Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-24; John 19:1-42
In the Hollywood
movie business they used to talk about the classic plot of a love story. Act One:
boy meets girl and boy gets girl. Act Two: boy loses girl. Act Three: boy gets
girl back.
The Bible also tells a classic love story. Act One:
God creates world. Act Two: God loses world. Act Three: God gets world back.
It’s classic. It’s perfect. It is what God did by coming to our world in Jesus.
We are still in the beginning of Act Three. It is far from over.
In the Gospel of John we are told the last words of
Jesus; just before he died on the cross. The last words were, “It is finished”.
“It is finished!”
Look what Jesus went through on his last day. He was
beaten with fists and clubs. He was brutally whipped according to a Roman
method that was sometimes fatal. The actual hours he spent nailed to the cross
were death by torture: hanging from nails in hands and feet, dehydration, asphyxiation,
loss of blood.
If we had gone through all that (knowing that we had
come to our final moment, and our final breath) “It is finished” would have
meant that it was finally over. “It is finished” would have been, for us, our
words of surrender; our words of defeat. But it was not that way for Jesus.
“It is finished” uses an odd Greek word that means
reaching the goal, achieving the purpose. It means consummated, completed. It would
be like shouting, “Victory!”!
Imagine thinking that such a death (a death by abuse
and torture), drawn out to the bitter end, was somehow a victory.
Something in me wants to say that it is the
resurrection that makes the death of Jesus a victory. But there is something in
this horrible death that makes the resurrection victory. The resurrection of
Jesus would not have been victory without this outrage that paved the way for
it.
In the perfect love story, the boy getting his lost
girl back is a true ordeal. It is a long and suffering quest. God getting his
lost world back was a true ordeal; a long and suffering quest.
The lost world is our world, and our world had its
beginnings in the life of the first humans: Adam and Eve. At the dawn of our
creation God designed us for a thriving life, an abundant life.
It was a life that thrived because it was rich in
relationships. It was grounded in the lives of others. Human life was designed
to be abundant because it was planted in our relationship with God.
It was through our relationship with God (as our Creator
and
All this goodness and abundance would come from our
love and faithfulness to God: knowing how loving and faithful God was toward
us. We would say “yes” to what God said “yes” to. We would say “no” to what God
said “no” to.
We would be partners with God; God’s special agents
in his creation, as bold as that sounds. We would be his living images walking,
and talking, and working in his world with him. We would be the mind and the voice
of the creation giving to God the praise which no other creature could put into
words. And we would offer the creation’s prayers to God. That was human nature,
as God intended it to be.
But Adam and Eve chose to say “yes” to what God said
“no” to; and “no” to what God said “yes” to. They did it in order to set up a
partnership between themselves; to become a team that was able to bypass God,
if necessary.
They wanted to have knowledge and wisdom that God might
not give them. They wanted to know what to do and how to live without having to
consult God. They acted without faith in God. They acted without love for God. In
doing this, they changed human nature.
This choice was theirs, in the beginning of the human
race. It was their choice of what we were to be. It is often ours to choose what
others around us will be, or it is ours to choose the sort of world others will
face because of our choices.
All life exists in connection with God. When Adam and
Eve chose to go outside the love and faithfulness of God, they went outside of
God himself. But there is no life outside of God, and so they went into death.
They lived in death. It is possible to do that, for a while.
So when the Lord God came into the Garden of Eden, in
the cool of the day, for fellowship with his human children, he found them
hiding from him. Although God was still full of love and faithfulness toward
them, they were afraid of God, because they had said “no” to his love and
faithfulness, and they were no longer able to feel what they had said “no” to.
God tried to talk to them and get to the root of
their problem. They answered with half-truths. The man blamed his wife. He was
willing for her to pay the price for what he had done. He was a traitor to her,
right to her face.
So, the human race was divided against itself. There
was cruelty, deception, pride, fear, anger. In the next generation their son
Cain would kill his brother Abel. One third of the male population of the earth
would kill another third.
The world as we know it was born. Humans, living in
this world, could no longer live at peace with God or in peaceful relationship
with each other, or with the world that God had made, or even at peace with
themselves; not as God designed.
Even in the midst of life, human beings experience
sin in the form of a kind of death, because the relationships on which our life
depends have been broken. We cannot mend these relationships completely. We
cannot make them what they ought to be, because something essential within us
is also broken.
My cousin Don lost his first wife to a long battle
with cancer when the oldest of their three children was a teenager. Patty was a
gentle, compassionate, cheerful Christian. She was a lovely human being. Later
on, one of Don’s friends went through a similar chain of events, and I remember
Don writing about it; that he approached his grieving friend, and hugged him,
and murmured in his ear, “It sucks.”
When the Lord first put Adam in the garden he told him,
“Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the
day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Genesis 2:17) It is death (taking many
forms, working in our life, even when we are at our best) that makes it suck.
In Jesus, God entered this life: this sweet, rich,
beautiful, troubling life. Remember that, in the beginning of his gospel, John
tells us that Jesus is the Word that was God from the beginning. (John 1:1-3) Jesus
is God expressing himself, so that we can see him and know him as he really is.
On the cross we see God encountering our world where it sucks the most.
Adam and Eve tried to get out of their mess by
denying it; by denying their responsibility for it, and by trying to make
others pay. God took the responsibility for our mess by stepping into it at its
worst. This is who Jesus is.
In Jesus we see God’s willingness to completely
disappear as a baby wrapped in cloths in a manger in Bethlehem
In Jesus we see a God who cares for the sick, and for
the caregivers of the sick. We see a God who cares for the grieving, and who grieves
alongside them at the grave of a friend. We see a God who cares for the hungry
and the needy. We see a God who hates hypocrisy, and self-righteousness, and a
petty and lazy faith.
In Jesus, we see a God who takes upon himself the
suffering that comes from our separation from him. He lets himself be punished
by the Jewish authorities as a blasphemer, and by the Romans as a traitor to
the emperor, although he was neither.
Adam courted death by his blasphemous ambition as a
creature to become the god he could never be. Jesus courted death by his
blasphemous ambition, as God, to become as truly human as Adam or any one of
us.
Adam courted death as a traitor against the love and
faithfulness of God. Jesus courted death as a traitor against our self-love and
self-rule. Jesus came to become the man that Adam failed to be; to become the
person each one of us fails to be.
The Roman governor brought Jesus out to his accusers
and said, “Behold, the man! Here is the man!” (John 19:5) God came in Christ
willing to be the man who must die because he stepped up to be, for us, what we
have failed to be.
The Temple
Jesus came to die to take our place; almost to suck into
himself all the human sin and all the evils of our world. He came to carry the
hell of our sin upon his shoulders, and to be the one who must die of it. He
did this to break the power that sin, and evil, and hell hold over us, and over
our world, so that they could no longer misshape human life.
Broken humans like us cannot mend the world. God came
in Jesus, as the innocent one who could die to mend human hearts and make us
whole. What happened on the cross has the power of God in it to make the work perfect,
good, and lasting. God, expressing himself in Jesus, has the power to see it
through until he makes all things new, and the victory will become visible to
everyone.
In a broken, human world like ours, broken by our own
selfishness, God would be the last one expected to take responsibility for
this. God has done the outrageously perfect thing to get the world back; to get
us back.
In Jesus we see that the glory, and the majesty, and
the honor of God are this, to stoop down to the worst horror that we and our
world can offer. He takes it upon himself, and he overcomes it for us.
It is the perfection of God to be the one who stands
for us in our greatest need. It is finished! Victory!
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