God's answer to cruelty

--Cruelty is rampant, from the plague of bullying in the schoolyard to the hate-filled suicide bombers of the Middle East, with many stops in between.

--The Nazi Joseph Goebbels was impressed with the cruelty of his fellow students, and learned it well.

--The English novelist William Golding opined that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”

--A college chaplain asked a graduating student what was the most important thing that he had learned at the university.

The student thoughtfully replied, “I have learned that people really aren't what they first appear to be.”

No, his response was not due to a girlfriend situation gone sour.

He said he was thinking about his experiences of cruelty with the faculty!

--Various persons have admitted that the only difference between us and Attila the Hun is that he had an army to act on his cruelty, and you and I do not.

--Our 11^th reading today about Jonah brings to mind the way in which that little book concludes.

The Lord challenges Jonah, who is complaining that the people of Nineveh actually repented, and whining that the castor plant which had been shading him had withered and died.

The Lord upbraids him for his cruel attitude toward the Ninevites: “And should I not care about the people of that great city, 120,000 of them and also many animals?

That is the last sentence of the story, contrasting Jonah's cruel attitude with God's mercy.

--Even St. Paul noted ruefully that “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” [Romans 7:19]

It is ironic that some of the worst bad that we have done in our age has been done by people trying to do good!

In the last hundred years, how many villages have been destroyed by good people trying to get rid of the cruelty of a bad dictator?

The list of cruel incidents goes on and on through human history.

And it extends most horribly to this day's remembrance of the brutal execution of Jesus.

The soldiers were just following orders.

The leadership was just trying to maintain discipline.

The crowds were just trying to keep Passover according to all the rules.

The disciples and other followers were just trying to stay alive.

And yet all of them take a role in the most unjust death the world has ever known.

We are approaching the close of this afternoon, after we have remembered our complicity in this cruelty, this death, and we would like to move quickly to burial and try to get it all behind us.

It is just too hard to think about for very long.

But wait...there is more to be said.

Jesus Christ is the one who chose to take on our human flesh; he is God became one with humanity.

By stooping down to us, he intends to get hold of us and thereby to lift us up from the way things have been going.

No matter what thing we do, we have already done the worst possible deed in killing Jesus.

Even here, God has mercy and patience with us; this is Good News!

Because of this, we are not to give up on this twisted humanity, because God has not given up on us.

God has put his mark of protection on us, as on Cain.

The cross, that sign of the worst of human hate and cruelty, is now become for us the sign of the greatest goodness of God, and our only reason for enduring hope.

It picks up where the story of Jonah leaves off.

Jonah was wallowing in his own misery, reluctantly doing what the Lord demanded of him, but without his heart in it.

Where we have no answer from Jonah to the Lord's challenge and demonstration of mercy, now we see in the cross, burial, and resurrection the true nature of his mercy.

Where we had the silence of Jonah in the face of the Lord's questioning, now we have the testimony of the soldier “Truly the man was God's Son.”, a proclamation of the Gospel which will be validated in the resurrection, and lived out in our new life in Christ.

One of our seasonal Prayers of Thanksgiving phrases our reason for joy in this way:

Thanks be to you, Lord God, heavenly King:

for in the light of our Lord's passion

and his victory over the grave,

you have chosen us as your people,

redeemed us by the love of Christ,

and lead us out of bondage to sin and death

through the waters of baptism onto the path of life complete.

It is a great wonder, that in the face of our cruelty to one another and to Jesus, the Lord God has not treated us as we deserve and simply wiped us off the face of the earth,

but instead continues to give us blessings beyond measure, and wants to entice us to life on a different basis.

Thanks be to God.

Thanks be to God who dos not allow our attempts to hide our cruelty in burial to be the last word.

Thanks be to God, who answers cruelty with sacrificial love.

We're going to sing of this in a moment:

May thy rich grace impart

Strength to my fainting heart,

My zeal inspire;

As thou hast died for me,

Oh, may my love to thee

Pure, warm, and changeless be

A living fire! [LBW#479.2]

Let all those who hear this as Good News on this tragic day trust that God will make it so, as we say...Amen.

Please note: The preceding 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.