February 19, 2017 National Presbyterian Church Apostles Creed: A Most Unusual Death Isaiah 53:1-11 David Renwick In our sermons this winter, we are reviewing basic Christian teaching and beliefs, and doing so, with the help of one of the oldest and most widely embraced summaries of the Christian faith known as the Apostles Creed. It begins like this (Taking us to a time before the universe; and beyond the universe) I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, (and then it brings us down to earth in the person of Jesus Christ) And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, (So, God comes to live among us in flesh and blood; and then we say something even more stunning:-- that when God enters the world as one of us, he suffers and dies) Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; and (finally) he descended into hell And for the last few weeks and again today, and next week we ve been and are focusing on what seems to be a disproportionate emphasis in the Creed on God s suffering in human history, in the person of Jesus God s only Son. In fact when you count the references to this terrible truth in the creed, you find that there are no less than 5 statements about this aspect of Jesus life: 1. suffered under Pontius Pilate, 2. was crucified 3. dead 4. and buried 5. he descended into hell FIVE statements pointing to the death of Jesus as of central importance in what Christians believe and always have. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that this imbalance has been so from the very beginning of the church. The earliest gospel accounts of Jesus ministry are skewed dramatically to the events in the last seven days of Jesus life, the days leading up to his death. 21% of Luke s account; 29% of Matthew; 37% of Mark; and 57% of John focused on the last week! Or, to put it another way only two gospels tell us about his birth but all four focus on his death. Which begs the question Why? To which the first Christians responded, by saying, first: His Death reveals the love of God the depth of God s love for us 1
There s a powerful scene in the old book and movie The Hiding Place, set in WWII. Two Dutch sisters, Betsy and Corrie ten Boom have been discovered hiding Jewish friends in their house and are shipped off to one of the worst concentration camps, Ravensbruck. They arrive at Ravensbruck and they are put into this huge room which is not only infested by fleas, but holds fourteen hundred women. It was awful! But something remarkable happened there. The two sisters had managed to keep a Bible, and began to read it together with any others who would gather. And Corrie, tells the story like this. She says: Soon a growing crowd of women began to gather for these reverential worship times. Lifegiving truth was read from the New Testament, first in German, then translated into French, Polish, Russian, Czech and Dutch. Prayers were whispered. Hymns were softly sung and gradually life in the miserable barracks began to dramatically change. Before, there had been the continual sound of brawling, sobbing, cursing. Now the room buzzed with considerate words, and even the sound of gentle singing. That December, sadly, Betsy died. But not before saying to her sister, that Corrie had to survive, and after the war, be a witness to this experience: You must tell them what we have learned here. You must tell them that there is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here. There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still. The cross tells us that. It tells us about God: about the character of God: that God is willing to go to any lengths to love us. It reveals the depth and extent of God s love. But it also tells us about ourselves, not just about God. It reveals to us both the GOOD NEWS of the Height of Human Glory and the BAD NEWS of the Depth of Human Sin This is who WE are! Glorious and Sinful at one and the same time. Or, let me put it like this: If it were it not for the value he places on our lives (our glory!), and the seriousness of the trouble we find ourselves in (our sin!), God would never have had to, or chosen to, go to such great lengths for us, to suffer and die in the person of Jesus. To use an illustration I used last week Think of a fireman entering a burning house. If there s no one inside worth saving! OR if the person inside is fully capable of saving themselves, then going into the house when a fire is raging is not an act of love or humility or courage at all! Rather, it s just an act of dramatic stupidity. But Jesus enters the world for us! Walks into the fire for us! Suffers and dies on the cross for us! And in so doing by his suffering and death, he reveals to us both the value and glory he places on your life and mine (made in the image of God), and reveals to us, too, the reality and seriousness of our sin and rebellion against him, and our own powerlessness to do anything about it; our powerlessness to help, or save, ourselves. In fact, the truth is that we are often blind to the deadliness of this predicament. We tell ourselves that even if we have a few problems, that our sin is not really serious, and certainly no worse than anybody else s. Our situation is rather like the one I found myself in nine years ago, when the doctor told me I had prostate cancer. I had no clue! I had no symptoms! It was 2
hard to believe; but then I woke up and had a choice to make To believe myself? Or to believe the diagnosis that I had never felt or seen. And if the diagnosis was true to accept the seriousness of the situation I was in, and that something had to be done. I needed to place my life in the hands of someone (a Surgeon in some sense like a savior ) who could take the radical action needed that I was incapable of taking for myself; someone who could deal with the problem (which they did!) So by ourselves, we may never see or believe the extent of our sin, or the seriousness of our rebellion against God: what we ve done or left undone. BUT, like my doctor, it s the cross of Christ that reveals the truth about who we are and what s going on! The truth that our relationship with God is so broken (that nothing less than the death of God himself can fix it). The truth that God sees us of such enormous value (that he is willing to die for us) The truth that God s love is so amazing (that God will descend to any depth to be with us, even facing death on a cross). And then one further truth one further truth revealed in Christ s Cross, that I want us to think about today The truth that God has a passion for justice, that costs him dearly. THE CROSS REVEALS GOD S PASSION FOR JUSTICE! This passion is something that we see in the teaching of Jesus himself. Sometimes I hear people saying Why bother with this justice business, let s just focus on LOVE! On the love and tenderness of God, and leave all that other stuff, the Old Testament stuff about God and justice, behind. But we can t! As followers of Christ we cannot do that in large measure because Jesus himself focuses on it, too much. To be sure, there are great stories that Jesus tells that focus on love, with no hint of God s passion for justice. Think of the story of the Good Samaritan (in Luke 10:25-37), where a man stops to take care of someone who is almost at the point of death because he s been beaten up by thieves and robbers. In the story, there s no mention of the fact that to a certain extent, it s the man s own fault! All of this could probably have avoided if he d used common sense and the buddy system traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho with a companion and not alone, not by himself. In traveling alone, one could argue that he was being irresponsible! In other words, the issue of responsibility, which is linked with justice, and holding people to account doesn t really enter into the story or into some of Jesus other stories at all -- except in the sense that, God loves people, and call us to love others, whether they deserve it or not; whether it seems fair or just or not. But none of that does away with the fact that in many other stories of Jesus God s passion for justice and human accountability for right and wrong is central. You ve got gifts and talents says Jesus given to you by God, and what you do with them will matter on the Day of Judgment Don t dare bury them in the ground! (Matthew 25:14-30) You ve got opportunities to help others in need says Jesus and whether or not you do it, will be taken into account by me on the day of judgment (Matthew 25:31-46). 3
There are people who you step on and hardly notice; don t think for a moment that on the last day you won t be held to account for the way you treat others you see as beneath you. (Luke 16:19-31) So the matter of Justice is important to Jesus, and reflects the passion of God himself not only for love -- but for justice. And, if truth be told, this is not only God s passion, but our passion too. All of us know the anger that can boil up inside when something happens that we perceive is really wrong and unfair: UNJUST! we cry! And we can see this passion especially in children almost from day one (or, perhaps more accurately, year 2!). A little child can speak and play with their friends and what s going to come out of their mouths before long is: That s not fair! In my own children (three of them, all adults now), long ago, when my wife, Currie, drove them ten miles each day to school, this cry for justice was patently clear, and was linked to who got to drive shotgun in the front. Here s how it went: I called it first. Well I called it 2 weeks ago. Prove it! This isn t fair! These cries were incessant until Currie, the judge, had a brilliant idea. She pulled out her calendar and filled it in for the next few months with the name of one of the children on each weekday, and hung it in the kitchen And, remarkably, when the children saw it (and, no doubt, counted to make sure their name was on there as often as the others!) they said, That s fair! And the ruckus was over. It s innate, built into our very being, part of what it means to be made in the image of God! We have this moral sense within us of right and wrong, of justice and injustice. And so too does God! In fact, in brief, this is what the last book of the Bible, The Book of Revelation, is all about. Revelation is like a 2000 year old Marvel Comic movie, a graphic novel! With one message: That in the end, God will sort out the mess and make things fair. God will Judge evil; will pass appropriate sentence on it, and remove it; and the punishment will perfectly fit the crime. And God will do this because that s Who God Is not only loving, but holy, pure, and moral: a judge. And that s What God Does, and will do with you and me as well. Though, in our case, this is not really good news at all, because unless there s some kind of way of escape, the just and fair action of God against our sin, the right thing for God to do, is to call us guilty, and point out our repeated choices to rebel against God, to live as if we were independent of God, to live as if God were of no or little consequence. And the sentence for that is death. ( The wages of sin is death, says St. Paul in Romans 6:23). Though what the Scriptures tell us as well is that this situation is not so simple! In fact it creates a dilemma deep w/in the heart of God, a tension within God that brings God, as it were, to his knees, so that God the Father Almighty himself is caught! Caught between his desire to show us love and mercy, and his passion for justice! To treat us not as unaccountable puppets on a string but as morally accountable children made in his image. 4
And, what the scriptures teach, and one reason why the Apostles Creed places such an emphasis on the suffering and death of Jesus is that It is precisely on the cross of Christ that God resolves this tension and dilemma. It is precisely on the cross where God s love and justice meet. It is precisely on the cross where God says, Your sin cannot go unpunished: to leave sin unpunished would be to leave the universe in moral chaos; as if evil didn t matter. AND, just as important, as if as if YOU and I didn t matter as if we did not bear God s image; as if we were mere victims, of little worth, not responsible for what we choose to do. So, says God, this is what I will do. Because my heart is filled with a passion for both justice and love, even if it means descending down to all the god-forsakenness of hell itself I will bear the sentence of justice myself I will take your place instead of you I will face your death -- for you And so in space and time, when Jesus dies, he not only cries out from the cross: It is finished! as if to say, Mission accomplished! This is what I came for; and now it s done! But he also cries out, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me! a moment of utter abandonment and dereliction and, yes, hell! A moment in which justice is done. Once. For all. For all time. A descent to hell SO WE WILL NEVER HAVE TO. And the first Christians believed this that the cross of Jesus pointed both to our human Glory and Sin, and to God s unfathomable love and justice, not only because they saw Jesus die, on Good Friday, and return to life on Easter Sunday (the Resurrection was proof in itself that Jesus death was unusual, and that God was in it!). But the first Christians believed this because of one particular passage in the Bible, written hundreds of years before they were born. The passage was the one we read from the Old Testament in Isaiah 53, which for them, prophetically, and perfectly, by divine inspiration described, and spoke about, and explained, the life and death of the very Jesus whom they had come to know. Let me read a few verses from it again: it s the story of Jesus and his cross. Isaiah 53:3-6, 11 3 He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; 4 Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. ( That s the Jesus we know, they would have said!) 5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 11 The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities 5
On the cross, Jesus suffered a sentence of death that was just and right: for us but not just and right at all for him! It was a death that we deserved, but he did not. On the cross, Jesus poured out his blood to seal a new covenant from God that promises us forgiveness and grace; gave himself as a Sacrifice to end all sacrifices; paid a ransom that covers all debts to God that we can never fully pay, and performed an act of love that sets us free and reconciles us to live with God for ever It s the cross that tells us who we are both in our glory and in our sin and it s the cross that tells us who God is both in his love and in his justice And it s through the cross, by Christ s death that God has opened up a door to his presence that nothing and no one can shut *********** There is no greater liberation for our lives; no greater purpose for our lives; no firmer bedrock for our lives, than in this remarkable and unexpected Statement in the Creed about God s only Son: Suffered, Crucified, Dead, Buried, descended into hell. May God help us, each one, to believe it and receive it, and through it find life, abundant and eternal. David A. Renwick Copyright 2017 All Rights Reserved. To listen on line go to: http://nationalpres.org/sermons To watch full services go to: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nationalpres THE NATIONAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 4101 Nebraska Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20016 www.nationalpres.org 202.537.0800 6