How much does he care?

I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile paying around his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world.

But each time after a while I have to turn away.

And I have to turn back to Christ on the cross...who laid aside his immunity to pain.

He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death.

He suffered for us.”

The three ecumenical creeds, Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian, serve as handy summaries of the faith.

Some parts we grasp more easily than others, and some we will ponder for a lifetime.

One of those difficult phrases deals with the dark time between Friday afternoon and the beginning of the Day of Resurrection.

Where is Jesus then, and what is he doing?

We have a clue in Psalm 22: For kingship belongs to the Lord; he rules over the nations. To him alone all who sleep in the earth bow down in worship; all who go down to the dust fall before him.

And then there is one enigmatic verse in the New Testament to help us here, 1Peter 3:19, which says that Christ was Put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which he also went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison.

In the centuries since then, we have been wondering what exactly 1 Peter meant by this sentence, and so there are a variety of interpretations.

The creed says that Christ descended into hell, the situation of the absence of God; this is the opposite of heaven, which is being in the presence of God.

So Jesus went there to proclaim good news to those captive by death, those who had died before he was revealed on earth.

Luther added another thought, that Jesus went to hell to fight as the leader of a military expedition sent out against the “prince of evil,” the devil.

Calvin took it a slightly different direction, reflecting on the separation from the Father which Christ felt from the lonely time in the garden to death on the cross.

In this view, hell is the terrible abyss where one feels forsaken and estranged from God, with prayers unheard.

At the end of all these theological ponderings, there is a wonderful affirmation of faith for us to treasure on this Good Friday:

No matter how dark, mysterious, and difficult our lives become, Christ is there.

No matter what we do to remove ourselves from the loving grasp of God, we cannot get so far away that God cannot reach us if he chooses.

Because Christ went there, even to hell, so has the love of God, ready to work its wonders on us.

On the cross, Jesus demonstrates that there are absolutely no limits to what he can and will do in order to get to us, grab hold of us, to save us, and to bring us home.

Perhaps you can remember with me one of those summertime evenings as a youth, where the game was a cross between Hide and Seek with Tag.

On our farm there was a cornfield that was just large enough, but not too large.

The seeker would give the sought only a brief head-start, and then plunge into the field to try to grab the quarry, who would stay a bit in one place and then scramble to another area upon hearing the rustling of the seeker's rush through the corn.

It would be a fun game unless someone went too far away so that he couldn't be found.

Eventually the seeker would then give up and leave, and the distant quarry would be annoyed as well.

“You have to keep looking,” he would protest.

“Not when you go that far,” the seeker replied.

And the evening would end badly, with recriminations on both sides.

That is not the way it works here with the Lord Jesus.

Once he has committed to the search, he does not give up.

No matter where we hide, how far away, how difficult the situation, Christ the Lord is persistent.

That is good news to us on this darkest of days: we have been found by the one who truly cares!

An old parable to say it once again:

Once there was a man who had not lived as he should.

He eventually died and found himself forlorn in hell.

When the word got around that he was there, all of his friends came to the gates of hell and stood there, banging on the gates and saying “Let him out, let him out.”

The gates remained firmly locked.

Then on Good Friday the Lord Jesus appeared in his royal robes at the gates, and said quietly, “Let me in, let me in.”

The gates of hell swung open at his command and he entered.

There is our salvation; there is Good News.

Nowhere is beyond his reach, concern, care, and action, not even death and the threat of nothingness.

There is our salvation; there is Good News.

Let all 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.