was a little chaotic, too.

4. Our organist provided a musical transition from the Palm Sunday celebration to the events after Jesus’ Passover meal with the disciples.

5. During the time alloted for the sermon, I read the following scripture lessons from the Liturgy of the Passion. Because the entire narrative moves from scene to scene, I separated each scene with a corporate prayer of confession. After I read each passage, I then invited the congregation to pray with me the prayer of confession. Here’s the sequence:

Palm Sunday Liturgy of the Passion

Reading: Matthew 26:14-30 — The Last Supper

All: Lord, we confess that just like Judas we have come to your table with thoughts of betraying you in our hearts. Like Judas, we have taken the bread from you hand and the cup from your table while harboring doubts about you and your teaching. Forgive us, O Lord, for this spirit of betrayal that presumes we know more about your Kingdom than you. Amen.

Reading: Matthew 26:31-56 — The Garden of Gethsamene

All: Lord, we confess that when you struggled in agony, we slept in apathy. When they came to arrest you, we betrayed your teaching by fighting back, and then abandoned you in your hour of need. When they accused us of being your disciples we denied ever knowing you. And when the cock crowed, we wept over our own failure to be faithful. Forgive us, O Lord, for our apathy, our fear, and our faithlessness. Amen.

Reading: Matthew 27:1-26 — Jesus Before Pilate

All: Lord, we confess that like the crowd gathered before Pilate, we have chosen Barabbas instead of you. Like the crowd that day, when Pilate asked, “What shall I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” — we have answered, “Crucify him!” Forgive us for our failure to choose you and the freedom you offer. Amen.

Reading: Matthew 27:27-66 — The Crucifixion and Burial of Jesus

All: Lord, we confess that we see ourselves in the faces of the Roman soldiers who nailed you to the cross; we hear ourselves taunting you as you hang silently before us; and, we feel the bitterness of one thief and the contrition of the other. May we be counted among those who, in great sorrow, lovingly laid you to rest in the garden tomb, hopefully waiting for God’s salvation. Amen.

I wrote the prayers of confession, so feel free to edit them for your use.

6. After the readings and prayers, our choir sang the anthem, The Hour Has Come, which was a solemn and powerful account of the last days in Jesus’ life.

7. When the anthem ended, the congregation left the sanctuary in silence, with a solemn organ postlude played during their exit. We included this note in the bulletin:

“In the tradition of the Liturgy of the Passion, there will be no benediction after the choral anthem. Please leave the sanctuary in silence as we contemplate the death and burial of Christ, and wait in hope for God’s salvation.”

Many people commented on how powerful and meaningful the service was for them. While it was hard for me to resist preaching on Palm Sunday, the narrative of the events of the last week in the life of Christ needs no explanation.

However you choose to celebrate and commemorate the events of Palm Sunday through Good Friday, give careful attention to including them all, including the betrayals, the trials, the mocking, and the crucifixion. The glory of the resurrection shines brightest when celebrated against the backdrop of evil, suffering, and death.

Palm Sunday Podcast: Sharing in the Suffering of Jesus

In Mark 15:1-39 we read the story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. The descriptions of the suffering of Jesus remind us that we should not trivialize the sacrifice of Christ. The apostle Paul reminds Christians that we share in the suffering of Christ. This passage provides us the background for both understanding and living a life of sharing Christ’s suffering by sharing the suffering of others. Here’s the link — http://traffic.libsyn.com/chuckwarnock/02_Sharing_In_The_Suffering_of_Jesus.mp3

Sermon: To Save The World

To Save The World

^“13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. ¹⁴ Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, ¹⁵ that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

¹⁶ “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”  – John 3:13-17 NIV’84

Public Prayer In The Name of Jesus

These are interesting times in our community.  Unless you have been away on a long vacation, you are no doubt aware that the American Civil Liberties Union has sent a letter to our county Board of Supervisors threatening them with legal action because they have in the past opened their monthly meeting with prayer, a prayer that has been offered to God in the name of Jesus Christ.

According to the ACLU, that makes it a Christian prayer, and therefore it is a sectarian prayer that violates the First Amendment of the United States Constitution which reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 The part we are interested in here in Pittsylvania County right now is, of course, the first 16 words –

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

I discovered while doing research for this sermon that although the First Amendment was thought only to apply to the federal government initially, a series of rulings particularly in the 20^th century, applied the First Amendment prohibition against state-sponsored religion to all governmental entities, which would include the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors.

So, what should we make of all this?  Do we agree with many that our personal freedoms, including freedom of religion and speech, are being violated by the threats of the ACLU?   Do we believe that the ACLU is in one letter writer’s opinion “The Anti-Christian Litigation Union?”  While that might have been a clever appropriation of the ACLU initials, it doesn’t seem to do much to clear up the issue.

Baptists And Religious Liberty

You also might be surprised to learn that Baptists historically have fought like, well…Baptists…over the issue of state-sponsored religion.  We experienced that right here in Virginia, when Baptists were outlawed and Baptist preachers like John Leland (1754-1841) were persecuted for their faith.

John Leland is a Baptist hero for his work in persuading Thomas Jefferson and others of the need for a Bill of Rights that would guarantee the freedoms on which the young republic had been founded. One rather amusing story about John Leland is that he was given the responsibility for delivering a mammoth round of cheese to President Thomas Jefferson. Apparently the people of Cheshire, Massachusetts drew milk from every cow in town to craft the 1600 pound cheese that was their gift to Thomas Jefferson.

Why did they send President Jefferson this huge chunk of cheese?  Because they were afraid that recently-elected Jefferson, being part of what they called the “French Revolutionary School,” would destroy all their churches, and forbid religious practice.

Reverend John Leland disagreed with this fearful line of thinking, and so after some deliberation, John Leland was given charge of the mammoth cheese, which he delivered to President Jefferson as a kind of goodwill gesture.  Upon Leland’s arrival, and I assume the safe transfer of the cheese, Leland was invited to preach to the President and to Congress. Leland said of the three week trip to Washington, DC, that he preached there and back.  Typical preacher not to miss any opportunity to preach.

Oh, and just so Jefferson got the message of the cheese, the town’s people had engraved on the top of the round of cheese, “Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.”

Leland would be among the Baptists who would influence the addition of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment which guaranteed freedom of religion.

But, even in the colonial period of the history of the United States of America, there were those who argued that America should be constituted as a Christian nation.  Listen to what John Leland said in reply –

“The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever…Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence, whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.” – John Leland, A Chronicle of His Time in Virginia. (courtesy of Wikipedia).

This issue of religious liberty is as old as our own constitution, and older than our nation’s history.  We as Baptists sprang from the Radical Reformation in the mid-1500s.  Objecting that the reforms of men like Martin Luther and John Calvin did not go far enough, our Baptists forebears believed that Christian baptism was reserved for those who had made their own confession of faith.  Therefore, infants should not be baptized because they had not yet reached an age where they could of their own free will make the decision to follow Christ.

Baptists also insisted that anyone could read and interpret Scripture, and that the Holy Spirit would guide each follower of Jesus Christ.  These and other views espoused by this radical group were unacceptable to Luther, Calvin, and the other leaders of the Reformation.

“If it’s baptism they want, then they shall have it” said their persecutors.  And so these early proto-Baptists were often sentenced to death by drowning for their unorthodox views.  For you see, in the days following the Reformation, lines of loyalty developed into political fiefdoms.  If the prince of your area was a Lutheran, then all within his jurisdiction were Lutherans.  Conversely, if your prince or king remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, all of his subjects remained Roman Catholics.

Of course, this does not mean that all were practicing Christians.  And, even within each province or country, there were those who dissented, who sought to follow their own conscience.  But for the most part, citizens went along to get along, because death was frequently the punishment for not complying with your state’s religious stance.

These Anabaptists (re-baptizers) eventually fled from England to the Netherlands in search of religious liberty, and finally found a home they hoped would be free from persecution in the United States of America.

But, even in the fledgling United States, old patterns of religious practice had begun to prevail.  Baptists in Virginia were forbidden from preaching, their marriages were not recognized, and many were accused of child abuse because they refused to have their new babies baptized.  As Baptists in Virginia grew in number, the established civil and religious order tried to stamp out this rag-tag religious band.  Bruce Gorley reports that Baptist preachers endured the following, just because they were Baptists.  They were…

“pelted with apples and stone”
“ducked and nearly drowned by 20 men”
” jailed for permitting a man to pray”
“meeting broken up by a mob”
“arrested as a vagabond and schismatic”
“pulled down and hauled about by hair”
“tried to suffocate him with smoke”
“tried to blow him up with gun powder”
“drunken rowdies put in same cell with him”
“horses ridden over his hearers at jail”
“dragged off stage, kicked, and cuffed about”
“shot with a shot-gun”
” ruffians armed with bludgeons beat him”
“severely beaten with a whip”
“whipped severely by the Sheriff”
“hands slashed while preaching” (This happened to Samuel Harris right here in Pittsylvania County).

— Lewis Peyton Little, Imprisoned Preachers and Religious Liberty in Virginia:

But preachers like Samuel Harris also used humor to answer their opponents.  Once when Harris was preaching to a crowd outdoors, part of the group suddenly pulled back and started making a commotion.  Obviously, this distraction had been planned, just like some of the others I read to you earlier.  Samuel Harris was not deterred, however.  He paused for a moment, looked at the group of rowdies, and then addressed the crowd in his booming voice.  “Never mind those disorderly people,” he said, “there are enough going to heaven without them.”  Observers later reported that the disorder stopped immediately!

Here in Virgina, the Episcopal Church was the official state church until it was disestablished in 1776, but it wasn’t until 1786 that Thomas Jefferson’s idea of religious liberty was adopted by the commonwealth of Virginia.  And, it wasn’t until 1791 that the Bill of Rights was ratified, based largely upon the work that John Leland, other Baptists and Presbyterians, and Thomas Jefferson had done.  (courtesy of The Baptist Index)

Of course, that is too brief a description to do the whole thing justice, but you get the idea – Baptists have always been proponents of religious liberty because they wanted freedom of conscience for themselves and others.

Down through the years, Baptists have fought not only for their own rights, but for the rights of others to follow the dictates of their own conscience when it comes to matters of faith and practice.  And, Baptists have always been suspicious of any government involvement in prescribing religious activity, including prayer.

The Board of Supervisors last week made it clear that prayer prior to their meetings was not part of their official government function.  The county attorney, in conference with the Board of Supervisors, crafted a resolution on prayer that removed the opening prayer from the official agenda.  Of course, the ACLU this week said that was not sufficient, so we will see how this all turns out in the days ahead.

Lifting Up The Snake in the Desert

So, how do we as Christians navigate the difficult terrain of conflicting civic opinions, and yet remain true to our faith.  We do it by lifting up Jesus, which is why we are looking at this passage of Scripture today.

I do not think there is a more relevant passage for us to think about, commit to our hearts and minds, and meditate on during these days here in our own community.

In this passage, Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council, according to John.  Nicodemus recognizes that “Jesus is a teacher who has come from God.”  No one could do the things you do, Nicodemus says, unless that were true.

But Nicodemus is just like we are – he is locked into his own system of belief, and he cannot understand who Jesus is, or exactly what Jesus is doing.  Still, he is strangely drawn to Jesus, even though he came in the dark of night to see Jesus, probably so others would not see him.

Jesus tells Nicodemus that one must be born again, or born from above, to see the Kingdom of God.  Nicodemus is puzzled by that, and asks how he as a grown man can enter his mother’s womb and be born.  Jesus explains that this “new birth” is a spiritual birth, a birth of the Spirit of God.

Nicodemus is still confused, and so Jesus refers to a story from the book of Numbers, a story that Nicodemus will know.  It is the story we read early this morning, the story of disobedience, death, and deliverance.

In Numbers 21, the people on their way to the Promised Land, grew impatient.  They spoke against God and against Moses.  The NIV translates it this way –

“Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert?  There is no bread!  There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”

God’s rebuke was swift, and deadly.  Numbers says that God sent poisonous snakes among the people.  Apparently, there were lots of snakes, who bit lots of people, and tragically some of the people died.

Quickly, the nation realizes what it has done.  They come to Moses and say, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you.  Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.”  The Bible says Moses prayed.

In answer to Moses’s prayer, God gave them a remedy for their snake bites.

“Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.”  So Moses made the snake of bronze, and lifted it up.  When anyone was bitten by a snake, if he looked at the bronze snake, he would live.

Lifting Up Jesus

That’s the story Jesus told Nicodemus, and then he said, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

Of course, we understand Jesus to mean that he will be lifted up on the cross.  Whether Nicodemus understands this or not, we aren’t told.  But then Jesus explains why this must happen, why he must be lifted up just like the bronze snake was.

¹⁶ “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

“For God so loved the world…”  When Jesus says “world” here, he is not referring to the world order that is opposed to God, which is how the New Testament sometimes uses the word “world.”  Here Jesus means creation, that which God set in motion in the opening verses of the book of Genesis, and after everyday’s creative act stops and says, “That’s good.”

God loves his creation, including the apex of his creation, humankind.  Men and women, boys and girls, people of all races, people from all time – God loves what God has made.

And because God loves this world, and everything He made in it, He sent Jesus God’s only son.  Whoever, Jesus says, commits himself or herself to Jesus, God’s son, trusts and believes in him, shall not perish like the world is perishing, but will have life eternal.

Then Jesus says something that we often do not quote, after we have quoted John 3:16.  “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

In other words, God’s purpose isn’t to pronounce judgment, and kill everybody, and destroy His handiwork in the process.  God’s purpose is to save the world.  To draw it back from its own self-destructive behavior, to pull it from the brink of self-annihilation, to save that which He has created.

Jesus is God’s antidote to the poison of our sin.  Jesus is God’s answer to our questions, the relief for our sadness, the purpose of our lives.

I often wondered why God didn’t tell Moses to make a bronze angel, or bronze bird, or anything but a bronze snake.  And then one day it hit me, in what I hope was a moment of spiritual insight.

God instructed Moses to make a bronze snake and lift it up, because the thing that kills you is the thing that saves you.

Let me explain:  I am sure no one in the camp wanted to be reminded of snakes.  But the snakes were God’s punishment for their sin.  When they looked at the snake that Moses had lifted up, they were reminded that God could take the instrument of their punishment, and turn it into the remedy for their disease.  God could take judgment and infuse it with life.  God could take that which had killed them, and make it the only way to redemption.

When Jesus was lifted up on the cross, God showed us a man, a man who in all of his humanity was tempted, was accused, was attacked, was beaten, was ridiculed, was tortured, and finally was crucified.

Looking at Jesus we see our own handiwork.  We see our own disobedience that inflicted the pain of the scourge in Jesus’ back.  We see our own selfishness and hatred and fear that lived in the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, and lives in us today.  We see all of our own sins, our own barbarism displayed in the bruised and scarred body of Jesus.

And when we look at Jesus on the cross, we are reminded that someone must save us from ourselves.  We are reminded that if we would kill the Son of God, there is no crime that we would not commit, no deed too dark for the human soul, no act too horrific for us to participate in.

When Jesus is lifted up, we must first see our own failure, our own sin, our own helplessness, just as the nation of Israel did in the desperation of the desert.  For unless we do, it will not help us to lift up Jesus in public or private prayer.  Unless we look at the result of our own sin, the marred visage of Christ, just as the Israelites had to look at the bronze snake, we will miss what God is trying to tell us.

But we also see in the lifted up Jesus the possibility for which God has created us.  We see the capacity for self-giving love that Jesus demonstrated.  We see the sacrifice he made so that others might also live.  We see the best that Jesus calls us to in living out the values and commitments to the Kingdom of God.

Jesus does not need anyone to defend him, for he did not even defend himself.  What Jesus seeks is the same thing he offered to Nicodemus. Jesus seeks those who will look at him on the cross, and will see themselves reflected in him.

And it is those who look and live who will go out to lift up Christ so that others may see themselves reflected in him, too; so that others may measure their lives by his and realize that there is no life without Jesus Christ.

Jesus said, “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me.”  Let’s lift up Jesus as the hope of all humanity.  Let’s lift up Jesus as the answer to all of the world’s terrible predicaments.  Let’s lift up Jesus as the model for a selfless life, lived to serve others, lived to save the world.

Crucifixion: Everything you wanted to know and more

If you think you know everything you need to about crucifixion and the cross, think again.  I’m preaching a 13-week series on The Apostles’ Creed, and this past Sunday we arrived at the phrase about Jesus —

“suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried…”

So, of course, my sermon was on the crucifixion, and I used the text of I Corinthians 2:1-2, where Paul says when he arrived in Corinth he was determined to “know nothing… except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”  Which is a very strange statement when you really think about it, which I did.

Thinking about the crucifxion and the cross led me to Martin Hengel’s small book titled, Crucifixion In the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross. Which is an incredibly long title for such a short book of 90 pages.  But Hengel, who died this year, packs more than you’d ever want to know about crucifixion and its significance into this brief work.  Hengel was Emeritus Professor of New Testament and Early Judaism at the University of Tübingen, and specialized in second-temple Judaism.

He traces the use of crucifixion from its invention by the Persians to its adoption by the Romans, who continued to describe it as barbaric.  Roman literature considered the mention of this form of execution as too coarse for public sensibilities, and little was preserved in the more refined works of Graeco-Roman authors.

When crucifixion is mentioned in ancient references, the descriptions are more horrific than even the depiction in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ, which was rated R because of the brutally violent acts shown.  Did you know, for instance, that….

• Dead people, as well as the living, could be crucified?
• Crucifixion was one of three forms of capital punishment preferred by the Roman empire.  The other two were burning and being torn apart by wild animals.  Sometimes crucifixion was combined with one or both of the other methods.
• The largest number of crucifixions known at one time was over 500.
• Bodies were often left on the crosses to decompose and be consumed by wild animals and vultures.
• Jews were “scandalized” by the cross and crucifixions because of Deuteronomy 21 — anyone hanged on a tree was cursed by God.
• However, some in Judea liked the Roman system of justice because common robbers were crucified, and roving bands of robbers were a problem for rural Judeans.
• Early Christians were ridiculed for following a common criminal who had met his death by being stripped naked and hung on a cross.
• To wish someone a “cross” was to insult and curse them.
• Crucifixion was reserved for common criminals, and slaves who had attempted escape.  The execution of slaves takes on new meaning when you read Philippians 2:5-11, where Jesus is said to have taken on the form of a “servant” which usually mean a slave.

Okay, enough of that or I’ll have all 90 pages summarized right here.  But the most enlightening chapter, which is also the last, was Hengel’s explanation of the Jews inability to believe Jesus was the Messiah.  Add this book to your reference library.  Disclaimer: You can get yours the way I got mine — buy it for yourself.

Sermon: I Believe in Jesus Christ and Him Crucified

Why We Need The Apostles’ Creed:
I Believe In Jesus Christ and Him Crucified
I Corinthians 2:1-2

¹When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. ²For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

The Cross in Today’s World

We have come today to the third statement out of six about Jesus in the Apostles’ Creed.  Here’s what we have affirmed so far:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Maker of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary,

And today we sum up our belief in the passion of the Christ — his suffering, crucifxion, death, burial, and descent into hell during the three days his body was in the grave.  We believe in Jesus Christ, who…

suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;

He descended into hell.

You may remember Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of The Christ, which hit movie theaters in 2004.  Because of the controversial nature of the film, Gibson distributed it himself, turning a $30-million investment into the highest grossing English language film ever, and the most profitable R-rated film in the United States.  The movie was rated R for its horrific and graphic violence, done mostly to the character of Jesus himself.

But despite the film’s success in America, Christians in the United States have a very different view of the cross of Jesus Christ.  We wear delicate crosses made of precious gold and silver around our necks, and dangling from our ears.  Hip hop artists wear gigantic caricatures of the cross dangling from outlandish chains, and pop artists like Madonna use the cross as a background prop in their music videos.

The cross itself has become the international symbol of the Christian religion, and of the humanitarian organization, The Red Cross.  It is an iconic symbol, but for much of the Christian community, the cross is strangely absent in our worship, devotion, or Bible study.  Seeker-sensitive churches intentionally leave all the signs and symbols of Christianity, which might be confusing to non-Christians, out of their buildings, including the cross.

As those who came from the Radical Reformer stream of the Protestant Reformation, we Baptists were offended by the crucifixes of our Roman Catholic friends, which graphically depict the Christ in agony on the cross.  Our theological position is that Christ is no longer on the cross, but is risen; therefore, Jesus should not be depicted as the suffering Christ, but as the risen Christ.

So opposed were the radical reformers to the crucifix, and the statuary and iconography of Roman and Orthodox churches, that they banned all images and statues of religious figures, including Jesus, as a form of idol worship.  Church buildings were constructed simply, and called meeting houses, to avoid the confusion with the Catholic church buildings from which they were separating themselves.

Rather than a high altar with a crucifix above it, the pulpit took center stage in the meeting houses of these radical reformers. Catholic churches were constructed with a center aisle so that worshippers entering the sanctuary could have an unobstructed view of the altar and the crucified Christ hanging above or behind it.  Baptist meeting houses were intentionally constructed without a center aisle, in contrast to the Roman Catholic church buildings.  Even in our architecture, our theology finds physical expression in the ways we configure and appoint our spaces for worship.

What About The Cross in the New Testament Church?

Paul explains his time with the fledgling church at Corinth in this way —

¹When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. ²For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Why did Paul make a statement like this — “…to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Why not Jesus Christ and his miracles?  Surely Paul would want to tell these non-Jewish believers about the miracles of Christ.

Why not Jesus Christ and his ethical teaching?  In the brutal world of the Roman empire, where power dominated, and military power held an iron grip on the civilized world, why not tell the Corinthians about turning the other cheek, going the second mile, and loving your neighbor as yourself?

Why not Jesus Christ and him risen?  The resurrection is the hinge-pin of the story of Jesus, for if we leave Jesus on the cross or in the tomb, his story becomes the sad story of another failed revolutionary, a Don Quixote figure tilting at the windmills of the Roman empire’s strength.

But Paul says, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

Leon Morris, in his massive volume titled, The Cross in the New Testament, begins his introduction with these words:

“This is principally a book about the cross, since in the New Testament salvation centres [sic] on the cross.”  He goes on to say, “The atonement is the crucial doctrine of the faith.  Unless we are right here it matters little, or so it seems to me, what we are like elsewhere.”

The gospel writers are not in agreement on all the details of the life of Christ.  Matthew and Luke are the only gospels that describe the conception and birth of Jesus.  So, even the event in the Apostles’ Creed that we examined last week — “conceived of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary” — is not included in two out of four of the Gospel accounts.

The gospel writers include different miracles, different parables, and different events in the life of Jesus.  Even those dramatic times of healing, feeding the five thousand, raising the dead, and walking on water are not included in all four of the Gospel accounts.

But when it comes to the cross, each of the Gospels includes the story of the cross and the crucifxion of Jesus.

Why did the apostles consider the cross central to the story of Jesus, and why are we so ambivalent about the cross today?

The History of the Cross

Why is it then, that in our 21st century sophistication, we’re so uncomfortable with the cross?  I grew up singing hymns like The Old Rugged Cross, At the Cross, Lead Me To Calvary, Power in the Blood, Nothing But The Blood of Jesus, and Are You Washed in the Blood, and other old-time hymns which reminded the singers of the cross, and the shed blood of Christ. But, today’s praise songs seldom refer to the cross or its result, the bruised body and shed blood of Jesus.  We sing about he awesome God, the glory of God, the wonder of God, the friendship of Jesus, and the majesty of heaven — anything but the cross and the blood.  The history and setting of the punishment known as crucifixion will help us understand some of the difficulty we have with it.

Paul introduced the centrality of the cross in the first chapter of I Corinthians with these words —

²²Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.  — I Cor 22-25 NIV

Corinth was an outpost of the Roman empire.  It was an immoral, corrupt city even by the standards of the first century.  The reputation of Corinth was so bad, that to be called a “Corinthian” was to be insulted and slandered.  Corinth was home to the temple of Aphrodite, where over 1,000 temple prostitutes performed the rituals of the temple.  It was a wild and wooly town, but Paul visits there, Aquila and Priscilla, and plants a church.

Upon Paul’s departure, the Corinthians quickly stray both theologically and morally.  We know more about worship in the Corinthian church than any other church in the New Testament because the Corinthians were doing just about everything wrong in worship that they could do.  They were trying to out-do one another in the practice of their spiritual gifts — speaking in tongues, interrupting each other with prophecies, shouting out words of supernatural knowledge, and letting worship degenerate into a frenzy of one-upmanship.  Even when taking the Lord’s Supper, the Corinthians turned communion into a drunken, gluttonous affair.  The well-to-do brought their own food, which they refused to share with those who had none.  In short, they were a train wreck of a church.

Paul’s letter calls them back to the center, and he reminds them that when he came to Corinth, he preached the cross of Christ.  That was his central message.

If they were such an immoral people, why not the ethical teaching of Jesus?  The Corinthians knew the great philosophers.  They knew the arguments for a kind of detached morality, even in the midst of their immorality.  They lived in the shadow of one of the great temples of the civilized world, the temple to Aphrodite.  A simple appeal to “live better” would have been totally lost on them.

But, if they wouldn’t listen to the call to live life according to God’s instruction found in the Ten Commandments and in the teaching of Jesus, what about the miracles of Jesus?  Surely, they would be impressed with those?  But Roman culture had its own mystical experiences.  The oracles, mystical figures who seemed to speak the words of the gods themselves, were located throughout the Roman world.  The most famous was the oracle at Delphi, but others existed as well.  Demon-possession, magic, the dark arts, and other forms of the supernatural were as common in the first century as they are in our world today.  Just as Pharaoh’s sorcerers and wisemen counterfeited the miraculous staff of Aaron with their own, the magicians and pagan practicioners of the first century also practiced the equivalent of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Ecstatic speech, foretelling the future, speaking as the voice of a god, healing, and other dark practices were well-known in the ancient world.

But the cross of Christ was the center for the Corinthian church, and for the Christian faith Paul knew.  Why?  And why did Paul refer to the cross as foolishness, and in another passage as a stumbling block or scandal to the Jews?

From the Roman perspective, crucifixion as capital punishment was borrowed from the Persians and others.  Crucifixion was reserved for criminals, rebels, slaves and the lower-class.  Seldom were Roman citizens or the upperclass foreigners executed by crucifxion.  Slaves and robbers particularly were crucified as a deterrent to those who might either try to escape their masters, or steal from others.

Crucifixion was gruesome business.  It was one of three methods of capital punishment used in the empire.  Crucifixion, being torn to death by wild beasts, and burning were the three methods of capital punishments.  Being torn by wild beasts required a public festival and an arena, so that was more difficult and involved.   But anyone could be crucified at anytime, and in a variety of methods.

Sometimes the stake was a single straight piece of wood.  At other times, cross pieces were used either in the form of a “T” with the crosspiece on top, or in the form most familiar to us — two pieces of wood that intersected with space above the victim’s head for some type of placard identifying his or her crime.  Limbs were either lashed to the cross, or fastened with nails.  Flogging and torture most often preceded the actual crucifxion, and the condemned was required to carry his cross, if able, to the public place of execution.

Public humiliation was as much as part of the punishment as was the victim’s actual death.  Stripped totally naked, the nude body was beaten, nailed to the cross, and lifted up for all to see as they passed by.  Jeers and taunts would greet those who had been robbers particularly, because the rural Judeans were often victimized by roving bands of robbers and criminals.

Bodies were often left on crosses to decompose, or be picked apart by wild animals and birds of prey.  The denial of burial was a further humiliation, particularly to the Jews.

As if all of that were not enough, the Jews had a special aversion to crucifxion and wooden crosses because of Deuteronomy 21 —

²² If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, ²³ you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him that same day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not desecrate the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance.

The Jews had a special aversion to crucifixion and crosses because they equated it with the Old Testament curse of being hung on a tree.  So, the offense of the cross, the scandal of the cross, the revulsion of the cross is that the Jews could not imagine that the Messiah of God, the Anointed One, would ever be hung on a tree. How could he, for anyone hung on a tree was cursed by God.  It becomes impossible for Jews to reconcile Jesus’ manner of death with his claim to Messiahship.

What of the Cross For Us Today?

But we are just as scandalized by the cross, just as offended by the gore, the brutality, the blood, and the stench.  Just as offended by the nakedness of Jesus, the taunts of the bystanders, the ridicule of the placard over Jesus head saying, “This is the King of the Jews.”  Like passing a bad car wreck on the highway, we don’t like the cross, and we turn our eyes from it as quickly as we can, and move on to other more pleasant aspects of our faith.

I have done that myself because the cross and Jesus’ death on it seems so barbaric, so crude, so primitive, and so messy.  My sensibilities are offended, and my sophistication and education rail against this as the central story of Jesus.  I like the Sermon on the Mount, or the feeding of the 5,000, or the raising of Lazarus, or even the resurrection of Christ himself as the central story of our faith.  But, none of those are, nor can they be.

We do not follow just an ethical teacher who gave us startling instructions on how we are to treat our neighbors.  We do not follow a mystic who could somehow gather the forces of the unseen world to make blind eyes sees, lame legs walk, and diseased bodies whole.  We do not follow a rebel, or an insurrectonist, as some would have us believe, who only sought to overthrow the unjust systems of society.

No, we follow the crucified Son of God.  And, Jesus himself was well-aware of the horror, the humiliation, and the inhumanity of the cross.  And yet, all the gospel writers tell us that at the end of his ministry, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, not for the praise of Palm Sunday, but for his death on the cross.

Mythology is full of stories of gods who were punished. Prometheus was nailed between two rocks in the ancient fable of the anger of Zeus. But Prometheus was freed and resumed his place in the pantheon of Roman gods.  Even in the popular literature of the day, the equivalent of our pulp novels, the hero of the story could be threatened with crucifixion, but just in the nick of time always escaped it.

But in Jesus, we have God who dies.  Jurgen Moltmann calls him “the crucifed God” — a story unlike any that has ever been told in literature or fable.  Gods don’t die, and certainly are not killed by mere mortals.  But in Jesus, God dies.  God provides a sacrifice for Himself of his only Son, who is himself God.  It is an event so radical, so impossible, so unlikely that those who think they know the One, True God best, cannot get past it.

In the cross, Jesus identifies with the slaves caught seeking freedom.  At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus takes the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue of his own hometown, Nazareth.  He unrolls the scroll and reads from Isaiah 61 —

¹ The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners

Freedom for the captives, the slaves, can only be bought with a price.  Release from darkness for the prisoners can only come from the one who holds the keys.  By the way, and we don’t have time to dig deeply into this, the phrase in the Apostles’ Creed —

He descended into hell

is meant to reflect Jesus preaching to the “spirits in prison.”  Peter writes in 1 Peter 3:18 — “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, ¹⁹through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison ²⁰who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.”

Scholars disagree on exactly what that verse means, but I believe it means Jesus did what he said he would do, what he proclaimed his mission to be — to release from darkness those imprisoned, even if they’re imprisoned in world of the dead.  That is what Jesus meant when he said “the gates of hell” will not prevail, will not stand, against the onslaught of the Kingdom of God.

Paul, in my favorite passage about Jesus says —

⁵Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
⁶Who, being in very nature^[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
⁷but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature^[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
⁸And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

It’s all there in these seven verses —

• Jesus willingly choosing to set aside all that is rightfully his;
• Jesus taking the nature of a servant, a slave;
• Jesus making himself nothing, becoming a human being;
• Jesus humbling himself in obedience to God:
• Jesus obedience even extends to his death on a cross — the worst, most heinous death one could die;
• But Jesus being exalted to the highest place;
• And Jesus being given a name above all names;
• That at the name of Jesus every knee bows — every angel knee in heaven, every human knee on earth, every demonic knee in hell — every knee bows regardless of location or previous allegiance;
• And every tongue belonging to the hosts of heaven, the citizens of earth, and the condemned to hell, confesses that Jesus The Messiah is Lord;
• And God the Father is glorified.

Mel Gibson, who was both producer and director of The Passion of the Christ, used his own hands in the camera close-up of the Roman centurion nailing Jesus to the cross.  Gibson did that he said, because, “It was me that put Him on the cross. It was my sins [that put Jesus there].” — Wikipedia

But that’s not right.  Our sins did not put Jesus on the cross.  He put himself there.  He walked straight to Jerusalem knowing the death that awaited him.  He put himself on the cross to die for us, for the world, and for God’s creation.  He put himself on the cross to say to the slaves both living and dead, “I know your suffering, I endured your pain, I took your place.”

He put himself on the cross to suffer for us, to share our sorrow, our despair, our misfortune.  He put himself on the cross as though he were the people of God, the Temple and the sacrifice — as though he were the last hope of a sacrificial system that no longer worked.

He put himself on the cross as the Lamb led to the slaughter, as the scapegoat, as the fulfillment and final chapter in the broken religious imagination of God’s people.

Jesus put himself on the cross so that we would not be hung there.  He put himself on the cross so that we would not be abandoned by God as he was.  He put himself on the cross as example and embodiment of God’s love.

No, we did not put Jesus on the cross, and neither did the Jews or the Romans.  Jesus put himself there, suffered unspeakable torture, endured the ridicule of Romans and Jews alike, humiliated between two thieves.  His last act of redemption was to save a condemned thief, and ask his Father to forgive those who did not know what they were doing.

We need the cross.  Without it we are doomed.  Without it the incarnation is meaningless.  Without the cross we do not see the love of God, the suffering of God, and the sacrifice of God.  All for us.  All because of our sin.  All because we couldn’t do it for ourselves.  For even our death would not have brought us into fellowship with God, nor paid the penalty for our sin.

We need the cross, the scandal of our intellect, the offense to our sensibilities, the foolishness of preaching.  We need the cross because it stands at the center of Jesus’ story.  If all we know of theology and the Bible is that Jesus died for us on an old rugged cross, then we know enough.

Paul said, “I resolved to know nothing…except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

When a right-wing death squad broke into the living quarters of Jesuit priests in San Salvador in 1989, they killed six priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter.  Father Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the university, was one of the priests killed.  The killers then drug the bodies of their murdered victims back into the house.  As they did so, they bumped into a bookcase, knocking a book to the floor.

When their bodies were found the next morning, lying in a pool of innocent blood was the fallen book — Jurgen Moltmann’s book titled The Crucified God.  Thousands around the world wept for those slain.  And I am sure God must have wept that day, too, for He knew the suffering and death of the cross.

Good Friday

Antonio Busca (1625-1684), Crucifixion (detail). Painting in the ceiling of the Pietà chapel, in the left hand transept of Saint Mark church in Milan (Italy). Picture by Giovanni Dall’Orto, April 14 2007.

A Place In The Garden

A Place In The Garden

Luke 23:33-43 NIV

³³ When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. ³⁴ Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”^[a] And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

³⁵ The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One.”

³⁶ The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar ³⁷ and said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”

³⁸ There was a written notice above him, which read:  THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.

³⁹ One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!”

⁴⁰ But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? ⁴¹ We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

⁴² Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.^[b]“

⁴³ Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Christ The King Sunday, The Last Sunday of The Christian Year

“How did we get here?” you might ask. How, on this Sunday after Thanksgiving, do we find ourselves at the crucifixion of Christ? This is Christ The King Sunday, the last Sunday of the Christian Year. Next week, is the first Sunday of Advent, when we begin to look all over again for the coming of the Christ. But today, the story of God ends for this year. “But,” you say, “why does it end so grimly? What happened to the resurrection and the hope and joy of Easter?”