Word of Salvation – Vol. 27 No. 30 – May 1982

 

The ‘Good’ About Good Friday

 

Sermon by Rev. J. Rietveld on Isaiah 53:4-6

Scripture Readings: John 19:16-37; Isaiah 53

Psalter Hymnal: 351, 355, 455 after sermon, 22

Today is another Good Friday.  Thousands, no, indeed millions of people today will somewhere be worshipping, undergoing some sort of religious experience.  I say some sort.  I mean that there will be many differing experiences when people consider Good Friday.  There have been so many Good Fridays in the history of the church since Jesus died and rose again.

People want to remember.  People want to erect a monument.  Monuments and statues are supposed to help people remember.

But what do we want to remember?  What is it that this Easter period, this Good Friday, is going to mean to us?  What sort of religious experience will we undergo?  There are many possibilities.  One of these possibilities is very simply the formality of Easter; everyone goes to a worship service so why not us?  If it’s only a formality, your religious experience will be limited mainly to the discomfort of being in church for an hour or so with perhaps a vague feeling of having done the right thing.

However, I don’t think you are here for that.  On Good Friday you and I have higher expectations and ideals than that.  It’s a holiday, but not particularly a “Holy” day; any more than yesterday or tomorrow – they will be just as holy.  It’s not a special day set aside by the Lord, and it’s not commanded in the Bible.  Nonetheless, it is a day that is set aside by the church, a day in which we take the opportunity once again to meet together and to worship the Christ who died for us.  It’s a day to remember.

But what do we want to remember?  What is going to be our experience today?  In the year 325, in the fifth Canon of the Council of Nicea, we find the earliest reference to the period of forty days of fasting before Easter.  It is called Lent.  The season of Lent was designed to help the church to remember.  It is supposed to be a season of fasting and of penitence, a time in which people go without and forgo the good things they normally enjoy.  Lent is today very widely practiced by many parts of the Christian Church.

A very different kind of activity but one directed towards the same end takes place periodically in the little European town of Oberammagau.  The Passion Play of Oberammagau attracts thousands of visitors as it physically re-enacts the anguish and pain of Christ’s crucifixion.  A man is actually spiked to a wooden cross in remembrance of the death of Christ.

Yes, we want to remember.

But even the Oberammagau festival falls so far short.  Pain-suffering, we can understand that; we live in a world of suffering.  Spikes driven into flesh and blood, tearing into sinews – we can understand that.  Others have undergone that and much worse besides.  The Passion Play can make us sensitive to that kind of suffering and pain, and help us to remember.

But what about the deeper suffering, the torment of the soul…?

Perhaps – yes, even that some can understand.

When the heart screams out in agony, when the soul as well as – or even more than – the body is lacerated with pain, then we sense human hurts and suffering;

 – suffering the injustice inflicted upon it by the cruel, stupid senselessness of a brother man;

 – writhing in hurt when somebody’s malicious and thoughtless comments strike so deeply;

 – hating yourself when Satan taunts you with those shameful deeds done so long ago, and you feel you don’t know where to turn;

 – or the suffering of losing someone close, someone so dear and precious that it seems your world will collapse and your heart will break.

It seems there is nowhere to go.  It’s your hurt, your pain, and you feel you want to drown in the tears of your own grief.

Yes, suffering we can understand.  It’s part of the lot of man, and the scars of sinful and sin-caused suffering mar the beauty of the crown of God’s creation – man!  It’s written in the eyes, and branded on the hearts of many to know and experience this suffering.

But when we’ve said all that, all we’ve done is come into the foyer of Good Friday.  For despite all our suffering, the suffering of Christ is beyond us.  It is something which we will never come into in terms of our experience.

If you are inflicted with cancer you can say to a fellow sufferer, “I know what you are going through.”

If you have lost a baby, you can stand beside someone who grieves the loss of their child, because you’ve been there.

If you have suffered the indignity and degradation of Prisoner of War or concentration camps, then you can be a blessing to those who were also hurt there.

But even if you were crucified, you could NEVER stand beside your Lord and say, “I know what it’s like.”

The meaning of Good Friday doesn’t centre around the crucifixion – but the crucifixion of Jesus!

Here in the passage before us we are confronted with the uniqueness of the death of Jesus.

It wasn’t simply in the crucifixion, for many before and after Him were crucified.  It was a common Roman practice for criminals.  It was not simply in His death, for all men die.

What is so wonderful about it, yes wonderful, is that it was Jesus who died, and the meaning and purpose God gave to His death.  For when we look past the very deepest of our agony, we see in this suffering servant a weight of anguish beyond our comprehension.  But in the midst of that suffering we see also the glory rays of grace, for streaming down from His battered, bloodied and thorn-crowned head is an ocean of love and mercy that knows no bounds.

He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.  Consider these words for just a moment and see if they do not point infinitely beyond our experience of suffering.  What illnesses and sufferings can we carry?  Isn’t it true that we can stand so little; that a little germ, a virus, a broken bone reduces us to helplessness?  When suffering comes to us, the you in our life is so quickly gone, and inwardly we seethe at our frustrations, our helplessness.

And if that is true of sickness, what of the pain of sorrow?  Can we ever really enter into the agony of another person’s grief?

It is true of course, that some people are not soon touched by the reality of grief and pain.  They skim along the surface of life, and the harrowing penetration of sorrow seems very much to pass them by.  There are others who can be deeply wounded by sorrow but they heal quickly.

But it is an awe-filled thing to see the greatness and extent of some peoples’ sorrows, and only those of you who have suffered something of this will begin to know what I mean.  It is greater than a physical pain.  It is overwhelming in its intensity, a place of darkness and emptiness, an aching hurt that batters the body and saps the spirit.  When it happens even death seems preferable for it seems we cannot bear it.

Jesus bore our suffering and carried our sorrows.  You can’t imagine that, and neither can I.  I know only of the loads I have to carry, and each pastor tries to stand beside you and help you with the loads you have to carry.

But He carried them all!  Not just for this congregation.  Not just for this denomination.  Not just for this generation – but for all His people all through the world, all through history.

And still that does not tell us all.  There is a great deal more.  He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities.  The Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

Now we go into a realm in which our experiences are so untrustworthy and unreliable.  Sin!  Iniquity!  Transgression!  Law-breaking!  We don’t even like to think about the things we have done wrong.  We like to forget them, and some psychologists tell us that 90% of what we have done wrong we have forgotten.  But just think about that horrible 10% that you can remember.

I’m not talking about the things that you have shrugged off with the excuse that “everybody does it anyway”.

I’m not talking about the things that were caused through mistakes and misunderstanding.  They too are all sin!

But I’m talking about the things that really caused you to stay awake at night.  The things that made it impossible for you to look other people straight in the eye; and they didn’t make you feel all that good about yourself either.

There would be few of you in this church this morning, excepting perhaps some very young ones, who do not know what I’m talking about.  That is your experience of sin and transgression, and it is mine.

And the Bible does not allow us to look outside the Christian Church with a cloak of respectability and Protestant purity at all the unsaved “heathen”.

All we like sheep have gone astray, each of us has done his own thing.  We are no different as far as sin is concerned.  There is none righteous, no, not one.  We, one people of the covenant, we the people born into Christian homes and Christian families, we the Good Friday people, we, those sitting here this morning, we have done this thing.  We have gone astray.  It is our transgressions that are being talked about.  They are our iniquities.

There is neither right nor invitation to look at others.  When we see the cross of Christ we cannot be looking at the short-comings of brothers and sisters.  Good Friday forbids it.  Good Friday people cannot talk about “them” and “I”.  It is we who stand together around the cross.  It is we who have strayed.

And when we think of just our own offenses and how the Lord dealt with us, we begin to see the enormity of God’s grace for our transgression, for our iniquities!

Do we understand that?  Do we see why NEVER in our wildest dreams or in our greatest pain can we understand what suffering Christ went through?

It was His own Father whose will it was for Him to suffer.  The Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all.  God the Father laid our iniquity on God the Son, Jesus – for He shall save His people from their sins… Christ – the Anointed One, the unique One, truly God and truly man.  Lord’s Day 6 of the Heidelberg catechism tells us why Jesus must be truly God.  It says, “That by the power of His Godhead He might bear in His human nature the burden of God’s wrath; and that He might obtain for us and restore to us righteousness and life.”  The Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all.  “The iniquity of us all” means all the rebellion, the anger, bitterness, spite, hatred, greed, jealousy, the neglect, laziness, slander, gossip, idolatry, lust, immorality.  What an awful weight of sin!

We know something of the weight of sin, do we not?  How far did not our sin drive us from God, drive us to hide from His presence?  How much did not our sin cause us to cover ourselves up with our own excuses, our own justification?  We know that is what sin does.

Sin alienates and puts up barriers between God and man and man and man.  There are people today who will not come into a worship service.  They do not want to hear the voice of God calling out, “Where are you?”  “Where are you hiding?”  The reason is ever the same.  “I do not want to admit any sin.  I’m hiding with my transgressions, and I’m ashamed of my guilt.”  That weight of sin is heavy for each man.  But He bore the iniquity of us all!  That is what it says here!  That is what caused this Jesus to cry out, “Why have you forsaken me?”

Yet there, in the very heart of that cry of anguish is the glorious grace of renewal and promise.

“The iniquity of us all”.  It was laid upon Him.  And that means in the most unmistakable terms that the crushing and oppressing weight of sin and guilt has been removed from us!

That is the good of Good Friday.  The iniquity is gone.  No longer is the sin and anguish of my soul separating me from God.  No longer is that alienating barrier of guilt weighing me down.  It has been lifted from me – taken away.  It has really, actually happened.  The Lord has taken it, and laid it upon Jesus.

I don’t ever have to carry it anymore.

Now some of you have been Christians a long time.  Others of you have been Christians only a short time.  I want to tell you this: Satan is going to attempt all the time to get you to look at the horrific nature of your sin.  He will fill you with doubt.  He will agonise you with uncertainty.  He will tell you what a horrible person you are and that God does not really care for you.  If that doesn’t work, he will do exactly the opposite, telling you that you are not a bad person at all, and you should not worry too much about sin or forgiveness or any such thing.

Well, here is the answer.  Take this Scripture and show him.  Read it aloud.  The Lord has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all.  I am forgiven because the Lord has done this thing.  Good Friday proves it.  There is more.  I am not afraid of punishment, of chastisement.  Our God is not going to do that to us because that was upon Him too.  Instead, I have peace that no one can ever take from me or from any of God’s children.  By His wounds we are healed.

WE!  Do you see it.  We belong together, sharing the same glorious liberation and freedom.  We live in the same peace, the same Shalom that Jesus has bought for us.  We are taken in every day again in that same healing process that comes through the blood of His cross.

All the brokenness, the fragmentariness, the lostness and the purposelessness of life has been healed and restored.  Jesus took that upon Himself for all His church.  Millions of people will today, somewhere be worshipping.  They will be undergoing some sort of religious experience.  What has your experience been today?  What have you remembered?

We will never enter into the suffering of our Lord; that is never our experience and never can be.  But by faith we enter into the reality and experience of Good Friday, the reality of peace, of healing, of restoration, the certainty and assurance of sins forgiven forever because the Lord laid them upon Him.  And we are free!

That is why Good Friday is so good!

Amen