304 S. Elam Ave.
Greensboro, NC

Phone: 336.272.2196
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© 2007 First Moravian Church
Greensboro, NC

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April 14, 2006 Good Friday

You are the heart and soul of the church, the people who know that the only place to be this evening is with other Christians, worshipping, watching and waiting at the foot of the cross.

When it's become fashionable to believe that the Christian religion is just one religion among many great religions, all teaching roughly the same thing, Today is the day we most emphatically disagree. No!

We Christians say. Our understanding of who God is and what God has done for us is radically unique among world religions.

The central claim to what we profess as right and true is that we tortured God to death in disgrace, shame and humiliation-- all with the seal of approval from the most advanced government and the best and most compassionate religion of the time. Public crucifixion was as cruel and as inhuman as possible to serve as a deterrent and warning to others. In crucifixions the worst was not only permitted, it was encouraged. Torture, public humiliation, taunts and insults hurled by a mob. A person being crucified was not even allowed the dignity of a human executioner. He was forced to be his own executioner as his body slowly suffocated him. It is hard to over emphasize the extreme brutality of Jesus' death or the fact he was executed by the best government and most compassionate religion in his world. This sort of collusion between government and religion shows our human depravity and ability to deceive ourselves even under the best of circumstances.

This undisputed historical fact of a crucified Messiah, who we proclaim to be God, is a scandalous event running counter to everything that human religious and spiritual imagination has ever produced about who God is and what God does. This is why Paul calls the cross a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks (1 Cor. 1:23 ). The crucifixion is a mind boggling image, offensive to religious and secular people alike. Just ask Mel Gibson why he released a less bloody version of his movie The Passion of the Christ!

The obvious answer to why Jesus died is he threatened the Roman state and the Jewish religious authorities. “The rulers of this age crucified the king of glory,” Paul tells us in 1 Cor 2:8. In this respect Jesus is not unlike thousands of martyrs executed by the ruling powers throughout human history. But why did God incarnate set his face like flint and go to this humiliating and horrific death?

Over and over again all the New Testament writers in one way or another tell us Jesus' death was for sin. Paul writes: “God made him to be sin who knew no sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor. 5:21) The first epistle of Peter says much the same thing: “Jesus himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live in righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” (1 peter 2:24). In John's Gospel, John the Baptist sees Jesus for he first time, and says, “behold, The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” ( 1:29 ) This phrase Lamb of God is found only in John's gospel, but it has echoes in Paul's statement to the Corinthian church: “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” (1Cor.5:7). Through his passion, Jesus takes on the sin of the world becoming our atoning sacrifice.

In taking on the sin of the world, Christ's death for sin is consistent with his life. Consistent in being a deeper, a fuller identification with the sinful. Jesus' ministry began by being baptized with sinners--those who needed to be washed from sin. Throughout his ministry he associated with sinners, those who needed a physician to heal them. Now he dies along side criminals, as if he were a criminal. By taking on sin, Jesus identifies in solidarity with each of us who also suffer from the consequence of sin. He joins us in the thick of sin—not by committing sin, but by being affected by sin's consequences.

From start to finish, Jesus' life and death is a lengthy associating with, and now putting on, the sin that engulfs humanity.

Fleming Rutledge observes: In his passion Jesus' exchanges his perfect health for our sickness unto death. His sinlessness is exchanged for our sinfulness. His righteousness for our unrighteousness.

Such an exchange is extremely countercultural. Self help and self betterment are major virtues in our world. Our American creed is “God helps those who help themselves.” This belief is eerily echoed in the taunts flung at Jesus hanging on the cross:

Matthew 27:39-42

39 Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads 40 and saying, ‘You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.' 41 In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking Jesus saying, 42 ‘He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him

It is easy for us, far removed from the scene, to distance ourselves from these hateful jeers. Yet they are familiar to us.

Our culture also teaches us that we reap what we sow, that people should be rewarded or punished for their actions and get what they deserve.

In the Matthew's account of the passion the high priest says to the people: “you have heard his blasphemy. What is your judgment? And the people shout, “He is deserving of death” (26:65-66).

This is what we say when the death penalty is handed down. We say he got what he deserved. But what does the cross say? The cross says the one person who did not deserve to die in fact died for sin. Death is what we rightfully deserve for our rebelliousness against God's good purposes for human life, for the wages of sin is death. Sinners deserve death, not Jesus, God Incarnate.

If the 20 th century and Abu Graib have taught us anything, it teaches us that we human beings are still capable of unspeakable atrocity, of unspeakable sin on a mind boggling scale in the midst of a very enlightened and advanced civilization. We are profoundly and irrevocably unable to cure ourselves of evil and sin. That is why the good news that God entered human history to save us from sin must remain the heart of our Christian faith. Jesus came and entered into our human condition, in the words of Fleming Rutledge, “to substitute his capacity for our incapacity, his righteousness for our unrighteousness, his deserving for our undeserving.”

We cannot take away our own sin because we are slaves to it, as Jesus teaches in chapter 8 of John's gospel: “Verily, verily I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. . .so if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” ( 8:34 -36) Free from the bondage of sin.

We like to say of those being punished, “he got what he deserved.”

The cross says the opposite. The cross tells us Christ laid down his life for his friends, for us. The cross says God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Not for the godly, the righteous, the religious, the moral. Jesus dies for the ungodly, the unrighteous, the irreligious and the immoral. Theologian William Placher proposes that since Christ occupies the place of sin, the good news is there in no place for sinners to go where they will be apart from God. The condemnation of sinners is no longer possible without condemning Christ who takes their place.

This is a night to rejoice, because we can look at ourselves tonight with our savior's eyes. Jesus knows that we cannot help ourselves. Jesus looks at us in the same way he looked at every human being he encountered during his earthly life: with infinite sadness for our predicament, yet with unquenchable unconditional love and with an unflinching resolve to rescue us from condemnation and death, whatever it took, wherever it led, whatever the prices.

The pain that God endures on the cross, and as a parent watching his child slowly die in agony, is the price love pays for taking sin seriously but refusing to stop loving. When we truly understand this, when it sinks into our hearts, we will never want to see another human being get exactly what he or she deserves. We will want every person to receive mercy as you and I have received mercy. We will want to help every person who cannot help themselves, like children born into poverty and despair.

The death of Christ on the cross Maximus the Confessor wrote: “is a judgment of judgment.” For us whose lives are transformed by the story of the crucified Christ, belief in retribution can no longer lie at the heart of things. Yes we may have to act in specific ways to protect the innocent and rehabilitate the guilty through rigorous forms of discipline, but in response to punishment or retribution, Christians ought to say that Christ has taken on the guilt of all his brothers and sisters and now they stand innocent. The cross has brought an end to retribution and shown us the better way of reconciliation and restoration. Theologian William Placher asserts: The conviction that in Christ guilt has come to an end and reconciliation and restoration is what God wants for us ought to be at the heart of any authentic Christian value, in contrast to the dominant form of putative retribution in our world today.

On this day we rejoice because what Jesus gives is deliverance from our prison of sin and reconciles us to God. Alleluia and Amen! May we continue God's work of restoration of right relationship with all our brothers and sisters throughout God's world, giving thanks for what Jesus has made possible for us.