Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 3, 2005

Scripture:

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.

This last Holy Week there was a sort of a mini-revival of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. Gibson was cropping up on news channel programs crowing about how he had bypassed the Hollywood establishment to make this movie that had, so he claims, revived Christianity yadda yadda yadda. I still haven’t seen the movie, and I don’t intend to. My own mental images of the Crucifixion are plenty gory enough, thank you very much. I don’t need Gibson’s cinematic wizardry to make them even more horrific. And I still don’t buy the interpretation advanced in the movie’s promotional materials that "dying was his reason for living." At least, I don’t buy it if, as I suspect, Gibson means by that that Christ’s death was the sacrificial slaughter of a truly innocent victim that was a necessary precondition to God’s forgiveness of human sin as stated in the classical theory of atonement. I have not, in the last year, become a convert to that medieval version of Christianity that passes for the faith itself in American culture today. I stick by what I said to you over one year ago in my sermon on Gibson’s movie that I called "No It Wasn’t." That sermon is available on the church’s web site if you didn’t hear it or don’t recall it.

That being said, I need to tell you that I have recently had something of a change of mind about part of the Christian tradition that I have always struggled with and that, in fact, I had pretty much rejected. The Christian Scriptures all, or nearly all, say that Christ’s death on the cross was necessary. That idea appears in this morning’s reading from Acts. There Luke, the author of Acts, has Peter say that Christ was handed over for crucifixion "according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God." Luke here is saying that Jesus’ horrible death as well as his life, teaching, and ministry were part of God’s plan. That’s the thing I always used to reject.

All of the Gospels have Jesus saying the same thing in one way or another. The classic text is Mark 8:31-33. There, immediately after Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah, it says: "Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, and the scribes, and be killed...." Peter objects to such a horrible thing happening to Jesus, whereupon Jesus rebukes him with the famous line: "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." The lesson is clear: From the divine point of view, it was necessary, and not just inevitable, that Christ suffer and be killed.

Last Sunday as I read Luke’s statement of this idea in our reading from Acts, I had what felt like an epiphany. I suddenly got it. Yes! It was necessary for Christ to suffer and die. His suffering and death were part of God’s plan. Like the good liberal that I am, I had always rejected that idea. I couldn’t see how a loving God could have intended something as horrible as the Crucifixion. God could foresee it, sure. God’s no dummy. God knows how the world works. But intend it? No, I could never accept that part of the tradition. Today I can, and do.

Those of you who have gotten to know me and my theological thinking over our three years together are probably as surprised to hear that from me as I was to think it for the first last time last Sunday. But then, last Sunday was Easter, and Easter is about new life, so I suppose it can be about new thinking too. It sure was for me this year. Let me see if I can make some sense for you this morning out of what that new insight-new for me though ancient in our Christian tradition-was.

In our Acts passage, Luke says that Christ’s crucifixion was done according to God’s "definite plan." I take that to mean not that God’s plan was only that Christ be crucified for the sake of Him being crucified. That would make God a monster. Rather, Christ’s suffering and death was part of a larger plan, and to understand the cross and its necessity we have to understand what God’s plan actually was. As Protestant Christians our guide for understanding what God’s plan was must, of course, be the Bible.

There are lots of places in Christian Scripture where we could turn to discover what the plan was that Luke refers to in Acts 2:23; but one very concise statement of that plan that I find particularly helpful in this context is found at 2 Corinthians 5:19, where we read that "in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself." It seems to me that, to the extent that we mortals can ever understand God, that was what God’s plan in Christ was. God’s intention in the entire Christ event, as the theologians call it-Christ’s birth, life, ministry, teaching, suffering, death, and resurrection-was to reconcile the world to God. In Christ, God’s purpose was to overcome the alienation of creation, to close the gap between God and us, to make God known and accessible to us, to stand in solidarity with us in every aspect of our lives, in everything that is part of our existence as creatures of the Creator.

God did that by becoming human in Jesus Christ. John 1:1-2, 14a. Ours is an incarnational faith. Paul says that if Christ is not risen our faith is in vain. 1 Corinthians 5:13. It seems to me equally true that if Christ is not the Word of God made flesh our faith is in vain. God became human in Jesus to reveal as fully as we limited humans are capable of understanding, and in a way that preserves our freedom, the nature and will of God.

That plan includes most importantly God’s intention to be present to and with humanity, all of humanity, in the joys but also in the sorrows of our creaturely life. And so the only One begotten of the Father, the uncreated Son of God, became a creature like us, emptied Himself of divinity, Philippians 2:5-8, for us. And in the person of Jesus He lived God’s intended solidarity with suffering humanity. He came to those whom society and religion considered most alienated, most separated from God. Scripture calls them the tax collectors and sinners. See, e.g., Matthew 9:10 They were the lepers, the blind, the lame, those we would today call mentally ill, the prisoners and criminals, the prostitutes, the poor. Jesus came especially to them, lived with them, taught them, healed them, treated them with the dignity and respect that society and the religious establishment of the time denied them. He lived in solidarity with them. He preached the Kingdom of God to them, but more importantly he lived the Kingdom of God among them. He lived God’s reconciliation of and solidarity with suffering humanity.

Now, and here’s where the part about the necessity of his death comes in, if God’s plan in Christ was to reconcile the world to God, God wasn’t going to reconcile the life of God’s creatures to God and not reconcile their death to God. Jesus’ work included living in solidarity with us, but it also included dying in solidarity with us, all of whom eventually die. And not only that. God wasn’t going to reconcile only peaceful, natural death to God. Every day on this earth men and women die agonizing, unjust deaths. Just look at a short list of latter day martyrs: Gandhi, King, the Jesuits and their staff slaughtered in Central America, Archbishop Romero, and so many others known only to God. Think of all of the victims of human brutality and hate, the victims of the Holocaust, of Pol Pot, and of the government of Sudan, and so many others. God’s plan included them and their deaths too, and to demonstrate God’s solidarity with them, God’s reconciliation with them, Jesus had to die the kind of suffering, unjust death that he did. He had to take even that kind of death into the Divine Person by experiencing that kind of death. The cross was necessary. It was necessary if Christ was going to be able to say, as John has him saying on the cross: "It is finished." John 20:30

The cross was necessary; and as something perfectly foreseeable, it was part of God’s plan. That doesn’t mean that God was a puppeteer pulling the strings of the executioners. They acted out of their own free will. Jesus too, like any person, had free will. He could have said no. In Gethsemane he prayed that it not happen; but then he said: "Yet not what I want, but what you want." Mark 14:36 As our representative-and God’s-Jesus freely went all the way to cross. He did it for us. He did it that God’s plan for and in him might be fulfilled. He did it so that God’s solidarity with suffering humanity, God’s reconciliation with suffering humanity, might be complete.

Today is the second Sunday of Easter, a time to celebrate the great good news of Jesus’ Resurrection. That’s why the Gospel reading today is a Resurrection story, and why we’re singing Easter hymns, and why the choir sang an Easter anthem. It’s easy to see Easter as good news, but the undeniable truth (at least I think it’s undeniable) is that Easter has no meaning and indeed could not have happened apart from the cross. Easter is the sign and seal of the truth of Good Friday. The Resurrection truly completes Christ’s work because it is God’s great revelation that Jesus was right, that Jesus was and is the one, that he is indeed the Christ. But what all that means we see not in Easter itself but in the cross and in the life that the cross snuffed out.

The cross is the culmination of Christ’s work of reconciliation and solidarity with suffering humanity. Jesus not only preached the Kingdom of God but lived it, and he enacted it on the cross. The cross is the ultimate statement that God is with us always, all of us, no matter what. Dying was not Jesus’ reason for living. Fulfilling the definite plan of God was his reason for living; and that plan included the cross. It had to in order to be complete. It had to if it was going to reconcile all of creaturely life to God. It had to in order to reveal God’s solidarity with us not only in the good times but in the really, really bad times. It had to in order to reveal God’s unshakable presence with us not only in life but in death. Jesus was handed over and crucified according to God’s definite plan; and that is very good news indeed. Thanks be to God. Amen.