3/12/67

Scripture: Read Matthew 27: 33-54.

I suppose I might as well make an admission that much of the ecclesiastical year on the present church calendars meant very little to me in my childhood and youth. (Perhaps I have said so before.) I grew up in a home where Sunday was the important day of the week. There was never any debate or discussion over whether we were going to go to church. We went as a matter of course -- at least so far as we children knew.

On the South Dakota farm, that meant some necessary chores at feeding the livestock and getting a few cows milked before breakfast. Then, rain or shine; freeze or melt; winter, summer, spring or fall, we traveled 4 1/2 slow miles by horse-drawn conveyance to the village church. Later, we made it faster with one of the early automobiles. But we always went to church for Sunday morning worship, then stayed another hour for Sunday School where my father served for a dozen years or more as Superintendent, then home for a late Sunday dinner about 2 o’clock.

When our family moved to the city, it was the same. Our parents went as a matter of course; out of desire to worship and to mingle in the church fellowship. We young folk, through high school and college years, went for the same kind of reasons. I don’t recall that we had to. Our whole family just wanted to!

And we did not feel a need for attention to many special emphases on Sundays. It was enough to be there to worship; to hear the preaching of the word; to be a part of lesson and fellowship. Of course, there was Easter. And there was Christmas. But I do not recall much emphasis on Lent, on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, on Whitsunday or on Advent. And if I ever heard of Passion Sunday, I have now forgotten that I did.

I’m not bragging over that seeming simplicity! For it may be that these various seasons of the year help to enrich our understanding and experience. I rather think that they do. At any rate, I have found a good deal of meaning in the Lenten season through my more mature years. I hope that you too, find it meaningful and helpful.

At any rate, I look forward now each year, not alone to Easter Sunday with its resurrection story at the breaking of springtime, but to Palm Sunday as well; and now, today, to recognition that this day is known among many people as Passion Sunday. It recognizes the fact that Jesus, having steadfastly set his face to go down from Galilee to Jerusalem, was nearing the city and nearing his great “moment of truth.” Some of his most penetrating teaching was being accomplished with admiring crowds of people and in confrontation with bitter opponents. It was getting closer and closer to the time when he would give his life, quite literally, for what he stood for, in the belief that what he stood for was God’s will and was a gift to all who were, or would be, his disciples.

The time was very near to the Jewish Passover. Jesus and his most immediate disciples, being of that faith, had come to the holy city at the time of the great religious festival that was, and is, precious to Jews --- the festive remembrance that an angel of death had passed over the Israelite households in Egypt while the plague of losing the firstborn of each Egyptian household smote the oppressors. It became the signal for the release of the Jewish people from bondage --- it had been the beginning of their long return to freedom. [Exodus 12: 21-28].

Jesus’ disciples even prepared an intimate meal, in anticipation of the Passover, in an upper room in a quiet part of the city. It was there that he made it clear that he knew that Judas would betray him. And it was there that he asked his disciples to remember him in the breaking of bread. In a general sense, perhaps we do that when we give thanks, “say grace,” for the food at meal time. In a more specific sense, we remember him, and what he said and did for us, as we gather periodically in the communion service.

According to the writer of the Gospel of John, Jesus had this to say to his remaining disciples after Judas had left the room that night: “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and in him God is glorified; if God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once. Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.” [John 13: 31-35].

Part of Christ’s passion seems to have been his yearning, his deep concern, over his disciples, then and now -- a concern that we should find our strength in love for one another and for God. He seems to have made it a kind of test, or measurement, of our desire to be known as his disciples or followers -- that we have love for one another.

Events moved swiftly that last week of his life in and about Jerusalem. On the Sunday that we call Palm Sunday, he rode a donkey into Jerusalem in what we might now call a demonstration. He spent time in the temple, criticizing corruption, teaching his hearers, performing acts of mercy. Then came the fateful Thursday night and Friday morning. Sleepless, wearied to exhaustion from mental torture and physical beating, he was taken to a hill outside the city and put to death by crucifixion along with a couple of criminals. We may look ahead to Easter as a time of joy. But all of that has little meaning, unless we remember what went before, and face some of its meaning for us.

One of the astounding facts about Jesus’ crucifixion is that Christians through ages of time and over all the face of the earth have seen in it a supreme revelation, a “showing forth,” of God’s love. Odd isn’t it, that there could be found any love anywhere in so brutal a transaction as that torturous way of doing a man to death! But part of the story is that Jesus remained consistent in the love that he commended to his followers. While he hung there in physical suffering, in agony of mind and spirit, deserted by all who might in any way have shown mercy --- he was able to pray for his torturers: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” [Luke 23: 34a]. In one of the awful moments, he had cried out: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” [Matthew 27: 46; Psalm 22: 1]. It was a quotation from one of the Psalms that thus came to his mind and lips. But, ere he breathed his last, he was able to say, “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” [Luke 23: 46].

It would seem clear to the reader of these gospel accounts of Christ’s crucifixion that he did not die as punishment for any wrong he had done. The case that his enemies had made against him was purely technical and is altogether unconvincing. He had been bothersome to them, and his presence was threatening to the security of the position which temple leaders then enjoyed. They’d rather he were out of the way. And as for government, it seemed better to Roman rulers to order removal of one man from the scene rather than risk some general, bloody uprising of many excited people. So it was tactics, not any wrong that he had done, that sent the Nazarene to his death.

And in it all we are convinced that, as we read in scripture, “God commends His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” [Romans 5: 8]. Somehow it is easier to perceive than to explain; that Christ’s death demonstrates God’s love for us --- that He gives his love to us in the life and death of that beloved Son.

What makes faith in God difficult is life’s injustices, its cruelty, the “giant agony of the world” summed up there on a cross on Calvary. Jesus had been falsely accused, unfairly condemned, arbitrarily flogged; a mocking crown of thorns pressed upon his head; slapped while blindfolded, spat upon, finally crucified. There were those who watched in grim glee while the suffering continued through six interminable hours until his death. Others -- millions of others -- have suffered agony and death at the hands of wicked and callous men, and it seems intolerable to us; but here it is on Calvary --- barbaric torture of history’s noblest personality. And yet Christians have perceived in that crucifixion the supreme revelation of God’s love. How can that be?

For many, it is not easy to believe in God. If one could go through this congregation, saying the prayers, singing the hymns of the church, appearing religious and worshipful --- what silent questions and secret doubts might arise? What agnosticism confronts us, deep within, when we try to imagine a good God in such a world? It is not usually some theoretical argument that disturbs our faith so much as it is the brutality in mankind, the horror of the world’s evil, the agony of people, that crashes through all the comfortable safeguards ordinarily erected against their impact, that wrings a cry from one’s conscience: “How can there be any God, much less a God of goodness, in such a world?”

Of course some ideas of God do lay themselves open to disbelief. God is no perennial Santa Claus, somehow invented by man’s need of comfort. The Christian faith starts in Jesus’ passion -- in his cross. And that plunges one into this paradox. What can we make of it? Here we see the very worst and the very best -- with the question arising: “In which are we going to put our faith?” Which goes deeper and reveals more truly the ultimate nature of things?

Here we face the issue! You want to cry that this world is dreadful. It is -- don’t pull your punches about that! And there on Calvary is the essence of its dreadfulness: callous, cruel torture, innocent agony, triumphant evil, a horrible, senseless affair. Say the worst you feel about life on this earth, and you are still far within the compass of the historic Christian faith. That faith starts with Calvary where life is at its dreadful worst ---- and where Christian faith has seen the good God supremely revealing himself, his love and concern and caring. Facing the worst, and the best, at Calvary; man’s sin and Christ’s Saviorhood, the Christian faith seems to say, “In which will you put your faith as revealing the Eternal?” You must choose.

Consider first that we must choose. It is deceptive to say that we do not know and to try to step into a non-involving neutrality. Real faith in God is a positive matter --- you have it or you don’t have it. To believe in a good God, a divine origin for life, purpose for life, destiny ahead of it, to hear the stars

Forever singing as they shine,

The Hand that made us is divine,

and deep within ourselves to feel the companionship of the Eternal Spirit, the Unseen Friend --- such faith is a positive matter. You have it, or you miss it. A man may feel that he can hold his judgment in suspense. But he can not hold his life in suspense. That gets made up, one way or another.

Whether we like it or not, life is full of such forced decisions. For instance, a man can love and trust his wife, and such love and trust can be a glorious experience, deepening with the years. A man has that experience, or he has not. If, as an alternative, he distrusts his wife, he has missed it. And if he tries to sustain a suspended judgment, saying to himself, “I neither trust nor mistrust her,” he has missed it, too. In this kind of vital mater, life presents one with forced decisions.

At Calvary, one confronts this forced decision about God. All that makes men most disbelieve in a good God is there; and all that makes men most believe in God is there. Looking at one aspect of it, I can say, even bitterly, “How can there be a good God?” And I can say, from the same vantage point, “Such character! such sacrificial love! These can be no accidental outcome of ruthless, unfeeling matter! Behind such goodness is some eternal Source; behind the sunshine is the sun.”

You and I must bet our whole life on this reading of it. We must be committed, like one of the men who stood by at the cross. He was a Roman centurion. Luke writes that, when he saw what had taken place, this centurion praised God and said, “Surely this man was innocent.” [Luke 23: 47].

Some of us have made our choice, and do believe in God, because that character upon the cross, and his sacrifice -- the complete giving of himself -- has done things to us, and to the world, that we are sure can not be explained by mere chance nor by any blind process of nature.

Fosdick has said that, as a very young boy, he used to think that the waving of tree branches caused the wind. Why not? Whenever the branches wave, the wind blows; the wind never does blow except when branches wave. That seems a simple enough explanation --- to account for the invisible by the movements of the visible. But, believe it, the invisible wind comes first, even in the physical world where the great causations come from the unseen.

Try the analogy a bit deeper. The New Testament can not be explained without its physical factors -- the paper on which it is printed, the type in which it is set, and the presses that print it. But the creative cause of the New Testament, its ultimate fount and origin go far back of the physical book into the invisible realm of mind and spirit. There may be some mystery in what we choose to believe, but the mystery is not cleared up, nor escaped, by denying God. Indeed, such denial would only plunge us deeper into mystery in its most unsolvable form!

A man who suffered a great deal during World War II was one of Doolittle’s flyers who was forced down, captured, and thrown into a Japanese prison camp. There he was flogged and starved. Yet see what he decided about that experience. After his release at the end of the war, he said about his captors: “They were ignorant and mean, but we thought there was some good in them. The only way to develop that goodness would be by understanding and education --- not by brutally mistreating them as they had done to us. So,” he said, “I’m going to a missionary school for training. And then I’m going to return to Japan and spend the rest of my life there, teaching the importance of love among men.”

That spirit is in this world, too. I know it may seem that there is only a little bit of it. But there it is. It only took one footprint on Robinson Crusoe’s island to demonstrate that someone had been there. That footprint could not be explained as an accidental impact of waves on sand. Someone had been there!

The evidence of goodness that one sees in the decision of that Doolittle flier, on release from his cruel imprisonment, to go back and help, seems to me like such a footprint.

I, for one, choose not the ruthlessness of Calvary, but the revelation of Eternal goodness shown forth there by that man on the cross.

In the Cross of Christ I glory,

Towering o’er the wrecks of time.

Here we come face to face, not so much with an argument, as with a fact, a personality, a character that “can not be confuted.”

Some have said that religion is the opiate of the people. Well, here is no opiate! Jesus, at his cross, refused even the mild mitigation of wine mixed with myrrh. There was no hint of lulling to sleep. Faith in God is no opiate! Faith in the God of righteousness is the most challenging, stimulating, sustaining faith that mankind knows! Your choice of it is the most momentous decision you can make!

You can believe in the ruthless Pilate and the treacherous Judas as the revelation of the Eternal --- or you can lay hold upon the understanding that God was there in Christ on Calvary, reconciling the world unto himself. Choose, therefore, to be a part of that reconciled world!

Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 12, 1967.

Also at Kalahikiola Church, March 23, 1969.

And also at Waioli Hiu’ia Church, March 19, 1972.