by Rev. Art Wiese
April 9, 2004 -- (Good Friday, Midweek Lenten Series)
Sermon Text -- John 19;1-9,14-19,25b-37
The final "Mark of the Church" is by far the most difficult. I can't begin with a story of my great-grandfather Wiese's suffering. I don't know if he ever suffered, beyond the suffering of ordinary human experience. If his experience was typical of our immigrant ancestors, I imagine that there was some suffering involved in leaving home. I'm sure that it wasn't easy to tolerate the long voyage to the new world. And I think that it probably wasn 't fun to find a new place to live and to begin to farm in a strange land. But, the purpose was improvement. The goal was a better life. The sacrifices made along the way were intended to achieve the dream of economic security and freedom from want. That hardly sounds like the kind of suffering that Luther had in mind when he named suffering as a sign pointing to the true people of God. And besides that, most of us want to avoid suffering. We don' t like feeling pain. We would rather not even have to endure the smallest discomfort, let alone endure real agony and torture. And yet, that is exactly what Luther is pointing to as he ends his list of ways that any "poor, confused person" can find the holy Christian people on earth.
Long before the gospel writers get to the events of Good Friday in their telling of the story, they relate how two of Jesus' disciples, James and John, came to him seeking positions of honor and power in his kingdom. "Grant that we may sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, when you come into your glory" (Mk. 10:36-37). They want to be first and second lieutenants in Jesus' administration. Together with Peter, we might believe that they are on the short list. Jesus has involved them in some of his most important work. They are part of his inner circle. So, why not make it official? In response, Jesus conducts a brief job interview. "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?" he asks, "or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" James and John reply without hesitation, "We are able." But, before long, we learn that they do not understand what they are asking. At only one other point in the gospels do the writers mention Jesus' right and left hand. We hear it in our text for tonight. "Two others were crucified with him," one on his right and one on his left, "with Jesus between them" (Jn. 19:18). That is the cup about which Jesus is talking. That is the baptism to which he refers. It is the cup of suffering and the baptism of death. As he ends the interview with James and John he assures them that they will indeed drink from the same cup and be baptized with the same baptism, but it is not for him to grant who will be at his right and his left.
So, what is this cup business all about? We hear about it once again as Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane that he might be spared from enduring the suffering that is about to befall him. He asks, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done" (Lk. 22:42). The cup to which Jesus refers in his conversation with James and John, is no doubt this cup of suffering which he is about to endure because of his faithfulness to the will of God. Jesus is obedient to God's will. He is faithful to the task at hand. And because he is faithful, he is about to suffer horribly at the hands of the political and religious authorities. It's not possible this year to consider Jesus' suffering without thinking about Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ." In his depiction of the last twelve hours of Jesus' life, he has painted us a picture of suffering, which far exceeds any level of suffering I have ever previously cared to imagine in regard to Jesus' suffering and death. Yet, having seen the film several times and having participated in a number of discussions and having listened to several interviews on the subject, I believe he has given us a highly accurate and excruciatingly realistic portrayal of Jesus' torture. Because he is working with some very definite artistic representations of the crucifixion, Gibson has allowed a few possible inaccuracies to remain in his picture of Jesus' actual death; but, in his rendering of the process of flogging and flaying as practiced by the Romans, he has provided me with a new appreciation for what this really meant. While Jesus' repeated beatings and his tremendous loss of blood are brutally difficult to watch, the result is a new understanding of why Jesus needed help carrying his cross to the place of crucifixion and why he died in such a relatively short period of time (just six hours on the cross) when death by crucifixion often took several days to accomplish. The thing that gives this suffering so much power, is precisely Jesus' willingness to endure it, without anger, without hatred, without a desire for revenge, but with a sense of compassion and a prayer for forgiveness for those who are responsible for inflicting such unthinkable horror upon him.
We need to be clear. "The Passion of the Christ" shows us Jesus' suffering, not our suffering. We are not called to give our lives "as a ransom for many" (Mk. 10:45 ). That has been done already, once and for all. But, we stand directly in the shadow of Christ's suffering. And in pointing to suffering as a "Mark of the Church," Luther was saying, look for the kind of faithfulness you see demonstrated on the cross. Look for people who are enduring persecution, and hardship, and danger, and death precisely because they will not compromise in their faithfulness to God. The history of the Christian church is filled with examples of people who have endured astonishing hardships and suffering for the sake of their faithfulness to God. The disciples themselves undergo a striking transformation from the scared little group that denies and abandons Jesus in the midst of his suffering to a courageous and growing community of believers which openly and daily proclaims him as the Messiah. By the fourth chapter of the book of Acts, Peter and John are being thrown in prison for preaching and healing in the name of Jesus. By the end of chapter five, the disciples are hauled before the same assembly of high priests, scribes and elders, which had handed Jesus over to Pilate. They are flogged because of their faithfulness. And we are told that "as they left the council, they rejoiced that they were considered worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name [of Jesus]" (Acts 5:41). Under the rule of Rome, Christians had to decide whether they would eat meat that was offered to idols and to annually declare their allegiance to the emperor in whatever fashion might be required. To refuse eating might offend one's neighbors. And to refuse honor to the emperor could result in a swift execution at the hands of the state. Who knows how many of the faithful have suffered and died over the years -- been thrown to the beasts, burned at the stake, beaten to a pulp, beheaded on the block, gassed in the chambers, pierced by the sword, shot by the bullet, or even crucified like our Lord -- because they refused to be unfaithful? There is no way to know! And add to them all of the faithful who suffer daily, quietly, in so many deeply personal and very private ways and you will find a world filled with followers whose suffering marks them as members of the church.
What a strange way this is to conclude the list of characteristics that define the church. Yet, it stands at the center of what we believe, for it is in the cross of Christ that we see most clearly the depth of God's love. True, there is a hiddenness about God in Jesus' suffering on the cross. When Jesus cries out in his sense of abandonment "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he gets no answer. God also is silent. But that does not mean that God does not suffer. In one striking formulation of what we see in the cross, it is said that "while Jesus suffers the dying, God the Father suffers the death of the Son." This is how God seeks and saves the lost of our world. In Jesus, God suffers and dies on a cross, laying down his life for friends and enemies alike, carrying with him the totality of their sinfulness, and remaining faithfully connected to them all the way to the end. In "The Passion of the Christ," at the moment of Jesus' death, the camera pulls back to a cosmic perspective directly above the cross. And then, as a single teardrop falls from the sky, we zoom back in to witness the opening of the earth in a great earthquake which splits the curtain of the temple in two from top to bottom and shakes the foundations of the world right down to the very depths of hell. There is no doubt that Christ's suffering and death have unleashed a great power that will continue to reverberate throughout history down to the very present. May we, like the first disciples, rejoice that we may also be found worthy to suffer for the sake of Jesus' name because it's a mark of the church.
Amen.