Died, For Me!

Please note: The following sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.

God will do just anything in order to get a hold of you and me, just anything!

To have Jesus walking around Galilee and teaching there was good, but it wasn't enough.

To have Jesus performing those miracles and wonders was impressive,

but then we remembered that Pharaoh's magicians did wonders to match those done by Moses and Aaron, so wonders are not enough.

To have Jesus establishing a radical table fellowship with everyone that happened along,

from the richest of sharp businessmen to the poorest day laborers,

from the healthy to those who were considered to be incurable, the “unclean”, the lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners of every sort was wonderful, but that was not enough.

Even a table fellowship that broad was not enough to convince us of Jesus' determination to reach us,

because I suppose someone else might actually try to gather together all those sorts of people.

Interrogations of Jesus by clever public officials or top-notch scholars are not enough either.

We have to know, as John the Baptist's disciples asked: “Are you the Christ, or do we look for another.”

And Jesus gave an excellent answer, one which should have been satisfactory, but wasn't. He said:

Go and tell John what you see and hear: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who does not take offense at me. [Mt.11:4]

All of those things were the well-known signs that Messiah was come among them.

The disciples and others saw all of these things, and still they doubted, still they fell away at the crucial moments.

Who are you? Are you the Messiah, or do we look for another?

We have restless ears and wandering feet.

Is there a god-candidate more attractive, one which will not demand too much from us?

What would convince us?

Such a candidate has to be big, of ultimate power, including all of time and place.

It has to involve death and resurrection;

nothing else will ever be enough.

Death and resuscitation won't be enough: we all know of those who have been brought back from the edge of death after cardiac arrest,

and I've read the cases of those who have been declared brain dead who have nevertheless recovered.

It has to be death and resurrection, a real and complete death, and a re-making of that same person into a recognizable yet different being.

That is what the Lord God does in Jesus' death on the cross, burial in a new tomb, and resurrection on the third day.

That's how far our God will go in order to show the depth of his commitment to us, to reach us, to woo us and entice us to listen and to follow this same Lord Jesus.

Everything else is half-way; but this is a complete action.

Here God puts all of himself into the task; Jesus gives everything that there is to give.

He enters death, and conquers it from the inside out,

and promises that victory to all who will trust that it is true.

This week I read another of those pieces by a “serious scholar” who claims that Jesus is an invention of the later church and it is all a pious fraud.

That opinion has been around from the very beginning, and we hear hints of it even in the gospels themselves.

At some point, each person must react to this story of Jesus.

Either it is all make-believe, or else Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth because of his death and resurrection.

Which will it be for each of us?

Either the passion of Christ is the greatest story ever told, or else it is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated.

Frankly, I will stick with St. Paul, who, in reflecting on the mystery of Christ's death and resurrection says:

We have been buried with him by Baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

Now there is a basis for living a life!

There is the reason to bother with all of these inconvenient things in the faith.

Death and resurrection: that finally can capture our attention.

There is something upon which we can bet our lives confidently.

How far will this Lord God go in order to reach us?

The Creed carries one more phrase that gives us considerable perplexity: descended into hell.

This phrase can be regarded on this Good Friday as a wonderful affirmation of faith for us to ponder.

Within this belief that Christ descended into hell is a great affirmation.

No matter how dark, mysterious, or difficult life gets, Christ is there.

No matter what you do to remove yourself from the loving reach of God, you cannot do anything that will utterly, irretrievably remove you from God.

Even in a situation in which we think that God is completely absent, hell, even there is God's loving reach.

Because Christ is there, even in hell, so is the love of God for us his wayward people.

Even for me, for you, for us together.

Paul comes at it a slightly different way when he says:

While we were weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

Even though we try to drive him out, to destroy him in death, to crucify him, he does not give up on us.

This crucified and resurrected one says: Come to me, for I am life, true life, eternal life.

This is my gift to you, and for you,

and through you....

Through cross and resurrection, Jesus demonstrates that there are absolutely no limits

through which he will not go

in order to get us, to grab hold of us, to find us and save us, and to bring us home into the fellowship of the kingdom of God.

No limits at all.

Oh, what a wonder:

Christ died,... for me!

Amen.

Died, For Me!

St. Mark's Lutheran Church