Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 1, 2007

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.

It never ceases to amaze me how I can read a Bible passage that I’ve read many times before and have something new jump out at me, something that was always there but that I’d never really thought much about before. It happened this week when I read Luke’s Passion narrative, part of which we just heard. In five brief verses, Luke 23:35-39, Luke has different people say three times to Jesus: “If you are the Messiah, the king of the Jews, save yourself from the cross.” First it’s the leaders of the people standing by watching the execution. Then it’s the soldiers who are carrying out the execution. Then it’s one of the criminals being executed along side Jesus. Their taunt to Jesus raises a good question. These people couldn’t understand how God’s Anointed One could let himself get crucified. Surely God’s Messiah was stronger than all the legions of Rome combined. Surely he had miraculous powers that would enable him to come down off the cross and pass safely through the midst of those who were killing him, as he did at the beginning of his ministry when the people of his home town were trying to throw him off a cliff. Luke 4:29-30 Or surely he could summon the heavenly host to drive the Romans into the sea, as so many people wanted him to do. Getting yourself crucified just wasn’t proper Messianic behavior.

Now, maybe the Jewish leaders, the soldiers, and the criminal were saying this thing to mock Jesus because they did not believe that he really was God’s Messiah. To them, his failure to save himself proved that he wasn’t. We, on the other hand, confess that he is God’s Messiah, but wouldn’t we have said the same thing? Wouldn’t we have been a lot happier if he had miraculously come down off the cross? We’d probably be even happier if he had sent the armies of heaven against the brutal Romans. That would have been so God-like, so Almighty, and we certainly want God to be Almighty, judging by how often we call God that. Smiting the Romans, or at least saving himself from execution, would have been Jesus acting the way we want God to act.

But that’s not what happened. Jesus didn’t do it. Why not? Why didn’t he? For us who confess that he is God’s Messiah, there has to be a reason why he didn’t save himself. There has to be some profound meaning in the fact that he didn’t. His death has to mean something important. What might that meaning be? Some of you have heard me say it many times before, and some of you have recently read a fairly lengthy exposition of it that I recently wrote; but the point cannot be made too often. He didn’t do it, he didn’t save himself from the cross, because the purpose of his entire life and teaching, and the purpose of his death, was to demonstrate God’s solidarity with humanity in all aspects of our lives and in our deaths. In Jesus as the Christ, as God’s Anointed One, indeed as God Incarnate, God entered fully and freely into human life, into all aspects of human life, right up to and including unjust suffering and death. In Christ on the cross we see God in person, and we do not see God remaining aloof from the tragedies of which human life is so full. Rather, we see God entering into them, experiencing them, sharing them with us in God’s own person. We see God not only experiencing them but sanctifying them with the Divine presence.

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? 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? It’s not in the Luke we heard today, but 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 NRSV Have you never 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 to 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 respond, look to the cross of Jesus. There is God the Son Incarnate experiencing the same thing. There is God experiencing human pain, suffering, injustice, and death. There is God experiencing nothing less than Godforsakenness. And what does that mean? It means the most wonderful thing that could ever be. It means that God has transformed Godforsakenness 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 it 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 try 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 knowledge 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 even 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.

So why didn’t he save himself? Because that’s not who God is. God is not concerned to save Godself. God is concerned to save us, and God saves us by showing us on the cross of Jesus just how much God loves us, just how God stands in unshakable solidarity with us, come what may. And that, my friends, is the best news there was or ever could be. Amen.