Christ Crucified

This is the sermon I gave at First Congregational Church of Maltby on Good Friday, March 25, 2016. It is a sermon in the tradition of theology of the cross, a soteriology very different from classical atonement theology and for me much more powerful. 

Christ Crucified

A Good Friday Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 25, 2016

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.

It’s such an odd thing, although maybe “odd” is too mild a word for it. It’s such a bizarre thing, such a fantastic and improbable thing. We Christians follow a crucified Savior. I suppose we take it for granted. We’ve heard the stories all our lives. We sing the hymns: “Where you there when they crucified my Lord,” and so many others. We wear the cross, we put it up in our homes and in our churches. We take it for granted, but think about it for a minute. The one whom we call Lord and Savior, whom we call God Incarnate, the Word of God made flesh, got himself crucified. The world killed him as a common criminal—or worse, as a political troublemaker who was a threat to the good order of his society. The One whom our tradition says rules in glory at the right hand of God the Father was, from an earthly point of view, an abject failure. His followers saw in him manifestations of the power of God Almighty, but he was so weak that the Roman Empire was able to snuff him out without giving the matter a second thought. Christianity is the only major world religion whose founding figure was executed by the ruling authorities as a criminal and a thread to public welfare.

Tonight we commemorate that execution. Tonight we recall and relive that terrible day nearly two thousand years ago when the Romans—and make no mistake about it, it was the Romans not the Jews who did it—when the Romans executed the Son of God upon a cross. We know, of course, that Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t the end for him, but for that part of the story we have to wait until Sunday morning. Tonight we enter into Jesus’ death not his rebirth. Tonight is about the tomb, and it is about the cross.

So tonight we consider what it means, this crucifixion of the Son of God. For you see, as much as Christians have clung to the Resurrection as giving meaning to our faith and to our lives, we Christians have also, from the very beginning, sensed that there is some ultimate meaning in Christ’s death too. We have sensed that, out of the thousands upon thousands of crosses the Romans used to eliminate troublemakers, this one has special meaning. We have believed from the very beginning that there is profound meaning for us in the cross of Jesus. It has to have meaning or else our faith is in vain. In the passage from First Corinthians that we just heard Saint Paul calls Christ crucified the power of God and the wisdom of God, and that seems so contradictory. What could the power and wisdom of Christ crucified possibly be? I invite you to bear with me while I try to answer that question in a way that makes sense to me and that I hope makes sense and might be helpful to you.

We begin with a question: Who do we say that Jesus is? We say that he is the Christ, and we generally mean by that that he is, as I have already said, the Son of God, or God the Son Incarnate. The Gospel of Matthew has a really good name for him, but it’s one that we generally hear only at Christmas because it appears only in Matthew’s birth narrative. That name is Emmanuel, and it means “God is with us.” Matthew 1:23 That’s who Jesus is for us Christians, God with Us. He is a real human being like us, but he is a human being in whom God is fully present in a unique way. In him we see God revealed to the fullest extent that we mere mortals can comprehend, and in him God lives and experiences human life in God’s own person. In Jesus we see humanity and divinity in total solidarity. We see Jesus’ total solidarity with God, but we also see God’s total solidarity with us. We see God in the person of Jesus taking on and experiencing human life. God always experiences human life of course, but in Jesus we see God experiencing human life in person, and we see how God experiences human life. We see that God does not experience human life remotely, or from afar, not indifferently or dispassionately. In Jesus Christ we see that God experiences human life personally, intimately, compassionately, in divine solidarity with humanity.

In the life of Jesus Christ we see how God experiences human life in reaching out and saving the least and the lost, accepting sinners and welcoming those whom the world casts out, teaching peace and crying out for justice. More importantly for us tonight, we see how God experiences human life in Jesus’ death. God in Christ could reject human death. Jesus could have avoided the cross, perhaps through a display of divine power and certainly by denying his mission, his ministry, and his identity, but he didn’t. Instead he accepted the cross, he accepted a cruel and unjust death. Why?

The Gospel of John suggests an answer. There Jesus’ last words are: “It is finished.” John 19:30 What is finished? Presumably what Jesus came to accomplish, his mission in the world. The important thing about that for us tonight is that Jesus’ mission wasn’t finished short of the cross and death. It couldn’t have been. It couldn’t have been because without the cross and death God’s demonstration in Christ of how God experiences human life would not have been complete. Those harsh realities of human life, the realities of suffering and of death, would have been left out. We would not see God’s unshakable solidarity with us in our suffering and in our death. The cross is the ultimate demonstration of God’s unshakable solidarity with us in all aspects of our lives, even (or especially) in our suffering and in our death.

And that, my friends, is the best news there ever was or ever could be. What, after all, is the real tragedy of human life? Is it not that we live separated from God, or believe that we do? How often have you, how often have I, called the world or some miserable part of it “God-forsaken”? How often have you, how often have I, felt abandoned and alone? In Mark’s account of the Crucifixion, and in Matthew’s, Jesus cries out from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46 Have you ever been tempted to call out the same thing? Most of us have. Especially in times of great despair, pain, or grief it is so easy to feel that God has forsaken us. When we look at the world around us, at all the evil, the hatred, the violence, the unjust suffering and death, it is so easy for us to ask: Why has God forsaken God’s world? Surely God is not present in all that suffering! Surely that suffering represents the absence of God not the presence of God.

But I say: Look to the cross of Jesus. There is God the Son Incarnate experiencing the same things we suffer, and worse. There is God experiencing human pain, suffering, injustice, and death. There is God experiencing nothing less than God-forsakenness. And what does that mean? It means that God has transformed God-forsakenness into the very presence of God. It means that God has shown us the way into human suffering, and the way out of it. It means that God goes with us every step of the way in complete solidarity with us, in complete solidarity with all who suffer and all who die. It means that we can have the courage to bear our own pain and suffering because God bears them with us. It means that we can bear our own death because God bears it with us. It means that we can enter into the suffering of others and work to alleviate it because God enters it with us.

God is not aloof. God is not remote. God does not sit in heaven and observe from afar. God showed us what God is like on the cross of Jesus. The cross shows us that God stands in complete solidarity with us in our lives, in our suffering, and in our death. God does not reject those things. In Christ Jesus God entered into them, experienced them, and sanctified them. Because Jesus had the courage to go all the way to the cross to show us God’s love, we can bear our own crosses with the assurance that God bears them with us. Because God is with us we can bear whatever we must bear. We can help others bear what they must bear and work to make their bearing easier. Because God is with us though we suffer and die we can risk everything for peace, we can risk everything for justice, we can risk everything for love. That’s what Jesus did; and because he did it, we can do it too.

That’s the wisdom and the power of Christ crucified of which Paul speaks. It is the wisdom and the power of God entering into complete solidarity with us humans in our lives and in our deaths. That horrible cross that we remember tonight completes God’s demonstration of that wisdom and that power. In that cross it is indeed finished. Thanks be to God. Amen.