Tearing the Curtain

This is the sermon I gave at our Good Friday service on March 29, 2013.  It was well received, and I quite like it.  It expresses well what Jesus' death means to me.

Tearing the Curtain

A Good Friday Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 29, 2013

Scripture:  Mark 15:25-39

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

The Romans killed Jesus.  About that there is no doubt.  Not the Jews, the Romans.  They saw Jesus as a threat.  People called him the king of the Jews, but the Romans knew who the real king of the Jews was.  It was the Emperor in Rome, not some rube from the hinterlands who was getting people all worked up.  He was preaching something he called the kingdom of God, but Romans knew what the real kingdom was.  It was their empire, not some imaginary kingdom ruled by God.  The Romans didn’t like it when someone got people all excited about something other than Rome.  The Romans didn’t like it when someone told people that God was their king, not Caesar, like this coarse fellow from Galilee was doing; and they knew how to deal with troublemakers like him.  Nail them up.  Make them suffer.  Make them die.  Make sure everyone could see them suffer and die.  They’d done it many times before.  They’d do it many times again.  They had no qualms about doing it to Jesus.  Nail him up.  Make him suffer.  Make him die.  End of problem.  The Romans executed the one we call Lord and Savior as a threat to public order and to Roman power.  About that there is no doubt. 

The Romans killed Jesus, and Jesus’ followers have been trying to make sense out of his early, unnatural, brutal, unjust death ever since.  They have tried to find meaning in his death ever since.  It has to have meaning after all.  If it doesn’t have meaning then we’re wrong about him.  If his death doesn’t have great meaning he was nothing but a fool and a failure.  God’s Messiah wasn’t supposed to be executed as a political criminal.  If anything, people, thought, he should have executed Pilate, not the other way around.  Jesus’ death has to have meaning for him to have meaning, and we Christians have found many different meanings in Jesus’ death.  Theologians give those different meanings fancy names.  Ransom theory.  Classical atonement theory.  Theology of the cross.  We’ve got lots of fancy names for different ways we have understood the meaning of Jesus’ death.

We’ve got lots of fancy names for different theories, but the Evangelist we call Mark expresses the meaning of Jesus’ death more powerfully, more evocatively, more beautifully than any theologian ever has or ever will.  He gives us the meaning of Jesus’ death in two sentences that paint a simple image. Mark writes:  “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”  The curtain of the temple was torn in two.  That image said everything there is to say about Jesus’ death to Mark’s audience.  It probably doesn’t say it to us, but it can.  It doesn’t say it to us because we aren’t first century Jews who knew the temple in Jerusalem and all of its symbols.  The temple means nothing to us.  We don’t know its symbols.  Specifically, we don’t know about its curtain, the one that was torn in two the moment Jesus died.  So we miss Mark’s meaning.  Tonight I want to help us recover it.

There was indeed a curtain in the temple.  In the very heart of the temple there was the most sacred place in all of Judaism.  It was an area called the Holy of Holies.  In that space sat a box called the Ark of the Covenant.  Originally the Ark supposedly held the tablets Moses received from God on Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments chiseled into them, but over time Judaism came to see that Ark of the Covenant as the very dwelling place of God.  In their scripture the Hebrews called the temple the house of the Lord, and they meant that quite literally.  God lived in the temple, they believed, in the Holy of Holies, in the Ark of the Covenant.

The Holy of Holies was so sacred that almost no one could enter it.  Only the high priest could go in, and he did it only once a year.  No one else could even look at the Ark of the Covenant, so holy was it as the home of God.  There’s even a story in 1 Kings about a man being struck dead for having touched the Ark.  So the Ark was veiled from everyone’s sight by a curtain.  The curtain kept everyone except the high priest separate from the Ark of the Covenant, from the dwelling place of God.  The curtain kept nearly everyone separate from God.  People couldn’t get too close to God.  They couldn’t be in the immediate presence of God, and the curtain of the temple maintained the separation of the people from God.

And Mark says that at the very moment of Jesus’ death the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.  The curtain that separated the people from God was torn in two.  The thing that separated the people from God was destroyed the moment Jesus died.  That, my friends, is the meaning of Jesus’ death.  Jesus’ death destroys that which separates us from God.  Jesus’ death destroyed the curtain in the temple, and Jesus’ death destroys everything that separates us from God.  Jesus’ death destroys sin.  Jesus death destroys alienation.  Jesus’ death destroys death.  After Jesus’ death nothing separates us, nothing can separate us, from God.  Whatever you think separates you from God is torn in two from top to bottom by the death of Jesus Christ our Lord.

It makes no sense of course.  How can the brutal, unjust death of an innocent man destroy everything that separates us from God?  Well, if Jesus’ death were only the brutal, unjust death of an innocent man it wouldn’t.  Innocent men and women die brutal, unjust deaths all the time in this world.  But you see, Jesus’ death is different from those deaths.  Jesus’ death is different because Jesus is different.  Jesus’ death wasn’t just the brutal, unjust death of an innocent man.  Jesus’ death was nothing less than the brutal, unjust death of God.  Jesus was fully human of course; but he is Emmanuel, God With Us.  He is the Word of God become flesh.  He was truly human, but he is also true God from true God.  In him God enters fully into human life.  In him God lives a human life, and in him God dies a human death.  In him God enters fully and completely into human life and into human death.  In him God shows us that human life is not separate from God.  In him God shows us that nothing in human life, not joy, not sorrow, not righteousness, not sin, is separate from God.  In Jesus God shows us that human death is not separate from God.  God doesn’t flee, God doesn’t reject the worst we humans can do.  In Jesus God enters into the worst we humans can do and shows us that not even the worst that we humans can do separates us from God.

In the death of Jesus the curtain of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom.  In Jesus’ death we see, in Jesus’ death we know that truly nothing in all creation can or does separate us from the love of God.  Nothing separates us.  We don’t need a high priest to go behind the curtain.  There is no curtain.  It’s gone.  God destroyed it in Jesus Christ.

Do you feel alienated from God?  Does God feel absent from your life?  We all feel that way at times.  I knew I feel that way at times.  So let me suggest something:  The next time you feel alone, the next time you feel isolated, the next time you feel alienated from God, the next time you feel unworthy of God’s love, remember Mark’s great image.  “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.  And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”  Our sense of living separate from God is of our own making, and it is false.  The curtain is torn in two.  It is torn in two by a horrible fact, the brutal execution of God Incarnate.  It is torn in two by a horrible fact, but it is torn in two.  Really.  Truly.  Eternally.  The curtain is gone.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.