Luke
23: 13-49
13 Pilate then called
together the chief priests, the leaders, and the people, 14 and said to them,
"You brought me this man as one who was perverting the people; and here I
have examined him in your presence and have not found this man guilty of any of
your charges against him 15 Neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us.
Indeed, he has done nothing to deserve death. 16 I will therefore have him
flogged and release him." 17 18 Then they all shouted out together,
"Away with this fellow! Release Barabbas for us!" 19 (This was a man
who had been put in prison for an insurrection that had taken place in the
city, and for murder. 20 Pilate, wanting to release Jesus, addressed them
again; 21 but they kept shouting, "Crucify, crucify him! 22 A third time
he said to them, "Why, what evil has he done? I have found in him no
ground for the sentence of death; I will therefore have him flogged and then
release him." 23 But they kept urgently demanding with loud shouts that he
should be crucified; and their voices prevailed. 24 So Pilate gave his verdict
that their demand should be granted. 25 He released the man they asked for, the
one who had been put in prison for insurrection and murder, and he handed Jesus
over as they wished. 26 As they led him away, they seized a man, Simon of
Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and
made him carry it behind Jesus. 27 A great number of the people followed him,
and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him.
28 But Jesus turned to them and said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep
for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. 29 For the days are
surely coming when they will say, "Blessed are the barren, and the wombs
that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.' 30 Then they will begin to
say to the mountains, "Fall on us'; and to the hills, "Cover us.' 31
For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is
dry?" 32 Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to
death with him. 33 When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they
crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.
34 [Then Jesus said, "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they
are doing."] And they cast lots to divide his clothing. 35 And the people
stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, "He saved
others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!"
36 The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine 37 and
saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!" 38 There
was also an inscription over him, "This is the King of the Jews. 39 One of
the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you
not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" 40 But the other rebuked him,
saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of
condemnation? 41 And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting
what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong." 42
Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom."
43 He replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in
Paradise." 44 It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land
until three in the afternoon, 45 while the sun's light failed; and the curtain
of the temple was torn in two. 46 Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said,
"Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." Having said this, he
breathed his last. 47 When the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised
God and said, "Certainly this man was innocent." 48 And when all the
crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they
returned home, beating their breasts. 49 But all his acquaintances, including
the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching
these things.
I was sitting on the floor in my
grandmother’s living room the first time I heard God. I couldn’t have been much
older than five or six, because I really don’t recall many other Sunday
afternoons waiting for dinner after church. Our church attendance dropped to
nothing after my granddad died, my dad went through his second divorce, and our
family was deemed a bit too “sinful” I suppose to remain in good fellowship.
But on one of those Sundays, I clearly remember sitting in the floor of the
living room at Grandma’s house, when I heard a low growling, a rumbling that
seemed to come from some strange place. I think I brushed it off at first, but
then I heard it again. I looked around the room; no one seemed to notice what
had happened. Naturally, having just spent the morning in Sunday school and
children’s church, I assumed this strange noise was supernatural. When I heard
it again, I asked out loud, “Did anyone else hear that?!” My uncle David looked
at me and said, “Heard what? God must be talking to you, boy!”
I couldn’t believe it! God was
talking to me! Of course, God wasn’t making a whole lot of sense, not speaking
very clearly. So, I waited to see if the Lord would speak again, and sure
enough, I heard the familiar, low growl, and so I said something akin to “What
are you trying to say God?!” That’s when my uncle started laughing; turns out
it wasn’t God speaking to me, but my uncle’s stomach speaking to him!
Now, you may laugh at such a
story, but when I was telling it to Dr. Betty Talbert, who was the director of
spiritual formation at Truett Seminary during my time there, Dr. Talbert leaned
forward in her chair, looked me right in my twenty-four year old soul and said,
“How do you know God was talking to you then, Chris?” “Well,” I said, “isn’t it
a bit silly to think that God would speak to a four-or-five-year-old through
the rumbling of his uncle’s hungry stomach?” Again, Betty T. leaned a little forward
I her chair, still holding my gaze, and said, “I suppose it’s a little foolish,
like God speaking through a bush that is on fire without being burned up, or
God speaking through a pregnant virgin, or God showing us how to live by
dying.” Yeah, that is a bit foolish I suppose.
I mean, is this how you would have
written this story? If you had some grand plan for all of humankind, would it
look like this? Would you create people so bent on their own selfishness that
they constantly forget you, forget to thank you, to praise you, to love you?
Would you desire simple sacrifices of lambs, goats, cattle, and grain only to
have your beloved ignore those, or capitalize on such sacrifices to gain wealth
or influence for themselves? Would you keep giving them chance after chance no
matter how deep their corruption, no matter how great their injustices to each
other and those around them? Would you be so determined to love them that you’d
slip into their world, nearly unnoticed and unannounced, to grow among them, to
walk with them, talk with them, eat with them, grieve with them? Would you
still want to hold on to them if they still failed to see who you were, if they
still failed to “get it,” if they constantly looked to you for power, for
prosperity, for wealth? Would you—you with the seeming power to create the
whole cosmos from scratch—hold on to the inhabitants of this blue-green rock to
the point of your very own death? What kind of plan is that? Why would anything
close to an all-everything God die?
You realize that’s what’s
happening here, right? God, in Christ, is dying, there on the cross, that most
cruel, tortuous, and bloody means of execution. That’s absolutely not the way I
would have done it, and I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn to say that I don’t
believe it’s how anyone of us would have done it. To possess the power of God,
the power that called light out of darkness, the power that parted the Red
Sea…and die?! No. That’s not how I would have done it at all. I can buy the
virgin birth, the walking on water, the feeding of five thousand, the healing
the sick, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead, cleansing lepers….all
that, but to die?! Doesn’t that disrupt the whole thing, throw an enormous
wrench in this whole “messiah” thing? Why, I think I’d almost rather have a God
that speaks through growling stomachs than a God who dies.
Where’s the power in that? Really? I mean, if it’s just a strategy for
catching the strong, the clever, the powerful unawares,[1]
then it’s honestly not a great one, right? Why not just simply overpower them?
Don’t let the whip strike your flesh, the nails pierce your hands. Instead, why
not just take hold of the whip, melt the iron of the nails with the snap of
your fingers, subdue those who would nail you to the wood with just the sound
of your voice or a show of cosmic strength by rending the sky in two to rain
down brimstone onto your would-be executors? If the death of Christ is nothing
more than strategy, a sort of living password for the righteous so that the wicked
perish and suffer, while the righteous get their reward, does it sell the very
death of God in Christ short? Does it cheapen the cross?
I suppose one way, a most popular way, of thinking of Christ’s death is
as a grand transaction, as the theologian John Caputo puts it, “an economy,
a good investment with long-term rewards.”[2]
God’s death in Christ is an all-encompassing sacrifice, meant to cover more
than the sacrifice of doves and goats, blood meant to be more transactionally
powerful than that of bulls spilled upon the alter in the Most Holy Place of
the temple. The death of Christ is a death completed “in our place,” so that we
may gain the glory of heaven in exchange for our acceptance of this price paid
on our behalf. While I don’t deny this understanding of Christ’s death, I
cannot help but find myself asking, to whom does God owe the debt that Christ
must pay on our behalf? If it is God, then forgiveness of such a debt can
surely be forgiven by the all-powerful God to whom it is owed, right? If we owe
God some debt for our sins, is God not God enough to simply forgive it, and if
not, then is there something greater than God to which God must answer, some
economic code of the universe? There has to be more, something more to it all.
It can’t just be about settling a debt, evening a score. The death of
God in Christ upon the cross must mean something more, because it is
God’s death in Christ upon the cross.
If we are not careful, we can find ourselves giving into the great
temptation of that ancient heresy of Docetism, the belief that the suffering
and death of Christ is merely “an appearance behind which lurks the real action
and power.”[3] Docetism can best be
summed up as the notion that God only “appeared” to die in Christ on the cross,
that somehow Christ escaped the real agony and suffering of death, leaving a
dead body behind to be inhabited later at the resurrection. The early Church
deemed such a notion a heresy, and I believe with good reason. To rob God of
the reality of suffering and death upon the cross cheapens the cross, makes God
little more than a mocker of our human pain, weakness, and suffering. When
Christ suffers in weakness and agony upon the cross, it is real
pain and suffering he experiences. When Christ breathes his last, he is really
dead, bereft of life. In Christ, upon the cross, we witness the weakness, the
real suffering, the death of God.
Rest with that for a minute. Don’t run from those words. If the cross is
going to mean anything, if it’s going to truly change hearts, change lives,
change the world, it has to mean that.
It’s not what we want. It’s not what we would have done. It—the cross and
Christ’s death upon it—disrupts EVERYTHING. It overturns all our expectations
of a hero, of a messiah, of a leader, or God God’s self! It’s all backwards and
inside-out. It’s like a gift we were sure was one thing, only to find it’s
something else entirely, something we didn’t even know we wanted or needed.
It’s like love—real love—that comes not in the grand gestures of planned
pomp and circumstance, but in the smallest and most -unexpected of actions.
It’s like grace that is hardly ever extended from those who sit high and lofty
to those below them, but from the oppressed to those who oppress them. It’s
like forgiveness that isn’t offered to those who come crawling on their hands
and knees, but given to those who can’t even admit they stand in need of it.
It’s life lived—not in pursuit of more—but in the ever-emptying, ever-dying to
ourselves, our selfishness, our sin. That is the gospel! That is the cross, the
death of God in Christ.
In the end, this is the Good News: God is not the God of our
expectations, the God who is all-powerful, victorious, a champion on a white
horse. No! God is the God of disruption, overturning those expectations created
out of our own vulnerabilities and desires for a God who is anything that is
unlike us and everything like what we want to be. The gospel of the cross
preaches to us that God is in fact everything like us and nothing like what we
expect God to be! Weak?! Suffering?! Dying?! Not my God! Yes! That’s God! The
cross testifies to the reality that God is indeed a God of absolute love,
grace, and forgiveness, made manifest in his words from the cross ("Father,
forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing”), made real by
his suffering despite his perceived power, made eternally grounded by his
death. Is it foolish? Yes! Is it weak? Yes! But I read where the Apostle Paul
said (over in 1 Corinthians 1:25), “For the foolishness of God is wiser
than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength,”
and I’m inclined to believe it.
Though there are times when it’s hard, when it’s difficult, because I
want a God who fits the mold, a God who’s understanding of justice is grounded
in vengeance, a God whose notion of right and good looks a whole lot like mine,
a God like the one Clarence Jordan describes when he wrote, “When God becomes a
man, we don’t know what to do with him. If he will just stay God, like a God
ought to be, then we can deal with him. We can sing songs to him if he’ll just
stay God. If he will stay in in heaven and quit coming down to earth and
dwelling among us where we have to deal with a baby in a manger and a man on
the cross; if God Almighty would just stay God and quit becoming man—then we
could handle him.”[4] Yeah, I want a God I can
handle, not a God who offers forgiveness from a cross. If God is going
to forgive, let God do it from a judge’s seat in the courtroom, not a cross. If
God is going to call me, call us, let him call us from a clouded throne in a
heavenly temple, not a splintered, blood-soaked cross! If God is going to call
us, let him call us a burning bush, a still, small voice, an angel, a talking
donkey, a growling stomach—anything but
a cross! Because a cross betrays the true nature of God: God’s desire, God’s
ultimate hope, God’s “plan” one might say, is love, love strong
enough for the God of the universe to die, upon a crude, bloody, rough, wooden
cross.
This is why one of the earliest hymns of the Church was sung: “Christ
Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a
slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled
himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every
name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on
earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is
Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”[5]
In the end, this is the Gospel, the Good News: God’s love for us is so
deep, so eternal, that God was willing to pour all of God’s self out for us, to
become like us, to suffer like us, to bleed like us, to die like us. God’s love
for us is so unending that it disrupts all of who we are and everything we may
expect God to be and do. And in that disruptive love, to that disruptive love,
through that disruptive love, God calls us. God calls you. God calls you to
give yourself up, to give up what you expect to find, have, and earn in this
life so that you may receive the gift you never knew you wanted or needed. God
calls you to be freed from the oppression of your own expectations, from your
own self-doubts about your own worth, to take hold and claim as yours the grace
and forgiveness that is freely given from a God who still offers it to those
who would crucify him. God calls you to a life truly lived in the death to
yourself, to your selfishness, to your sin. God calls you to love—to God’s love
and the love of others—a love so deep, so eternally real, that the very God of
the universe was willing to die—really die—to show us just how real it is. It’s
the Good News, the Gospel, that God calls us to come and die, die to self, and
be transformed into the very likeness of the same One whose love for all was so
great, that he turned everything upside-down and inside out by his disruptive
death on a cross, a death that calls us to disrupt our own expectations and the
expectations of the world by that self-same love. May we all be so bold as to
answer the call and begin, even today, to die more to ourselves, so that we may
live more for God and each other. Amen.
[1]
Caputo. Cross and Cosmos, 4.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Clarence Jordan, "Incarnational Evangelism"
[5]
Philippians 2:6-11
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