Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 8, 2009

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.

Jesus died. That much is undeniable. Beyond that, he not only died, he was crucified. That means that he was executed—murdered—by the Romans as a common political prisoner. He was a threat, they thought, or at least a nuisance. So they did to him what they did to everyone they thought was a threat, or even a nuisance. They killed him, and they did it in the most brutal, miserable, demeaning way they could think of so that he—and all the others—would not just die but would be a warning to everyone with similar ideas not to mess with the Roman Empire.

Jesus died a miserable, humiliating death, and his followers couldn’t believe it. Our reading from Mark this morning was written around forty years after Jesus’ death, but one part of it reflects what Jesus’ followers must have thought about his death at the time. When Jesus says that he must suffer and die—more about that in a minute—Peter “rebukes” him. Mark doesn’t put words in Peter’s mouth, but Matthew does. In a parallel passage written maybe fifteen or twenty years after Mark Matthew has Peter say “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” Matthew 16:22 The story is set before the things Jesus predicts have happened, but I think it also reflects how Jesus’ followers must have reacted when it did happen. Can’t you just imagine them saying: How can this be?! It can’t be! It’s so wrong! Why didn’t God intervene to stop it?! I’m sure they reacted with disbelief, shock, grief, and even anger at God. The one in whom they had hoped, in whom they had experienced the presence of God in a new, powerful, and direct way unlike anything they had ever experienced before had been rubbed out like a nobody, crushed like a gnat, snuffed out like an ember that popped out of the fire. They couldn’t believe it. It looked for all the world like they had been wrong about Jesus, for surely God wouldn’t let someone like Jesus, someone so faithful, someone so holy even, just be killed like a lawless criminal. Yet that is exactly what happened to Jesus. He looked for all the world like an abject failure. True, there was what they experienced as his Resurrection a couple of days later, but that didn’t change the facts about his death. If anything it made them all the more incomprehensible. If God cared so much about Jesus that God raised him from the dead, why had God let him be crucified in the first place? It was all more than they could bear, more than they could comprehend.

And yet. And yet there was still that experience that they had of meeting God in him in a new and life transforming way that they couldn’t forget and couldn’t deny. So they had to find a way to make sense out of it. Very quickly they came to the conclusion that there had to be meaning not only in Jesus’ life, and not only in his Resurrection, but also in his death. The only way they could bear it was to find meaning in it. The only way they could come to terms with God letting it happen—for it would never occur to them that it happened against God’s will (more about that in a minute too)—was to say that there had to be meaning in it. God had to have a purpose in letting it happen, or even willing it to happen.

It took them a long time to figure out just what that meaning was, just what God’s purpose in it was. And they didn’t all come to the same conclusion about that. But their conviction that Jesus’ death had to have meaning, that God had to have a purpose in it, quite early on led them to an interesting conclusion. They began to speak of Jesus’ death as necessary. We see that conviction in our passage from Mark this morning. Mark doesn’t say just that Jesus knew he was going to killed. He says that Jesus began to teach the Disciples that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed.” Not will be, must be. It’s not hard to understand why they thought that. Jesus’ death couldn’t be meaningless. They couldn’t live with the idea that it was meaningless. And if it had meaning, it had to happen because if it hadn’t happened the meaning would have been lost. And so they took what did happen and said it had to happen.

The Christian tradition has followed suit ever since. Indeed, it went even further. It said that it was God’s will that Jesus suffer and die. That makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose. If there is meaning in Jesus’ suffering and death, and if God’s purpose was to convey that meaning to us, then you could say that Jesus’ suffering and death were God’s will so that the meaning that God wanted us to get, we’d get. That certainly is the idea behind Mel Gibson’s gruesome movie The Passion of the Christ, with its marketing slogan “Dying was his reason for living.”

But I’ve got to tell you that I’ve got a real problem with the idea that Jesus’ suffering and dying a horrible death had to happen because it was God’s will. We know that all humans die, but I don’t think that suffering is God’s will for anyone. I certainly don’t think that it was God’s will for Jesus, whom we confess to be God’s own Son. Jesus’ Crucifixion was not God’s will. I cannot believe anything other than that it was the action of sinful human beings precisely against God’s will. I believe that God sent Jesus to lead a fully human life, and that meant that he would die some day. I don’t believe that the brutal, unjust way in which he died was God’s will.

So what are we to make of Jesus’ death? Let me suggest to you a way of thinking about it that is true to what we know happened but that doesn’t blame what happened on God. With the first disciples we know what happened, and like them we struggle to understand. Like them, we yearn for meaning in what seems so senseless and meaningless. Yet we can’t believe that God would orchestrate the unjust torture and murder of God’s own Son as a way of conveying meaning to us.

Here’s how I see it: God did not send Jesus to die, but God did not send Jesus not to die either. God sent Jesus to reveal to us in the fullest way possible God’s true nature and God’s true will for all of humanity. Precisely because Jesus did that so well the world couldn’t tolerate him, and it killed him. That’s what happened, and though it may sound rather strange to say so, God had to deal with what happened every bit as much as those first disciples did. And so God opened the hearts and the minds of Jesus’ followers to find meaning in Jesus’ death. God used what had happened to complete the revelation of God’s nature and God’s will that Jesus had begun during his short public ministry.

The death came first, then the meaning. His first followers, and many of his followers today, think that the meaning came first and so he had to die the way he did. That’s why Mel Gibson was able to make a lot of money proclaiming that dying was his reason for living. I don’t agree. I think that what happened to Jesus is an opportunity for us to find meaning, to find out something about who God is, not something that God did to God’s own Son.

Many of you know what I think the meaning of Jesus’ Crucifixion is. I’ve written about it, and I’ve preached about it before. I’m going to preach about it again soon, but not today. Today I want to invite you rather than preach at you. I invite you into a Lenten spiritual exercise. I invite you to consider what Jesus’ death means to you. I invite you to meditate on it. I invite you to pray over it. What does it mean to you that the world murdered the Son of God Incarnate, which is who we confess Jesus to be? Or does it mean anything at all? Was it God’s will? Did it have to happen? Who do we see God to be when we consider Jesus’ Crucifixion? Or does Jesus’ Crucifixion say anything at all about who God is? Maybe you will have other questions to ponder. Good. I invite you to ponder away.

Jesus’ earliest disciples wrestled with all of these questions. We are Jesus’ disciples too, and we need to wrestle with them just as they did. We don’t have to reach the same answers they did. Like I said, they didn’t all reach the same answer. But Jesus’ Crucifixion is a central event in our faith’s foundational story. It is an event that, among others, makes Christianity unique among the world’s great religions. Jesus’ glorious Resurrection that we will celebrate on Easter doesn’t undo the Crucifixion, doesn’t mean it never happened. And we have to think about it. We have to come to terms with it. May this Lenten season be a time for us to do that. Amen.