Maundy Thursday … the day the Chief Potentate of the Roman Catholic Church washes the feet of the poor in obedience to instructions from Jesus. “I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:14) The day Jesus transformed Passover into the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion. The day that ended in his arrest and trumped up trial.
Without doubt this has been one of the most dramatic commemorations of Christ’s walk to Golgotha that I can remember. A lot of the drama, for me, centers on the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” Extreme elitist reaction to this movie, even before its release, has been nothing short of circus. The box office stats are amazing eve to the most optimistic of us. The movie itself is a creative, moving re-enactment of the most pivotal event in cosmic history.
My Wife Shirley and I watched the movie with friends almost three weeks ago. We were moved deeply. The love for Jesus that is growing in me deepened as I saw, in graphic detail, the humiliation and devastation he chose so that I would not have to suffer these consequences of my own sin. Shirley and I both saw a man, who, though appearing to be at the mercy of his accusers and tormentors, deliberately chose every intricate detail of his death so that he could “carry the sins of the entire world in his body with that cross, and to it, enabling us to die to sins and live for righteousness; so that we may be healed by those wounds.” (See 1 Peter 2:24.)
Reflecting now on the movie and the flurry of media attempts to catch this “wave of religious enthusiasm” – another Peter Jennings attempt (this one three hours in prime time) to reduce it all to a secular event no different than any other historical social event in antiquity; a TIME cover story; opinion upon opinion appearing in the most unexpected places there is much about this circus that troubles me. Still, whether well or poorly represented, Jesus really is, as he should be, front row center during this Holiest of all Holy Weeks.
One commentary on the movie has lurked in the background and frequently played across the foreground of my mind. This critique appeared in The New Republic on March 8. Written by Leon Wieseltier, TNR’s literary editor it is, without question a scathing review. “The Passion of the Christ is intoxicated by blood,” Wieleltier opines. “The bloodthirstiness of Gibson's film is startling, and quickly sickening. The fluid is everywhere. It drips, it runs, it spatters, it jumps. It trickles down the post at which Jesus is flagellated … down the cross upon which he is crucified, … . The flagellation scene and the crucifixion scene are frenzies of blood. When Jesus is nailed to the wood, the drops of blood that spring from his wound are filmed in slow-motion, with a twisted tenderness … It all concludes in the shower of blood that issues from the corpse of Jesus when it is pierced by the Roman soldier's spear.” Gibson’s achievement, Wieseltier concludes, is the “verisimilitude of filmed violence.” “The viewing of The Passion of the Christ,” is, for this critic, “a profoundly brutalizing experience … This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life.” Acknowledging the subjectivity of the sentiment he writes, “it leaves you desperate to escape its standpoint, to find another way of regarding the horror that you have just observed.” Just in case you’re not quite sure of his assessment he, at one point, in passing, alludes to it as Gibson’s, “slasher movie.” After several lines of insistence that the movie is, “without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie,” he concludes with this. “… the loathing of Jews in Mel Gibson's film is really not its worst degradation … . Its loathing of Jews is subsumed in its loathing of spirituality, in its loathing of existence. If there is a kingdom of heaven, The Passion of the Christ is shutting it in men's faces.”
After several readings and much reflection on this piece I am still troubled by not only the critique but the reasons for such animosity to the vivid re-telling of a real event of colossal, even cosmic proportions. Granted this shouldn’t surprise me. Less than 20 years after it took place St. Paul noted that it had become an event “scandalous” to the Jews, and “foolishness” to the Gentiles. (See 1 Corinthians 1:23.) It certainly is both of these to Wieseltier. It is “repulsive,” “fantasy” to him.
Perhaps the roots of such disgust and disdain can be attributed to the general uneasiness, even denial with which all of us encounter suffering and death. This “uneasiness” has been credibly substantiated in the work of Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist and a 1974 Pulitzer Prize recipient. In his Pulitzer applauded work, “The Denial of Death,” Becker writes this. “We might call this existential paradox (a Kierkegaardian category) the condition of individuality within finitude. Man … is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality … gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.
“Yet at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body … a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways – the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die.” Later, summarizing his work in “… Denial …” for a subsequent book, “Escape from Evil,” Becker observes that “man’s innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man’s natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image is the root cause of human evil.”
My contention here is that Wieseltier and, for that matter, all of us are so uncomfortable with the unparalleled suffering of Jesus the Christ because of what we must face about ourselves in it. This is how we, humankind, treat good men. The preposterous claim that this good man was, at the same time God, even goes so far as to suggest that this is how we, humankind, treat God when he comes to visit. Deeply offended by such denigrating inferences we ignore the event or convene councils to remove the offensive elements of it. When we protest or deny it, sometimes the ink, with which we record our protest is pure vitriol. But the blood won’t go away. We have been a species of blood since the beginning of time. Within a generation after our preposterous assumption that we could master our own destiny one man killed another. And the killing has gone on, and on, and on.
Something else Wieseltier wrote reminded me how pervasively the blood stains our race. “I do not agree,” he protested, “that Jesus is my savior or anybody else's.” This sounded to me gravely like the protest of the Humanist Manifesto. “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves,” the framers assert in the closing sentence of the First of their “common principles.” Few documents approach the heights of this Manifesto. And yet, hidden even in these heroic aspirations of the “mind that soars,” are dark reminders of our bloodiness. Principle Eight, insisting that, “All persons should have a voice in developing the values and goals that determine their lives,” then states, “Alienating forces should be modified or eradicated … .” There appears to be a contradiction here. “All persons should have a voice.” That is except “Alienating forces.” They, whoever they might be, should have no voice. In fact they must be modified. I can only imagine how that might be done. They must, if necessary, be eradicated. However you imagine this being done one thing is painfully apparent. Here, in the blueprint for a humanist utopia, are stains of blood.
Wieseltier, concerned as he is for spirituality and existence, has failed to reckon with the grim fact that he is every bit as complicit in the bloody history of our race as any of the rest of us. His vitriolic reaction to Mel Gibson’s work is a chilling reminder that it is often the elite, religious, political, or intellectual; those who have found in their creeds, their power, and their intelligence a temporary shroud for their mortality and a case for their superiority, who identify the alienating forces, and determine how best to modify or eliminate them. For all of recorded history it has been so.
But now, in Jesus of Nazareth, we find an exception. A man, with direct access to infinite power, who manipulates or eliminates no one. He chooses, rather, to love all; every member of the human race. He chooses to give himself for the sake of each and every one. He will suffer at the bloodstained hands of everyman so that he, now one of us, can forever change the course of our inglorious history. He forgoes the superiority and privileges of ultimate sovereignty and becomes one of us. He does not deny the truth that to be human means to die. He does not run from it. He does not use his power or the privilege it offers him to get around it. He does not manipulate or eliminate those who are a threat to him. Like the Father has done from before time he risks life in a world of free creatures; people who can scorn and reject him. Love can exist only in such a world. So he risks. As expected he suffers and dies. At first glance it seems he has lost everything. Existence really does seem to be profaned in this darkest of all moments. Look again. Something quite remarkable happens. Life explodes from the bloody ground around the cross. There is a Kingdom of Heaven. And the King has just thrown open the door to any and every human who will permit him to be their Savior/King.
From long before recorded history it has been written into the fiber of things that life is perpetuated in death. “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies it remains a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds.” And so it is. So it is now for all of us because Jesus is the “first of many, who, having died, will live on.” And the spirit of this person who dies, ignominiously, so that the many may live, is the passion – the deeply felt, tirelessly patient, no strings love – of the Christ.
Jim Denison
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
IdeaLog - Illumidate 05.26.04 - Why Did They Have to be So Mean to Him
This past Weekend, Easter Weekend, a colleague told me about his and his Wife’s experience with Mel Gibson’s, “The Passion of the Christ.” Reflecting back on the conversation since one thing he said stands out in my memory. As they left the movie his Wife said, “Why did they have to be so mean to him?”
This deeply pained identification with Jesus’ suffering is one of the more common responses to this dramatic portrayal of his crucifixion. Cascading down a third of the cover of none other than TIME magazine is emblazoned the question, “Why Did Jesus Have to Die?” Kids wonder. Journalists speculate. Scholars pontificate. Pastors elaborate. One Pastor has published a short work titled, “The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty Reasons Why He Came to Die.” A High School Teacher prepared a 3 page point-by-point summary of Biblical answers to this pressing question in response to the endless pleading of his Students for an explanation of what they perceived to be an atrocity.
So, WHY DID HE HAVE TO DIE?
At the risk of appearing presumptuous I’d like to weigh in. Without pretending to provide an exhaustive summary of what the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures teach about the death of Jesus I suggest the following reasons I consider to be critical to us.
1. This is the way we humans treat someone who is truly better than we are.
2. Someone had to reconcile us with each other and with our God.
3. Someone had to defeat sin and its perpetrators.
4. We need a pardon.
5. Somebody had to get us out of debt.
6. We’re dieing someone has to save our lives.
7. We are enslaved to a lot of things and need deliverance.
8. We don’t really know God.
9. We were made to rule and need someone to restore us to our rightful status.
O.K. … I don’t have fifty reasons. Still these are a lot. Theodore Jennings Jr., of Chicago Theological Seminary probably thinks there are too many. “The New Testament,” he commented in an interview with the writers of the TIME article, “is just all over the map … something really drastic, fundamental and dramatic has happened and they’re pulling together all kinds of ways to understand that.” He seems to be saying that if we really understood what we believed here we’d be much more concise and orderly in our answers to the big questions Jesus life and death pose.
Well, maybe we don’t understand it. We are, after all, trying to explain something that has been conceived and carried out in the mind of an infinite God before ever any of it came to our sphere of existence. The nine reasons I’ve chosen are matters I recognize in Scripture and recognize as not only reasons for his suffering but aspects of it that underscore our complicity. You see, he really was “Wounded for our transgressions … .”
1. This is the Way We Humans Treat Someone Who is Truly Better Than We Are.
Have you ever thought about how we came up with the term Nerd and why the sort of person you picture as you read the word ever got branded with such a term of derision? This is a common instance of a self-indicting practice. We have ways of bringing down, or at least down to a little below the level we’ve defined to be our own, people who are, or are perceived as, better than ourselves. And my colleague’s Wife saw that playing out in the life of a man whom she perceived to be guiltless. “He never did one thing wrong,
Not once said anything amiss. They called him every name in the book and he said nothing back. He suffered in silence …” That’s how his friend Peter describes him. Frankly, the more I learn about Jesus the more accurate I find this description to be. What it is about us that leaves us so touchy in the presence of goodness will have to wait for another discussion. The fact remains. We don’t treat good people well around here.
2. Someone Had to Reconcile Us With Each Other and With Our God
Read the first three chapters of Genesis.
Consider this. Our choice to disobey God resulted in alienation from literally everyone and every thing in our world including ourselves. The first couple’s immediate awareness of their nakedness is stark evidence of immediate self-consciousness and shame. Their hiding, ostensibly from each other but most certainly from God, confirms alienation from each other and from God. The killing of animals for clothing, the feud that began with serpents that day, the cursed ground, the oppression of woman by man. Rifts that have divided us to this very day were torn in the fiber of our existence the day we presumed to be our own God.
The New Testament writers use the term “reconciliation” to speak of the bridge that has been rebuilt between God and man, and between us and our fellows, through Jesus. Is there any greater incident of the realization of this possibility than Christ’s compassionate prayer for his tormentors, “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”?
The love of God demonstrated in Jesus is God’s first step in the journey to reconcile all the rifts that exist because of our sin.
3. Someone Had to Defeat Sin and Its Perpetrators
Our greatest liability is our sin. The presumptive notion that we could take a course different from the one God designed for us spelled our doom. The burden of God, which we assumed when we chose to define our own destiny, is too heavy for us and we are overwhelmed by its weight. The decision to ignore God and defer to ourselves is called sin in the Bible. Our inability to live up to our own press, our constantly failing to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves, our “missing the mark,” our shortcomings are the outgrowth of that sin. We are incapable of fulfilling the mission we’ve given ourselves.
Most of the blame for this rests with us.
There is however an accomplice. The tempter is in it with us.
St. Paul wrote this about our sin and our accomplice. “When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive—right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross. He stripped all the spiritual tyrants (our accomplice and his ilk) in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.” The cross was a battlefield. Jesus won. He now has the resources to declare you and me forgiven and to set about the lifelong work of recreating us; making us like the God in whose image we were originally made.
4. We Need a Pardon
Think about it! You’re guilty. The execution is about to be carried out. The apparatus has been prepared. The “guard and the sad old Padre” have come to escort you to the chamber of death. You’re “Dead Man Walkin’.”
Suddenly it all comes to a grinding halt. A pardon is delivered. The Governor has commuted your sentence.
And so he has. Read it again. “All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross.”
You did it. You told God to butt out. You assumed what you considered to be your rightful place as the ruler of your own life. But you overstepped. You made wrong choices. Your own life was skewed. A lot of other people suffered as well. The world God trusted to you and your race suffered. It is now the kind of world that kills good people.
But God has commuted your sentence. You are free to go. You have been pardoned.
Another reason Jesus died.
5. Somebody Had to Get Us Out of Debt
Every time we pray the prayer we’ve come to know as “The Lord’s Prayer,” we acknowledge another Biblical assertion about the reason for Christ’s suffering and death. We are indebted to God.
To underscore the extent to which this is true Jesus told a story. “The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market.
“The poor wretch threw himself at the king’s feet and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt.”
“In the day you eat fruit from the forbidden tree,” God said in Eden, “you will surely die.” That dieing is about more than declining life span. It is immortality in isolation from God who gives life. Eternal solitary confinement is what we owe. Jesus covered our debt. He endured a Divine moment separated from God. His infinite solitude was enough to cover our debt. Paid in full, is written large, in the blood of Jesus, across the loan documents.
6. We’re Dieing, Someone Has to Save Our Lives
Yes, as we acknowledged previously, our immortality has been compromised.
But Jesus has died to correct that as well.
Perhaps the most familiar passage in all the Bible is John 3:16. Even people who have no clue about what’s in the Bible or who Jesus is have seen that reference. They may think it’s a trick play in football cause they keep seeing it at football games. But at least it’s familiar. It is about Christ’s conquest of death. “God loved the world – i.e. – you and me – so very much that he gave up his only Son (let him die) so that anyone who believes in him will not perish – i.e. – die forever – but have life that never ends.”
Jesus endured the most ignominious death known to humankind so that we could live forever with him.
7. We Are Enslaved to a Lot of Things and Need Deliverance
Read this.
“So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? …
“That’s what baptism into the life of Jesus means. When we are lowered into the water, it is like the burial of Jesus; when we are raised up out of the water, it is like the resurrection of Jesus. Our Father raises each of us into a light-filled world so that we can see where we’re going in our new grace-sovereign country.
“Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the Cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did.
“That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God.”
This is a modern English version of a section of the New Testament. (Romans 6:1 and several of the following verses.)
The message is clear. Our sin has enslaved us under its tyranny. Jesus has thrown off that tyranny by walking out of his tomb.
We are delivered. “Free indeed,” to quote Jesus.
8. We Don’t Really Know God
“No one has ever seen God,” St John wrote in the first chapter of his selective biography of Jesus. “But,” he continues, “(God’s) only Son, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart; he has told us about him.”
Every event, every word he spoke, every act in the life of Jesus, even his response to pain and death, gives us a glimpse of God. Jesus said, “This is immortal life. To know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” And, he said to his Father God, “I have revealed you to them.”
We can know God now thanks to Jesus’ willingness to come and tell us about him both through what he taught as well as how he lived and died and lived.
9. We Were Born to Rule and Need Someone to Restore Us to Our Rightful Status
God’s instructions to the first couple were, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” We were made to rule. Our choice to take that too far, disregarding God as the source of our authority and the one alone deserving of the last word, resulted in alienation, conflict, and oppression. The extent to which we had lost control was never more evident than on the day of Christ’s crucifixion. But on that day the potential for a major reversal, what C.S. Lewis described as “death starting to work backward,” was introduced. Within less than 50 years St. Paul was able to write, “The fruit of the Spirit is … self-control;” “He has not given us a Spirit of timidity but of love, power, and self-discipline;” “Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.” “Self-control;” “love, power, and self-discipline;” “reign;” the curse is certainly being reversed. We are being restored, gradually but surely, to our original place in God’s world. This restoration is taking place right now in the lives of people who are filled with the Spirit of God. Great privileges follow for those in whom the Spirit of God is completely free to carry out his ongoing work of creation; greater by far than many of us expect. “We are being changed,” St. Paul asserts, “from one degree to another in our resemblance to Jesus.” Still, though our experiences of restoration are substantial now they will not be “what they’re gonna be,” ‘til we enter the real unseen world where “this mortal will become immortal.”
Jesus said, “I came to give my people life to the max.” This life is ultimate living; the way for which we were created. Restoration to the place of rule to which God originally appointed us is only possible as we take that way. Jesus life as the Christ, the consummate man, is the only model for such life. He had to die to make it possible. So he did. And, so, we will, indeed, live as he lived and rule with him “substantially now, ultimately then.”
Why did they have to be so mean to him? Because rescuing us required an effort that drastic. Because his love was so great it willingly chose such effort. Because he considered the joy of seeing his beloved restored to be worth such a price.
One song writer caught in the euphoria of this love of Jesus wrote the following lines. “Were the whole realm of nature mine that were a present far too small. Love so amazing, so Divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
I agree!!!
Jim Denison
This deeply pained identification with Jesus’ suffering is one of the more common responses to this dramatic portrayal of his crucifixion. Cascading down a third of the cover of none other than TIME magazine is emblazoned the question, “Why Did Jesus Have to Die?” Kids wonder. Journalists speculate. Scholars pontificate. Pastors elaborate. One Pastor has published a short work titled, “The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty Reasons Why He Came to Die.” A High School Teacher prepared a 3 page point-by-point summary of Biblical answers to this pressing question in response to the endless pleading of his Students for an explanation of what they perceived to be an atrocity.
So, WHY DID HE HAVE TO DIE?
At the risk of appearing presumptuous I’d like to weigh in. Without pretending to provide an exhaustive summary of what the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures teach about the death of Jesus I suggest the following reasons I consider to be critical to us.
1. This is the way we humans treat someone who is truly better than we are.
2. Someone had to reconcile us with each other and with our God.
3. Someone had to defeat sin and its perpetrators.
4. We need a pardon.
5. Somebody had to get us out of debt.
6. We’re dieing someone has to save our lives.
7. We are enslaved to a lot of things and need deliverance.
8. We don’t really know God.
9. We were made to rule and need someone to restore us to our rightful status.
O.K. … I don’t have fifty reasons. Still these are a lot. Theodore Jennings Jr., of Chicago Theological Seminary probably thinks there are too many. “The New Testament,” he commented in an interview with the writers of the TIME article, “is just all over the map … something really drastic, fundamental and dramatic has happened and they’re pulling together all kinds of ways to understand that.” He seems to be saying that if we really understood what we believed here we’d be much more concise and orderly in our answers to the big questions Jesus life and death pose.
Well, maybe we don’t understand it. We are, after all, trying to explain something that has been conceived and carried out in the mind of an infinite God before ever any of it came to our sphere of existence. The nine reasons I’ve chosen are matters I recognize in Scripture and recognize as not only reasons for his suffering but aspects of it that underscore our complicity. You see, he really was “Wounded for our transgressions … .”
1. This is the Way We Humans Treat Someone Who is Truly Better Than We Are.
Have you ever thought about how we came up with the term Nerd and why the sort of person you picture as you read the word ever got branded with such a term of derision? This is a common instance of a self-indicting practice. We have ways of bringing down, or at least down to a little below the level we’ve defined to be our own, people who are, or are perceived as, better than ourselves. And my colleague’s Wife saw that playing out in the life of a man whom she perceived to be guiltless. “He never did one thing wrong,
Not once said anything amiss. They called him every name in the book and he said nothing back. He suffered in silence …” That’s how his friend Peter describes him. Frankly, the more I learn about Jesus the more accurate I find this description to be. What it is about us that leaves us so touchy in the presence of goodness will have to wait for another discussion. The fact remains. We don’t treat good people well around here.
2. Someone Had to Reconcile Us With Each Other and With Our God
Read the first three chapters of Genesis.
Consider this. Our choice to disobey God resulted in alienation from literally everyone and every thing in our world including ourselves. The first couple’s immediate awareness of their nakedness is stark evidence of immediate self-consciousness and shame. Their hiding, ostensibly from each other but most certainly from God, confirms alienation from each other and from God. The killing of animals for clothing, the feud that began with serpents that day, the cursed ground, the oppression of woman by man. Rifts that have divided us to this very day were torn in the fiber of our existence the day we presumed to be our own God.
The New Testament writers use the term “reconciliation” to speak of the bridge that has been rebuilt between God and man, and between us and our fellows, through Jesus. Is there any greater incident of the realization of this possibility than Christ’s compassionate prayer for his tormentors, “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”?
The love of God demonstrated in Jesus is God’s first step in the journey to reconcile all the rifts that exist because of our sin.
3. Someone Had to Defeat Sin and Its Perpetrators
Our greatest liability is our sin. The presumptive notion that we could take a course different from the one God designed for us spelled our doom. The burden of God, which we assumed when we chose to define our own destiny, is too heavy for us and we are overwhelmed by its weight. The decision to ignore God and defer to ourselves is called sin in the Bible. Our inability to live up to our own press, our constantly failing to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves, our “missing the mark,” our shortcomings are the outgrowth of that sin. We are incapable of fulfilling the mission we’ve given ourselves.
Most of the blame for this rests with us.
There is however an accomplice. The tempter is in it with us.
St. Paul wrote this about our sin and our accomplice. “When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive—right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross. He stripped all the spiritual tyrants (our accomplice and his ilk) in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.” The cross was a battlefield. Jesus won. He now has the resources to declare you and me forgiven and to set about the lifelong work of recreating us; making us like the God in whose image we were originally made.
4. We Need a Pardon
Think about it! You’re guilty. The execution is about to be carried out. The apparatus has been prepared. The “guard and the sad old Padre” have come to escort you to the chamber of death. You’re “Dead Man Walkin’.”
Suddenly it all comes to a grinding halt. A pardon is delivered. The Governor has commuted your sentence.
And so he has. Read it again. “All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross.”
You did it. You told God to butt out. You assumed what you considered to be your rightful place as the ruler of your own life. But you overstepped. You made wrong choices. Your own life was skewed. A lot of other people suffered as well. The world God trusted to you and your race suffered. It is now the kind of world that kills good people.
But God has commuted your sentence. You are free to go. You have been pardoned.
Another reason Jesus died.
5. Somebody Had to Get Us Out of Debt
Every time we pray the prayer we’ve come to know as “The Lord’s Prayer,” we acknowledge another Biblical assertion about the reason for Christ’s suffering and death. We are indebted to God.
To underscore the extent to which this is true Jesus told a story. “The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market.
“The poor wretch threw himself at the king’s feet and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt.”
“In the day you eat fruit from the forbidden tree,” God said in Eden, “you will surely die.” That dieing is about more than declining life span. It is immortality in isolation from God who gives life. Eternal solitary confinement is what we owe. Jesus covered our debt. He endured a Divine moment separated from God. His infinite solitude was enough to cover our debt. Paid in full, is written large, in the blood of Jesus, across the loan documents.
6. We’re Dieing, Someone Has to Save Our Lives
Yes, as we acknowledged previously, our immortality has been compromised.
But Jesus has died to correct that as well.
Perhaps the most familiar passage in all the Bible is John 3:16. Even people who have no clue about what’s in the Bible or who Jesus is have seen that reference. They may think it’s a trick play in football cause they keep seeing it at football games. But at least it’s familiar. It is about Christ’s conquest of death. “God loved the world – i.e. – you and me – so very much that he gave up his only Son (let him die) so that anyone who believes in him will not perish – i.e. – die forever – but have life that never ends.”
Jesus endured the most ignominious death known to humankind so that we could live forever with him.
7. We Are Enslaved to a Lot of Things and Need Deliverance
Read this.
“So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? …
“That’s what baptism into the life of Jesus means. When we are lowered into the water, it is like the burial of Jesus; when we are raised up out of the water, it is like the resurrection of Jesus. Our Father raises each of us into a light-filled world so that we can see where we’re going in our new grace-sovereign country.
“Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the Cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did.
“That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God.”
This is a modern English version of a section of the New Testament. (Romans 6:1 and several of the following verses.)
The message is clear. Our sin has enslaved us under its tyranny. Jesus has thrown off that tyranny by walking out of his tomb.
We are delivered. “Free indeed,” to quote Jesus.
8. We Don’t Really Know God
“No one has ever seen God,” St John wrote in the first chapter of his selective biography of Jesus. “But,” he continues, “(God’s) only Son, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart; he has told us about him.”
Every event, every word he spoke, every act in the life of Jesus, even his response to pain and death, gives us a glimpse of God. Jesus said, “This is immortal life. To know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.” And, he said to his Father God, “I have revealed you to them.”
We can know God now thanks to Jesus’ willingness to come and tell us about him both through what he taught as well as how he lived and died and lived.
9. We Were Born to Rule and Need Someone to Restore Us to Our Rightful Status
God’s instructions to the first couple were, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” We were made to rule. Our choice to take that too far, disregarding God as the source of our authority and the one alone deserving of the last word, resulted in alienation, conflict, and oppression. The extent to which we had lost control was never more evident than on the day of Christ’s crucifixion. But on that day the potential for a major reversal, what C.S. Lewis described as “death starting to work backward,” was introduced. Within less than 50 years St. Paul was able to write, “The fruit of the Spirit is … self-control;” “He has not given us a Spirit of timidity but of love, power, and self-discipline;” “Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.” “Self-control;” “love, power, and self-discipline;” “reign;” the curse is certainly being reversed. We are being restored, gradually but surely, to our original place in God’s world. This restoration is taking place right now in the lives of people who are filled with the Spirit of God. Great privileges follow for those in whom the Spirit of God is completely free to carry out his ongoing work of creation; greater by far than many of us expect. “We are being changed,” St. Paul asserts, “from one degree to another in our resemblance to Jesus.” Still, though our experiences of restoration are substantial now they will not be “what they’re gonna be,” ‘til we enter the real unseen world where “this mortal will become immortal.”
Jesus said, “I came to give my people life to the max.” This life is ultimate living; the way for which we were created. Restoration to the place of rule to which God originally appointed us is only possible as we take that way. Jesus life as the Christ, the consummate man, is the only model for such life. He had to die to make it possible. So he did. And, so, we will, indeed, live as he lived and rule with him “substantially now, ultimately then.”
Why did they have to be so mean to him? Because rescuing us required an effort that drastic. Because his love was so great it willingly chose such effort. Because he considered the joy of seeing his beloved restored to be worth such a price.
One song writer caught in the euphoria of this love of Jesus wrote the following lines. “Were the whole realm of nature mine that were a present far too small. Love so amazing, so Divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
I agree!!!
Jim Denison
IdeaLog Illumidate 05.26.04 - Tolerance Revisited
Something to think about as we struggle with the idea of "tolerance" as an absolute and clamor for some form of speech management in an increasingly pluralized society. ...
Today, for example, we encounter this paradox in the concept of 'militant democracy': no freedom for the enemies of freedom. However, from this example we can also learn that the straight deconstruction of the concept of tolerance falls into a trap, since the constitutional state contradicts precisely the premise from which the paternalistic sense of the traditional concept of 'tolerance' derives. Within a democratic community whose citizens reciprocally grant one another equal rights, no room is left for an authority allowed to one-sidedly determine the boundaries of what is to be tolerated. On the basis of the citizens' equal rights and reciprocal respect for each other, nobody possesses the privilege of setting the boundaries of tolerance from the viewpoint of their own preferences and value-orientations.
- Jurgen Habermas
More on morality and ethics in postmodern culture.
Today, for example, we encounter this paradox in the concept of 'militant democracy': no freedom for the enemies of freedom. However, from this example we can also learn that the straight deconstruction of the concept of tolerance falls into a trap, since the constitutional state contradicts precisely the premise from which the paternalistic sense of the traditional concept of 'tolerance' derives. Within a democratic community whose citizens reciprocally grant one another equal rights, no room is left for an authority allowed to one-sidedly determine the boundaries of what is to be tolerated. On the basis of the citizens' equal rights and reciprocal respect for each other, nobody possesses the privilege of setting the boundaries of tolerance from the viewpoint of their own preferences and value-orientations.
- Jurgen Habermas
More on morality and ethics in postmodern culture.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
IdeaLog Illumidate 05.25.04
I was talking with a guy the other day who was beating himself up over his sense of complete failure. As I listened to him I realized that his problem was not with his failures but with the extraordinarily high expectations he had for himself. He genuinely believed that he ought to be perfect. Listening to him I realized that it is possible to have such a lofty estimate of ourselves that we are rarely, if ever, pleased with ourselves.
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