Monday, April 28, 2025

April 18, 2025 - Good Friday

Title: Following Jesus to the cross and finish!
Text: John19:17-30

Facebook live: Following Jesus to the cross and finish!

29 A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Many things have been done in the name of religion.
Some have been good and some have been bad.
Some people have been helped others have been hurt.

Religion has given rise to great institutions of healing, and it is also produced some of the most vicious wars in history.

What we are talking about today is not fictitious?

It is real. The place of the skull not imaginary, it is real. In Hebrew. It has a real name, Golgotha.

Two men were crucified there that day and their crimes were real.
Whether the judgment passed upon them was just or not, the penalty was real.
One of them thought the penalty was just. He was probably right.

The third man is real too.

We know the judgment that brought him there was not just, it was just about as unjust as any judgment in the history of the world.

Nevertheless, there they nailed him to the cross. They also nailed the two other men to crosses, one on each side with Jesus between them.

This is life as it is lived in our world. Crucifixion is a very real part of life even today. It goes on all the time. People crucify other people and so doing they also crucified themselves. The world crucifies itself. It is a brutal thing to see, but our world appears to be intent on doing it.

A feature of crucifixion that is most often ignored, but was obvious to anyone who ever watched?
It was the disgrace of the crucified who became a target for popular scorn.
His very humanity was even caricatured:

It might be of interest to note that the earliest known pictorial depiction of Jesus on the cross was a cartoon. Often referred to as “The Alexamenos Graffito,” it’s a crude drawing of a human figure raising a reverent hand toward a crucified individual with the head of a mule. Discovered on the plaster wall of an ancient Roman school, this second-century parody of a certain Jewish Messianic movement includes, scrawled beneath the caricature, a taunt, perhaps best translated as “Alexamenos worships his god.”

You can see it – the crucifixion in the world - even in the 2nd century.

Beyond these childish taunts, there was torture not to mention suffering and dehydration. Fever, stretched muscles, dislocated joins, and unrelieved pain.

There was numbness and exhaustion. There was agony and finally there was death.

Bodies were not always taken down from the cross. They were allowed to decompose up there and then crumble away. They were a reminder.

Sometimes they were left for the wild animals.

A couple of men had the nerve to come forward in spite of what it might do to their reputations and positions in society, and take the body of Jesus Christ down from the cross and put it in the tomb over the weekend.

But not everybody got that kind of consideration.

The world doesn't mind seeing people torn up. If they can't be torn up in one way, there is always another way. This is the devil at work. Of course, but that's the way of the world. It invites the devil in, it encourages his worst.

The world judges but the true judgment comes from God.

The actions of our world constitute a mass challenge against God. The creator of the natural order of things is God, and the world is trying to rearrange that order.

It's action sometimes remind you of one who is deranged.

The Earth is not ours to do with it as we please. It is the Lords and he is the one who made it. We have defiled what belongs to him. It is his judgment upon us.

The cross of Jesus Christ tells us how God feels about human sin.
It is a brutal, bloody thing, that cross of Jesus Christ.
The wrath of God is for real.

The payment was real too.

But no one forget that when he looks at the cross of Christ, God is not a kindly old grandfather who winks at the mistakes of his children and their children. He is a just God and he makes it quite clear whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap.

Playing God is sin.

When Martin Luther was asked to describe sin, he said it is man turned in upon himself.

It is not an irony of modern civilization that people have been deliberately educated, trained, and reared to regard this almost as a virtue in our day, the truth is finally beginning to dawn upon us.

What a man sows, that also shall he reap.
We are part of the world and we have made our own contribution to the world as it is.

There is no escape from the cross.

There is no way out of the harvest of confusion we have prepared for ourselves unless God comes to our rescue.

What we are talking about is sin. The thing people don't like to talk about if they do talk about at all.

It is usually something other people do.
There is sin in this congregation because everyone here is a sinner.

(President Harrison’s election in 2010)

The reality of what happened at the place of the skull, brings home to me again, with devastating force that there, they nailed Jesus to the cross for my sin, and also nailed two other men to crosses, one on each side and Jesus between them.

If sin is for real, so is he everything about that cross.

A notice had to be put on the cross and Pilate put it there, Jesus of Nazareth the king of the Jews is what he wrote.

Reaction to the sign, as human reactions often are, was immediate and violent.

Many Jews read this because the place where Jesus was nailed to the cross was not far from the city. The notice was written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek.

The first was the language of religious people in that city and the other two languages of commerce in the Roman Empire.

The Jewish chief priest said to Pilate,

“Do not write the king of the Jews, but the man said I am the king of the Jews!”

By this time the governor, had had his fill of their self-righteousness Scribes and Pharasees, saying,

“I have written what we have written.”

The truth must be told even if pilot has to tell it.
The soldiers beneath the cross were real.

Their - kickback - as it is called in our world for their work happened to be the personal effects of the crucified, who would have no further use for them.

The soldiers took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier.

They also took the robe which is made of one piece of woven cloth without any seams in it and threw dice to see who would get it.

Saint John reminds us that too was in fulfillment of God's plan.
This happened to make the scripture come true.
They divided my clothes among themselves.

Most poignantly real, is the little amount of people standing close:

25 but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.

One man was there. The disciple whom Jesus loved, as John described himself.
And when Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing there. He said to his mother:

“Woman, behold, your son!” 27 Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!”

Here is His dying wish for the woman who gave him birth, and this was carried out by John, and from  hour the disciple took her to his own home.

Jesus knew by now that everything had been completed in order to make the scriptures come true.

28 After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.”

He suffered as men suffer and he was thirsty.
A real man died there that day.
He really died, without a thought for self.

29 A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth.

30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

God shows himself to be real.

This is his way of doing things.
Only God would have thought of doing it that way?
I could think of other ways and so, could you?
But this is his way.
This is how we know love. Not that we love God but that he loved us.

He gave his only son-in propitiation of his wrath as a substitutionary sacrifice for our sins.
God was reconciling the world to himself not counting their sins against them.

It's hard to believe why would God do something like that?

By his own power and glory, a real man died there that day and a real man arose from the dead.
He was delivered for our offenses and raised again for our justification.

Don't sit there in your sin, accept his forgiveness!

The salvation of God is real.

It is new life that can truly be called eternal life.
It is a new peace, as you see our loving God in Jesus Christ, as your savior.
It is a new hope, and that friends is exactly what all of us need.

The judgment of God upon our world and upon us has been shouldered by Jesus Christ, he took the disgrace, he took the rebellion, the hatred, the pride, which constantly pressed in upon us.

There is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

He took it all friends for you!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son + and of the Holy Spirit!

Amen



Modified: Concordia Pulpit Rev. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann C 1976

No comments:

Post a Comment