Sermon manuscript:
I remember one of my seminary professors telling the
classroom of future pastors that Good Friday is not a funeral for Jesus. That
is to say, it is not an opportunity to open the vein of sentimentality and let
it gush all over everything. There is a way of observing Good Friday where we
feel good about feeling so bad about what happened to Jesus. In a way we hold
up a mirror, while watching the sad scene with Jesus, to look at our own tears
streaming down. The conclusions we draw is that we must be rather tenderhearted
and good people—after all, just look how sad we are.
Luke tells us in his Gospel about Jesus’s surprising
response to some sentimental women who were following him while he was carrying
his cross to Golgotha. It says, “A large crowd of people was following
Jesus, including women who were mourning and wailing for him. Jesus turned to
them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for me, but weep for
yourselves and for your children. Be sure of this: The days are coming when
they will say, “Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never gave
birth, and the breasts that never nursed.”’”
In this way Jesus ruined their pity party. They were having
a nice time feeling sorry for the man, and then he has to make himself so
unpitiable. What a jerk! I bet their tears dried up real quick.
There is a different conclusion that we should draw on Good
Friday than that we are ever so tenderhearted. Paul says in our reading, “We
have come to this conclusion: One died for all; therefore, all died.” This
is a very different conclusion. Instead of feeling like pretty good people, who
have gone out of their way on this Good Friday, to attend Jesus’s funeral and
to feel bad about he has been mistreated, we are confronted with this stark
claim that we have died. And why have we died? Because we were irredeemable.
God says in Jeremiah 17:9 that the human heart is deceitful
beyond measure. It cannot be cured. It cannot even be understood. Feeling good
about yourself for how you are feeling bad about something is crazy. But it is
just part and parcel of our standard operating procedure. Our flesh is always
looking for its own advantage. It looks at something or someone and says, “What
can I use you for?” Thus we might look at the cross of Christ. Can I somehow get
an emotional reaction out of this? I’ve seen many an individual at a funeral
who resents the preaching of glad tidings of great news. It interrupts their
feasting on their own sadness that they had been enjoying.
Or how about how we snarl and snap and bite at our God when
he tells us to do something good. As children we would get enraged at our
parents for telling us to do something—some chore or whatever. That is sheer
madness! Why should we resent it when what they are telling us to do is good
and helpful? All of God’s commandments are for our good. So why do we get
ticked off when he tells us we should pray to him or that we should not despise
preaching and his word, but gladly hear and learn it? And when he tells us that
we should be faithful to the spouse whom God has given us? Or that we should be
content with the wealth that he has given us? Or that we should be generous and
help others? Why do we hate God so much?
It is as the Bible says that our heart is desperately
wicked. It’s so wicked that we will never get to the bottom of it. And so don’t
allow yourself the cheap luxury of believing that you are a pretty good person
for how bad you feel about everything that happened to Jesus. That is a lie. What
you are looking for is some proof within yourself that you must be one of the
good ones. After all, just look at the tears. Do not allow yourself to draw
that conclusion.
Consider, instead, the conclusion that Paul makes: “One
died for all; therefore, all died.” You hate God so much, and, specifically,
you hate God’s commandments so much, that there was nothing else that could be
done with you. You had to be put down. That was the only way to get rid of the
addictions, the hatred, the lying, that is to say, the flesh. The flesh, the
Old Adam, cannot enter the kingdom of God. It cannot be in heaven, if, for no
other reason, than that it hates God and everything he is and does and stands
for.
So it is not bad news, but tremendously good news, that we
have died. Even if we weren’t raised again, it would still be good news,
because the evil would have been put down and done away with. But, of course,
God did not leave us dead. He raised Jesus from the dead. And Paul tells us
why.
Let me continue on with the quotation that we’ve been
dealing with: “We have come to this conclusion: One died for all; therefore,
all died. And he died for all, so that those who live would no longer live for
themselves, but for him who died in their place and was raised again.”
Then, a little later he says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
The old has passed away. The new has come!”
Christ died for all, but not everybody is in Christ. That is
to say, not everybody is baptized; not everybody believes in him. But, if
anybody is in Christ, that person is a new creation. How so? In all kinds of
ways, especially when the end comes and our bodies are changed, but Paul
mentions just one thing. He says that we are a new creation so that “we
would no longer live for ourselves, but for him who died in our place and was
raised again.” Let’s deal with that first part first: “So that we would
no longer live for ourselves.”
No longer living for yourself is a wonderful thing. It opens
up the possibility (that otherwise cannot exist because of our flesh) of truly
loving others instead of just yourself. It opens up the possibility of being
obedient. It allows us to submit to God’s order of things. The Holy Spirit brings
this about, giving us his gifts, and thereby sanctifying us. We return to being
human beings who are happy, who are blessed.
Let me give you a purely natural example to help explain a
little bit of what I’m talking about. The average person looks back fondly on
their childhood. Why is that? I would argue that the biggest reason why that is
true is because little children are blissfully un-self-conscious. They wake up,
they play, they eat, they laugh, they go to bed and do it all over again the
next day.
But right around age 8 or so they start to look in the
mirror. They start to compare themselves to others. How do they stack up as far
as beauty is concerned, as far as smarts are concerned, as far as strength is
concerned? And everybody wants to make love to what they see in the mirror.
They want to be the greatest at everything. And when they aren’t the greatest
they are sad. Their sadness and shame lead them into tearing down others and
trying to build themselves up. They look at anything and everything—even their
nearest and dearest—and think to themselves, “What can I use you for?” This is
such a change from our younger years when we would play with anyone. Or, to use
the phrase we heard from Paul, “we lived much less for ourselves” in
those days compared to when we got older and more corrupt.
But, as I mentioned, this is only a natural example. It is
observable in people whether they are Christians or not. With the Holy Spirit
we are not only set free from the slavery of living our lives for ourselves, we
are also given the gift of living our life for the One who died in our place
and was raised again. This is a revolution in what life is all about. All the
old standards fall by the wayside. All the old measurements of greatness are,
as Paul says, “crap.”
Greatness is loving the Lord Jesus, taking up your cross,
and following him. Greatness is loving God and loving the people whom God has
placed into your life. The more you forget about yourself, the less you measure
yourself, the better. There is no need to measure yourself. Because you are a
child of God. You have died and been raised again. You are a new creation. The
old has passed away. The new has come. You have been reconciled to God through
the cross of Christ.
This is already the best life that can be lived in this old
world, even though it is burdened with sufferings and troubles, just as Jesus
suffered and was troubled. In the life of the world to come, though, it only
gets better and better. Our old Adam, the world, and the devil no longer get in
the way and make us falter and fail like we do in this age.
This whole new life was opened up for us on a Friday
afternoon some 2,000 years ago. Thus it has the altogether fitting name of “Good Friday.” I suppose that is an
understatement if there ever was one. Strangely God had so much mercy on us
wretched and wicked creatures that he sent his Son to become one of us and to
die in our place. Having died and been raised in Jesus a life of goodness and
mercy stretches out before us as far as the eye can see. Even the death of our
earthly bodies cannot put a stop to it, or even hinder it. In fact, it helps,
for then our sinful selves are done away with, and our bodies await the pure
resurrection.
So this is no funeral for Jesus. If anything it’s the
opposite. Today he won the costly victory, specifically in his death. Thus we
sing: “Thousand, thousand thanks shall be, dearest Jesus unto thee.”
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