The King We Need

[This message was shared during worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio earlier today.]

John 12:12-19

In many churches, in recognition of the fact that many Christians don’t attend Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, this day is designated not as Palm Sunday but as The Sunday of the Passion, a Sunday that remembers Christ’s suffering and death for us. I prefer to give Palm Sunday its due as a separate day with its own significance. 

Besides, if you’re interested in remembering Christ’s passion--His suffering and death--there is a whiff of His crucifixion and death amid the celebrations of Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday isn’t all sweetness and light. Don't let the crowds who shouted in adulation fool you about that!

To set the stage for what happens in today’s gospel lesson, which gives us John’s take on the first Palm Sunday, it’s important to remember what comes just before this event. In John 11, Jesus raises His friend Lazarus from the dead, the seventh and final sign John records Jesus performing.

This should have alerted people to who Jesus is. But even miracles from God can be doubted or arouse controversy. In John 11:45, we’re told that some who had witnessed Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life ran off to tell the Pharisees what had happened. The Pharisees aren’t happy, but alarmed. John 11:46 says that, along with the chief priests, they called a meeting of Judea’s religious leadership. They’re all more fearful of their Roman overlords than they are of the God Who is meeting them in Jesus. “If we let [Jesus] go on like this,” they tell each other, “everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.” (They gave little evident thought to the fact that a Messiah Who can bring people back from the dead might be able to provide them with ultimate protection from an enemy who, at best, could only kill them once.)

In John 11:49-50, Caiaphas, the high priest for the year, upbraids the rest of the leaders for worrying. The solution, he says, is simple: a way must be found to kill Jesus. “You know nothing at all!" he tells the others. "You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” In the next verse, John tells us that Caiaphas was the one who didn’t know anything: “He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them [Jews and Gentiles] together and make them one.”

So, as Jesus prepares to enter Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, there’s a plot to kill Him. The plotters, Judea’s religious cream of the crop, are clueless about the the fact that, Jesus, “the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world,” is going to the holy city with the intention, according to God’s plan, of sacrificing Himself on the cross in order to save the world from more than death in this world. He’s going to die and rise to save all who entrust themselves to Him from sin and from the more lasting and horrible death of eternal separation from God. Jesus could well have said to these leaders what He later told the Roman governor, Pilate, in John 19:11: “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” 

Ultimately, it would be neither Jewish leaders nor crowds nor the Romans who would take Jesus’ life. In Luke 23:46, we’re told “Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last.” Jesus died at precisely the moment when God had decided He would die. The leaders didn’t know it, but they were doing the will of God against their wills.

In our lives, we often think that we’re in control. But, whether we perceive it or not, God is still in charge. We may endure tragedies and heartbreaks, as the folks down South whose lives were upended by tornadoes yesterday, but God is bound to ultimately bring His good out of bad. God will use Good Fridays to bring Easters for those who place their hope in Him alone! In fact, in The Small Catechism, Martin Luther shows us that Good Fridays and Easters are the prevailing pattern of the disciple's life. The life of daily repentance and renewal it commends is nothing other than the daily crucifixion of self so that Christ can give us the forgiveness that brings new life in Him.

Good Friday and Easter loom in the background as Jesus and His disciples enter Jerusalem at the beginning of our gospel lesson. Please go to it, John 12:12-19.

Verses 12-13: “The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival [the festival is Passover] heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, ‘Hosanna!’ [meaning Save or rescue us, Savior] ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ‘Blessed is the king of Israel!’”

The words and the palm branches used to welcome Jesus help us to understand that while the people see Jesus as a king, they want Him to be an earthly king who uses military might to save them from the oppression of the Romans. Among God's people, palm branches were associated with the welcome given to military conquerors. 

Jesus is the King--the Messiah, Lord of heaven and earth. But He doesn’t conquer by force of arms, by mob rule, or by using a democratic vote. Jesus’ authority isn’t derived “from the consent of the governed.” As Jesus told the Roman governor Pilate after He was arrested: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.” Instead He conquers by a servant love that dies for us. And the enemies He conquers are the common enemies that live in every human soul: sin, death, darkness.

Jesus won’t be our king on our terms. We can’t come to Jesus and say, as some people do, “Jesus, I’ll follow You if You do so and so.” Jesus becomes our Lord only when we entrust ourselves to Him, allowing Him to crucify our sinful selves so that our new selves, remade in Christ’s image, can rise.

Verses 14 to 16: “Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written: ‘Do not be afraid, Daughter Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.’ At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.”

Jesus isn’t shy about claiming His kingship. He says in John 10:30, "I and the Father are one." And just as foretold in the messianic prophecy in Zechariah 9:9, Jesus rides into Jerusalem to claim His kingdom on a donkey. God's people generally didn't like horses. Horses were the engines that moved the chariots used by armies that had threatened and conquered them for generations. By contrast, donkeys were seen as noble mounts worthy for a king.

Despite the prophecy and the symbolism though, not even Jesus’ closest followers understood Jesus at this moment. 

We shouldn't be too hard on them. Even today, I find Jesus' ways and will difficult to understand. There have been times in my years of following Jesus when it has seemed to me that Jesus has blocked from my life the very things that I thought would bring me happiness. Only in heaven will we more fully understand Jesus and His mysterious ways. 

But anyone, Christian or not, who tries to understand Jesus apart from His death and resurrection or apart from His call to follow Him because He is the way to life with God, they are missing the point. 

On the first Palm Sunday, some may have understood, though most didn’t, that in meeting Jesus, they were facing God in the flesh. Ignorant or not, they all disregarded His signs and the substance of His teaching, refusing Jesus’ call to follow Him through death to eternal life.

Verses 17-18: “Now the crowd that was with [Jesus] when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. Many people, because they had heard that he had performed this sign, went out to meet him.”

Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead was seen as an interesting use of power. The crowds hailed Jesus as king because of a sign, not because of what the sign pointed to.Jesus had power; now the people hoped to draft Jesus as king to do their bidding. 

But within days, another Jerusalem crowd would demand Jesus’ execution. 

People can turn on God when they don’t like the way He does His job as Lord of the universe. A woman I knew years ago became bitter with God because, her mother, in her late eighties, died after long years of illness. “I’m mad at God for taking my mom from me,” she said. I wanted to ask the woman if she would like it if her mother, a believer now free from suffering and in the presence of God, would be brought back to this earthly life by God just to make her happy. I bit my tongue. But it’s questions like these we need to ask ourselves when God disappoints us.

In the midst of the Palm Sunday joys and celebrations, our gospel lesson ends on an ominous note: “So the Pharisees said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!’”

Jesus is seen as a threat by the Pharisees. And, in truth, Jesus is a threat to us whenever the things valued by this world--security, wealth, health, family--become more important to us than welcoming Jesus to rule over our lives. Only Jesus and not the world can bring us peace with God, the presence of God with us through all the times of this life, and life with God now and in eternity. The call of Palm Sunday is to trust in Jesus, letting Him forgive us our sins, letting Him guard us from separation from God, and letting Him give us everlasting life with God.

I look forward to being with you on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, so that, once again, we can celebrate Jesus not as the king we want when sin has its way with us, but as the King we need when we let Him reign over us. 

As we immerse ourselves deeply into the story of Christ's death and resurrection this Holy Week and remember how Christ did all of this for sinful human beings like you and me, God can incite us to sing the old Lenten hymn with a deeper sense of awe and gratitude and faith: "Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble." Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Palm Sunday...and Where It Leads

[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Springboro, Ohio, during both worship services today.]

John 12:12-19
In many churches, no doubt partly in recognition of the fact that many Christians won’t be commemorating Holy Week at Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, this is designated not as Palm Sunday but as The Sunday of the Passion, a Sunday that remembers Christ’s suffering and death for us.

Personally, I prefer to give Palm Sunday its due as a separate day on the Christian calendar. Besides, as we’ll see, there is a whiff of murderous conspiracy against Jesus and a hint of the agonies of His crucifixion and death that can be detected amid the celebrations of Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday isn’t all "happy happy joy joy."

To set the stage for what happens in today’s gospel lesson, which gives us John’s take on the first Palm Sunday, it’s important to remember what comes just before this event. In John 11, Jesus raises His friend Lazarus from the dead, the seventh and final sign John records Jesus performing.

But even miracles of God can be ignored or even more improbably, arouse controversy.

In John 11:45, we’re told that some who had witnessed Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life ran off to tell the Pharisees what had happened.

The Pharisees, far from being happy or praising God for this miracle, are alarmed. John 11:46 says that, along with the chief priests, they called a meeting of Judea’s religious leadership. These religious leaders are more fearful of their Roman overlords than they are of the God Who is meeting them in Jesus. “If we let [Jesus] go on like this,” they tell each other, “everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

It’s a classic case of the haves wanting to protect what they have. In John 11:47-48, we see that these religious leaders are more interested in maintaining their status and their religious traditions, than following God. They worry that Jesus will gain such a following that the Romans will be alarmed and destroy the very institutions that guaranteed them their cushy lifestyles and gave a modicum of peace--the enforced peace of an iron dictatorship, what was called the pax romana--in the midst of their people’s oppression.

In John 11:49-50, Caiaphas, the high priest for the year upbraids the rest of the leaders for worrying. The solution, he says, is simple: a way must be found to kill Jesus. Kill the One the people want to make their king and you’ll save the very people who, in a short while, will be crying, “Hosanna” for Jesus from death and disaster. “You know nothing at all!" he tells the others. "You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

In the next verse, John tells us that Caiaphas didn’t know much either: “He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one.”

So, as Jesus prepares to enter Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the religious leaders are hatching a plot to kill Jesus from selfish, fearful motives. They’re clueless about the the fact that, Jesus, “the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world,” was going to the holy city with the intention, according to God’s plan, of sacrificing Himself on the cross in order to save the world from more than death in this world. He was going to die and rise to save all who entrust themselves to Him from sin and from the more lasting and horrible death of eternal separation from God.

Jesus could well have said to these leaders what He later told the Roman governor, Pilate, in John 19:11: “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.”

And ultimately, it would be neither Jewish leaders nor crowds nor the Romans who would take Jesus’ life. In Luke 23:46, we’re told “Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last.”

Jesus died at precisely the moment when God had decided He would die.

The leaders didn’t know it, but they were doing the will of God against their wills.

In our lives, we often think that we’re clever and in control. But, whether we perceive it or not, God is still in control.

We may endure tragedies and heartbreaks, as well as loves and loved ones lost, but God is bound to bring His good out of bad.

God will use Good Fridays to bring Easters for those who place their hope in Him alone!

All of this looms in the background as Jesus and His disciples enter Jerusalem at the beginning of our gospel lesson. Please go to it, John 12:12-19.

Verses 12-13: “The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival [the festival is Passover] heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, ‘Hosanna!’ [meaning Save or rescue us, Savior] ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ‘Blessed is the king of Israel!’”

The words and the palm branches used to welcome Jesus, help us to see that while the people see Jesus as a king, they want Him to be an earthly king who uses military might to save them from the oppression of the Romans.

Jesus is the King--the Messiah, Lord of heaven and earth.

But He doesn’t conquer by force of arms or by using a democratic vote. (If Jesus' Lordship were dependent on majority votes, even in most churches, He would most likely lose.) Jesus' power isn't derived in any form of human power or manipulation.

As Jesus told the Roman governor Pilate after He was arrested: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

Instead He conquers by a servant love that dies for us.

And the enemies He conquers are the common enemies that live in every human soul: sin, death, darkness.

Jesus has encountered people wanting to make Him a king on their terms before, of course.

Before Jesus began His public ministry, He was offered the crowns of every nation on earth by Satan, if only He would worship Satan.

And some time later, after He fed the 5000 with five barley loaves and two fish, the crowd didn’t understand that this was a sign of Jesus being God. They saw it as a sign that they’d found an instrument for their earthly ambitions. Jesus would have none of it. In John 6:15 we’re told: “Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.”

Jesus won’t be our king on our terms.

We can’t come to Jesus and say, “Jesus, we’ll follow You if You do so and so.”

Nor can we say, “Jesus, we know that You believe in our preferred political philosophy. So, bless what we've already decided to do.”

Jesus becomes our Lord only when we give Him unconditional surrender, allowing Him to crucify our sinful selves so that our new selves, remade in Christ’s image, can rise.

Jesus commands us to trust in Him just as He trusted in God the Father. Jesus claimed His eternal kingdom not through force, but through surrender to death and trusting that the Father would raise Him on the third day.

Verses 14 to 16: “Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written: ‘Do not be afraid, Daughter Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.’ At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.”

Jesus isn’t shy about claiming His kingship. He says, "The Father and I are one."

And just as prophesied by Zechariah 9:9, in the Old Testament, He comes to banish our fears and bring us God’s kingdom. Also as Zechariah said, He was riding on a donkey.

Donkeys always had a better press than horses among God’s people in Biblical times. Horses strapped to chariots were the means by which malicious foreign powers had done harm to them. Donkeys were even seen as the more majestic animal, the mount of a dignified and reputable king.

But, as John tells us, not even Jesus’ closest followers understood Jesus at this moment. We shouldn't be too hard on them though. Even today, I find Jesus' ways and will difficult to understand. There have been times in my years of following Jesus when it has seemed to me that Jesus has blocked from my life the very things that I knew would bring me happiness. Only in heaven will we more fully understand Jesus and His mysterious ways.

There are some things we can't understand about Jesus while we live in this world. But anyone, Christian or not, who tries to understand Jesus apart from His death and resurrection or apart from His call to follow Him because He is the only way to life with God--if they try to see Jesus only as a great teacher or a kind man, or only as a religious leader, they are missing the point.

On the first Palm Sunday, neither the crowd, nor Jesus’ own disciples, nor the Jewish religious leaders nor the Romans, had a clear understanding of Jesus. I'm convinced that some knew that, in meeting Jesus, they were facing God in the flesh. But ignorant or not, they all disregarded His signs and the substance of His teaching, refusing Jesus’ terms of total surrender as the way to life, and instead, saw Him on their terms, which is the way to death.

Verses 17-18: “Now the crowd that was with [Jesus] when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. Many people, because they had heard that he had performed this sign, went out to meet him.”

Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead was seen as an interesting use of power. It proved Jesus had power that others didn't possess.

The crowds hailed Jesus as king because of a sign, not because of what the sign pointed to.

Jesus had power; now the people hoped to draft Jesus as king to do their bidding.

Within days, these same Passover crowds would demand Jesus’ execution.

People can turn on God on a dime.

A woman I knew years ago became bitter with God because, after her mother, in her late eighties, had suffered a long train of illnesses in the final few years of her life, died. “I’m mad at God for taking my mom from me,” she said.

I wanted to ask the woman if she would like it if her mother, a believer now free from suffering and in the presence of God, would be brought back to this earthly life by God just to make her happy. I bit my tongue. But it’s questions like these we need to ask ourselves when God disappoints us.

We tend to think in the short term. God has an eternal perspective.

In the midst of the Palm Sunday joys and celebrations, our gospel lesson ends on an ominous note: “So the Pharisees said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!’”

Jesus is seen as a threat by the Pharisees.

And, in truth, Jesus is a threat to us whenever the things valued by this world--security, wealth, health, family--become more important to us than welcoming King Jesus to rule over our lives.

None of the things valued in this world can bring us what only Jesus can bring us: peace with God, the presence of God with us through all the times of this life, and life with God now and in eternity.

The call of Palm Sunday is to surrender--totally, unconditionally--to Jesus, letting Him forgive us our sins, letting Him guard us from separation from God, and letting Him give us life everlasting.

I look forward to being with you on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Easter Sunday, so that, once again, we can celebrate Jesus not as the king we want when sin has its way with us, but as the King we need when we let Him reign over us.

As we immerse ourselves deeply into the story of Christ's death and resurrection this Holy Week, God can incite us to sing the old Lenten hymn with a deeper sense of awe and gratitude and faith: "Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble." Amen

The Reason for Christmas

[This was shared during the second Christmas Eve worship service of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio earlier this evening.]

Luke 2:1-7
It’s striking that in his Gospel, Luke takes just seven verses to describe the birth of Jesus! It's so spare that, if we’re not attentive, we may miss the powerful message his narrative conveys.

“In those days,” Luke writes, “Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)”

Caesar Augustus was the first Roman emperor. The adopted son of Julius Caesar, in 31 AD, about three decades before Jesus’ birth, he became the uncontested ruler of Rome after a long civil war. After taking power, he named himself emperor. He labeled his adopted father and himself the “son of god.”

It was claimed that through Augustus’ kingship, he had brought God’s justice and peace to the world. The many poems and songs written in honor of Augustus claimed that he was the savior and lord of the world. And in much of his empire, during and after a long reign, Augustus came to be worshiped as a god. Augustus, a ruthless and bloodthirsty man, did nothing to dissuade people from worshiping him or from making all these claims about him.

Employing the coercive powers by which all governments--whether good or bad--must operate, Caesar Augustus ordered a census of his empire, which included most of the lands around the Mediterranean Basin, north into Europe, and even what we today know as the United Kingdom.

Augustus was a powerful man and when he issued an edict, an entire empire hopped-to. The purpose of the census Augustus ordered was to generate tax money. It takes a lot of money to run an earthly empire.

Affected by this decree were two impoverished young people, betrothed to be married, who lived in the often forgotten Galileean countryside of Palestine.

“And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

Today, many scholars believe what Martin Luther preached in his Christmas sermons: That Joseph of Nazareth actually grew up in Bethlehem and moved to Nazareth in Galilee as a young man. Recent archeological finds indicate that there was a large migration of people from the Bethlehem countryside to the Galileean region. It’s possible that both Mary’s and Joseph’s families had migrated from Bethlehem to Nazareth, because both were descendants of David. Going to Bethlehem would have been required of Joseph because he still owned property there.

Augustus’ decree forced Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem. But, in fact, neither Augustus nor his empire were in control of events.

Nor were Mary or Joseph.

Decades later, as He stood trial before Pilate, the governor who oversaw Roman interests in Jesus’ homeland, Pilate asked Jesus why Jesus refused to answer Pilate’s questions. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” Pilate asked Jesus. But Jesus answered: “You would have no power over Me if it were not given to you from above...”

Despite outward appearances, Joseph and Mary and the Child in Mary's womb went to Bethlehem not because that’s where Caesar Augustus, who had never heard and never would hear of Joseph or Mary or Jesus, wanted them to go, but because that’s where God wanted them to go.

Those with earthly power may misuse or abuse their power. They may be selfish. They may act unjustly. They may treat other human beings like chess pieces to be manipulated at will. But the Biblical witness is clear that over the long haul, God is in charge. As I've been telling Catechism students for years, "Either God gets His way or God gets His way." There are no other options.

Old Testament prophecies had made it clear that when God’s Anointed King--the Messiah, the Christ-- came into the world, His birth would take place in Bethlehem.

He would be born into a family descended from David. God intended to enter our world and be our Lord at precisely the moment and in precisely the place He chose.

He would do it in order to live the perfect life, become the perfect human sacrifice for sin, then rise from the death promising that all who repent and believe in Him will share His victory over sin and death and meaningless living.

A Caesar might be willing to die to take or keep earthly power. Augustus had killed a thousand times over.

But he never would have died to give forgiveness and eternal life to people who, like us, only deserve condemnation and death for our sin. Jesus is a different King and Lord.

Please pull out a pew Bible and look at Romans 5:6-8 (page 785). It says: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

At the right time, the Savior Who was to die on a cross was born in a barn. 

There’s a simple reason why God doesn’t bludgeon us into submission with showy displays that evoke “shock and awe” the way the Caesars of this world do.

A reason why God the Father sends God the Son, Who totally takes on human flesh, a baby who cries and needs His mother, Who suffers and bleeds and dies.

There’s a reason God claims subjects for His kingdom not by brute force, but by love, by the gentle wooing of the Holy Spirit Who empowers ordinary people like you and me to keep telling the story of our crucified and risen Savior.

There’s a reason why by God’s plan, we become His subjects not by establishing residence in a religious institution, not by performing a set of tasks that lead to earning citizenship in the kingdom of God, but solely and simply by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

And the reason is simple: “God is love,” the New Testament teaches.

The Old Testament book of Genesis says that God made we human beings in His image.

God made us to love and to be loved by Him.

God made us for relationship with Him.

Sin has marred that relationship, separating us from God.

Jesus is the bridge back to God.

He is the manifestation of God’s love given on the cross.

The ultimate goal of a Caesar is to elicit obedience so that he can lord it over you.

The ultimate goal of Christ is to elicit faith and obedience so that He can set you free to live in a relationship of self-giving, fulfilling love with God and with others.

Jesus doesn’t want to judge you, though one day He will one day judge the living and the dead.

He wants to save you from your sin.

He wants to make us children of God.

There are lots of things that we do in the name of Christmas. But all that the God we meet in Jesus really wants us to do is repent and believe, turn from sin and trust in Him to guide us into life with God.

It's a life characterized by love, service, and selflessness.

It's a life of confidence that we are loved and approved by the only One Whose love and approval matters.This is the God Who came at Christmas.

The God Who demonstrates His power not by ordering people around as though they were worthless robots, but by becoming One of us so that, by His grace, we might be restored to Him again and forever.

Thank God He loves us and gives us Jesus.

May we take Him as God's great gift to us every day and learn to joyfully, voluntarily, without coercion, be loved by God and to love Him in return.

Merry Christmas! Amen

Why Should Jesus' Execution Bring Salvation?

In comments earlier today, Spencer Troxell, posed an important question:

I wish I understood why it was necessary for Jesus to be crucified for the sins of the world. Can you explain this to me without saying "For the wages of sin are death, which is the answer that I'm always given, although it's not a logical answer. WHY IS IT THAT one man's murder by an angry mob somehow offers salvation to that mob?

This has always troubled me. You're one of the smartest christians I know, so hopefully you can shed some light on the subject.

First of all, I'm probably not one of the smartest Christians Spencer knows and I'm apt to prove it in what I write below.

Secondly, he's not alone in wondering about the Biblical insistence that Christ's death was necessary to bring about salvation for humanity. I think about it myself sometimes and just this evening, before our Midweek Advent worship, a member of the congregation I serve as pastor remarked, "I'm looking forward to seeing how you answer that question because it's something I wonder about."

The Bible is insistent that Jesus had to suffer and die for fallen humanity in order to bring us salvation. The Gospel of Luke, for example, says that the risen Jesus told two of His disciples, who were skeptical of the word they'd gotten from some others of Jesus' followers that they'd seen Him alive at His tomb, "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”" (Luke 24:26)

But why was it necessary? There are, you should know, many theories of atonement among Christian theologians. (Atonement is a word from Old English, literally a compound word meaning at one-ment. The idea is that Christ's death on the cross brings reconciliation between God and humanity, making them one.) Honestly, all these theories are little more than informed conjecture, none of which can really tell us why God chose to use Christ's death on a cross and His resurrection to bring about that reconciliation. But that God has made that choice, the New Testament is emphatic.

Both John's Gospel and the New Testament book of Hebrews refer to the ancient Jewish custom of sacrifice of unblemished lambs in connection to Jesus. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, these lambs were sacrificed on the altar at the temple in Jerusalem. The lambs were stand-ins for people who realized that their sins, their violations of God's call to love God and love neighbor, the themes of the two tables of the Ten Commandments and later, incorporated by Jesus into the Great Commandment. The lambs bore the sins of the repentant and for yet another year, they and God were at one.

In John's Gospel, John the Baptizer sees Jesus and says, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29).

But, the New Testament, especially Hebrews, makes clear that there is a qualitative difference between Jesus and all the other unblemished lambs who gave their lives for the sins of others. Hebrews says that all the Jewish religious rites that preceded Jesus were either faint copies of heaven or faint precursors of God's definitive action in Christ. The temple replicated heaven. The lambs sacrificed at the temple could only atone for sin for a restricted period of time. The atonement from Jesus is everlasting.

Hebrews says that Jesus was not only the ultimate sacrificial lamb, but also the ultimate high priest. It was the high priest who sacrificed the lambs on Yom Kippur. Priests had to purify themselves in order to enter the holy of holies where the sacrifice happened. Not so with Jesus because He was sinless. And this sinless sacrifice and priest, Hebrews says, "has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself" (Hebrews 9:26).

From all of this, I think, we get an idea of the seriousness of sin. And in speaking here of sin, I'm not necessarily referring to the individual violations of God's will that are forbidden in God's law, things like false witness, stealing, or misusing God's Name. Those are sins, individual acts that result from the basic human problem of alienation from God and an inward turn to self and selfishness. If we're turned away from God, we're turned away from the source of life. Jesus, Hebrews says repeatedly, has done what all the religious rites of ancient Judaism only hinted at: obliterated sin's power "once for all." (See here).

To God it evidently makes perfect sense that a condition which threatens our eternal lives should be reversed by a perfect sacrifice on the part of an eternally righteous God Who didn't need to experience death. It must make sense to God that our sin should be exchanged for His righteousness, that His undeserved acceptance of death should bring us life.

I don't understand this. Nor can I explain it.

But I do want to suggest a different way of looking at Jesus' death. The angry mobs who cried for Jesus' death and the gutless Roman governor, Pilate, who ordered Jesus' execution were only the proximate causes of His murder. Unlike the lambs offered up by sacrifice by pious Jews on Yom Kippur, Jesus, God-in-the-flesh offered Himself up. His death wasn't really the result of the decisions of jealous priests, angry Pharisees and Saducees, disappointed crowds, or a Roman governor. According to the Old Testament prophecies and the witness of the Gospels in the New Testament, God long ago decided that Jesus would die on a cross. Jesus' death happened at God's initiative, not ours.

Luke 9:51, for example, says that Jesus, when it was time for His crucifixion, "set his face toward Jerusalem."

When Pilate couldn't get answers out of Jesus, he asked if Jesus realized that he had the power to have Jesus executed. "“You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above..." (John 19:11).

And elsewhere, while referring to Himself as "the good shepherd," Jesus asserts, "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again" (John 10:18).

Now, what's significant in all of this to me is that it speaks to a premise of your question. Yes, my sin is the ultimate reason that Jesus went to a cross. A sinful world didn't (and doesn't) want the bother of a sinless Savior come to reclaim a fallen world. We harbor the notion that if we can kill off Jesus (or deny His resurrection or deny His existence), we can have the run of things and do exactly as we want. (See here.) But, in reality, had it not been Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, Annas, Judas, the angry mobs, or the sadistic soldiers, Jesus would have died for us anyway. God mandated it and was in control even when Jesus' murderers thought that they were. His resurrection underscored that.

I don't know why God chose to use the death of a sinless Savior to bring salvation. But when I look back on Old Testament history and when I consider the horrors that human sin unleashes--from the killing chambers of Auschwitz to the terrorist horrors recently unleashed in Mumbai, God's method of atonement doesn't surprise me. Sin is truly grave, killing business. It doesn't shock me that death would play a role in the expunging of its killing power.

In the cross, it seems, God comes into our world and shares the worst of our human experience so that all who surrender to Christ can experience the best of God's experience, resurrection and everlasting life.

I don't get it. But apparently from God's vantage point, it was necessary in order for Him to truly connect with us and take us back from the evil that threatens to take us down for eternity.

This may not be a very satisfying answer, Spencer. But for now, it's the best that I can do. Someone sharper than me can probably see and say more.

[UPDATE: Four years ago, my colleague and fellow blogger Mark Roberts wrote a fantastic series of posts on why Jesus had to die.]