In Remembrance of His Death Isaiah 53 July 1, 2012 Travis Collins Isaiah 53 was written seven centuries before that silent, holy night in the little town of Bethlehem when Christ the Savior was born. There is no more certain reassurance that the Bible is divinely inspired, for Isaiah describes the death of Jesus in ways that he could not have without the guiding hand of God s Spirit. And there is no more powerful depiction of the death of Jesus on our behalf than that of Isaiah 53. Feel the drama of these excerpts from Isaiah 53 He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. God inspired Isaiah to include an interesting detail in the description of Jesus. Jesus didn t look like Brad Pitt or George Clooney or Justin Bieber. If Jesus had been born in the southern U.S. folks might have said, Bless his heart. His words are like none I ever have heard. I never have sensed a love as pure and deep as his. And his miracles are beyond human description. But he s not very handsome. Besides that, he spent a lot of time sleeping in the fields or on the side of a hill beside a bush, wrapped up in his outer robe. So when he walked into the nearby hamlet the next morning he looked like you and I would look if we d slept outside on the ground. There were some who found him unattractive. Some who despised him. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. In Jesus day what we call the Holy Land was ruled by Rome. The people of Judea, the region around Jerusalem, hated Rome, hated their taxes, and hated everything about living under the thumb of Rome. And they were a rebellious lot. There was always some movement afoot to win their freedom from those oppressive Romans. Therefore, in order to keep the Judeans in line, Rome imposed its rule cruelly and brutally. Crucifixion was one of those ruthless reminders of who was in control. They d nail traitors and rebels and political enemies, as well as thieves and murderers, to those rustic, brutal, crosses for all to see. The crosses were placed conspicuously on hillsides and along roads so that passersby would be reminded: Don t mess with Rome. No death was as agonizing, as humiliating, as tortuous, as vindictive, as pitiless, as malicious, as merciless, as painful, as frightening as crucifixion. 1
The diamond-studded, polished gold, varnished wood crosses belie the horror of the real thing. The horror of crucifixion was staggering. The Romans prided themselves on the terror that crucifixion invoked. It involved pain beyond description. The pain of a crucifixion was so horrible that a word had to be coined to describe it the Latin word exruciare, from which we get the English word, excruciating. When the practice of Roman crucifixion came along, they had to come up with a new word to describe the pain. Excruciating means from the cross. Ex means out of, or from. Cruciare is the word from which we get the word crucifixion. Death on a cross was a horror too great for words. They had to invent one. I never have tried to describe the physical pain of the cross. Because my words would be so inadequate, doing so always has seemed to cheapen the awful reality of it. But I choose never to use the word excruciating for anything that I experience. My back hurts, but it is not excruciating. My plantar fasciitis hurts, but it is not excruciating. I had an EMG once. They hooked up electrodes to my facial muscles to make sure I didn t have a neurological thing a few years ago. The test was negative, but probably the most painful thing I ve ever suffered. Yet it was not excruciating. I reserve the use of the word excruciating for the description of the death of Jesus. A death that was uniquely excruciating. Besides the physical torture, there was the even greater spiritual pain. He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; Every lie, every trip to the pornographic web site, every refusal to speak up for Jesus, every word of gossip against people in the church, every feeling of hatred, every refusal to help, every injustice. And God has piled all our sins everything we ve done wrong on him. Some of us this morning came in here feeling the weight of our sin. Imagine feeling the weight of every sin ever committed. What a hellish experience. He died so that now, somehow, when we confess our sins and ask for forgiveness it is more than catharsis, more than therapy, more than just getting it off our chests. Something changed in the world beyond that which we can see. An objective change occurred. God s wrath against sin was somehow absorbed by Jesus. Justice was served. So that we can go free. The death of Jesus as a sacrifice for our sins is deeply mysterious. First is the matter of the extremely unusual physical phenomena that accompanied his death. The earthquake. The dead temporarily awakened from their Jerusalem tombs. The sky going dark in the middle of the afternoon. When you think about it if indeed this was the central moment of history the apex of the battle between God and the Evil One the fact that the universe would be shaken into an unusual physical state is not surprising. This was the ultimate Battle of the Titans. That the universe would respond in unusual ways is not surprising. It s not surprising, but it certainly is mysterious. 2
Then there s the mystery of Jesus, to quote the Apostles Creed, descending into hell. The question of what happened to Jesus between his death and resurrection is a tough one. Many believe 1 Peter 3 answers it when it says he preached to the spirits in prison. That s mysterious! Also mysterious is this matter of sacrifice for sin. The meaning of Jesus death is rooted in ancient Jewish practices of animal sacrifice a system given by God to the people of Israel by which they secured God s forgiveness. But it s not just that. I know it sounds barbaric to us, but I believe it is not coincidental that around the world and throughout history people have had an intuited sense that sacrifices are required in order to relate submissively to whatever they understood to be God or gods. Now, I don t mean to imply that the sacrifice of chickens and goats in rural Africa or Asia or the Caribbean islands atones for sins. But those folks are on the right track. They are following an intuited sense that a sacrifice is necessary to take away our sins. And that sacrifice was in the death of God in the flesh the Lord Jesus. Again, that s mystery. Yet somehow when Jesus offered himself as a sacrifice for my sins and yours, something changed between us and God. Again, because of his death, when we confess our sins and ask for forgiveness it is more than catharsis, more than therapy, more than just getting it off our chests. Something changed in the world beyond that which we can see. An objective change occurred. God s wrath against sin was somehow absorbed by Jesus. Justice was served. So that we can go free. What happened that dark Friday afternoon, just outside Jerusalem, is a mystery is great mystery. But remember, in the words of Dennis Covington, Mystery is not the absence of meaning. It is the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Iniquity is an ugly word. An offensive word. It has the connotation of perverseness, or perversity. It means a warped morality. Iniquity is a reference not only to wrong acts and attitudes, but to the perverse human nature from which those acts and attitudes spring. Maybe you remember studying the Enlightenment. That was a movement among philosophers, mainly in England, France in particular, in the 1700's. The Enlightenment questioned traditions and institutions' including the church. The Enlightenment elevated reason over divine revelation and so the church suffered in intellectual circles. Biblical teachings were considered both fairytalish and unnecessary. I can't say I've exactly been a student of the Enlightenment, but I've read what others have said about the Enlightenment and best I can tell one of the main theories coming out of that movement is that humans are basically good. A man named Rousseau, maybe the most influential thinker of the Enlightenment, seems to have thought that humans are born good, but negative influences from our environment taint us. That idea still characterizes our culture. But that is not what God has said about our condition. God says we are born with an overwhelming tendency toward the wrong thing. A sin nature. 3
That s why Jonathan Acuff said, When Jesus died on the cross he didn t do so because he wanted to shift my paradigm or to help me realize my full potential. No, the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all. And he cried, It is finished. That which was born in the heart of God as soon as humankind rebelled in Eden. That which was prophesied seven hundred years earlier by Isaiah. That story which began one night in the quarters of a teenage virgin named Mary when the angel said, You re going to have a son, and then appeared to Joseph and said, You will call the baby boy Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. That which was celebrated by the old man, Simeon, when he held the infant Jesus in his arms at the temple on the eighth day of his life and rejoiced that the Messiah finally had come. That story of our humankind s redemption had come to its completion. The event that made our forgiveness possible was over. It is finished, he said. And he hung his head and died....the LORD makes his life an offering for sin A few years ago I was watching an episode of the television show, ER. A man was dying. He was a doctor who had worked at a prison, and whose job it was to administer lethal injections to those who d been given the death penalty. This dying physician had a guilty conscience haunted especially by hurrying one particular man s death for it was later revealed that the man was innocent. The end was certain for him but he still was very much alert and strong. An open-minded, tolerant, progressive chaplain (I m trying not to use pejorative terms) was with him and the dying physician said, I m afraid of what comes next. And what do you think that is? asked the chaplain. You tell me. Is atonement even possible? What does God want from me? I think it s up to each one of us to interpret what God wants, the chaplain answered. That response didn t go over well. The terminally ill man screamed, I need answers and all your questions and all your uncertainty are making things worse.i need someone to look me in the eye and tell me how to find forgiveness because I m running out of time! Pretty frank dialogue for a network television program. Here was a man facing his mortality and wanting candid answers, not politically correct platitudes. He was struggling with the most fundamental of human issues. What does God want from me? he pleaded. I need someone to look me in the eye and tell me how to find forgiveness because I m running out of time! 4
I believe a lot of folks are looking for forgiveness. And every once in a while, despite our constant attempts to disregard our mortality, we remember that we are running out of time. That s why talk of the cross is so important. We know instinctively that we cannot save ourselves; we cannot redeem our own stories. That s why the story of the cross as mysterious and brutal as it is is so beautiful. The cross screams grace! The cross says, You are more sinful, more scarred and more weak than you might dare to admit. And you are more loved than you might dare to dream So place your trust for here and forever in the One Who took upon himself your sins so that you could be forgiven. 5