Word of Salvation – September 2024
The Great Reversal
Sermon by Harry Burggraaf B.D. on Colossians 1:19-20
Scripture Readings: Psalm 22:1-5; Matthew 27:45-54
Singing: O sacred head now wounded (BoW.305)
From heaven you came (BoW.404)
When I survey (BoW.301)
Jesus is Lord (BoW.330)
A Good Friday Sermon
Text:
Colossians 1:19,20 (commentary on Matthew’s account)
“From beginning to end Jesus is there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe – people and things, animals and atoms – get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.
(E. Peterson’s Paraphrase: The Message)
Congregation
In one of the earliest creeds of the church, formulated at the Council of Nicea in AD 325, we have these incredible words:
We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ
The only Son of God
Begotten from the Father before all ages,
God from God
Light from Light
Very God of very God…
He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate
He suffered and was buried…!
Surely there can’t be a more astonishing conjunction of two phrases than these ‘Very God of very God’ and ‘He was crucified under Pontius Pilate’.
The death of God fixed in time by this obscure, minor Roman bureaucrat in the backwater state of Palestine.
Despite the shame and sadness of it all, what took place on a hill called Calvary, became the most important event in all of history.
I don’t know if you’ve been following the recent discussions about Good Friday and what films may or may not be screened today. But it does seem ironic doesn’t it that of all things, the controversy was about ‘The Exorcist’ – a film about demon possession and overcoming evil.
Society wants to be allowed to screen a film about satanic power on the very day when we declare that Satan has been dealt a fatal blow and the demons flee because the Son of God suffers on a cross.
Society wishes to portray the helplessness of a servant, the church, a priest, in the face of demonic evil, when we remember those triumphant, victorious words of Jesus: ‘It is finished…!’. Death has been conquered, evil has been confronted, the power of darkness has been broken.
It was interesting to hear the reasons why we shouldn’t show certain things on Good Friday.
– Because it is the most holy day in the Christian calendar.
– Because it was a sacred day.
– Because we respect the special days of other religions and traditions. We honour days like Anzac Day so why not Good Friday. We mustn’t desecrate a holy day.
Congregation, the tragedy is not that The Exorcist, or other films are shown on this day, or sport is played, or whatever, but that people do not recognise that on that hill,
just outside the city of Jerusalem,
on that local garbage dump,
from midday to 3.00 in the afternoon,
2000 years ago
history was rewritten, here was the definitive moment of all of time since the beginning of the world.
When God suffered and died under Pontius Pilate
creation held its breath,
the sun hid its face,
temple curtains were torn,
the earth shuddered,
the tombs gave up their dead,
because a new era had begun. Here was the great reversal of all the tragic consequences of The Fall. As Paul puts it in his letter to the Colossians ‘all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe get properly fixed because of his death on the cross.’
Someone has pointed out that few biographies of famous people devote more than ten percent of their pages to their subject’s death. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Abraham Kuyper, Hudson Taylor, some of whom met violent and politically significant ends – a few pages are given to their death – as an epilogue to their life. The film of Gandhi for instance – three and a half hours of it – his death is displayed in the last five minutes.
In contrast the Gospels devote nearly a third of their length to the climactic last week of Jesus life. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and especially John see death as the central mystery and the core of Jesus’ ministry.
The central purpose of God’s mission of rescue and renewal is achieved on that day when his Son hung on that cruel Roman instrument of torture and execution, the cross.
That is why Good Friday is important!
It is through the cross that all the brokenness of sin and of The Fall is addressed and a new world begins to be born.
Using Paul’s words to the Colossians as a commentary on Matthew’s account of the death of Jesus I want to point out just three areas of reversal that the cross brings, of all the many things that could be said. ‘All the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe brought back into harmonious relationship through Jesus death on the cross’:
In the cross God deals with our alienation.
The cross means many things but at the heart of the crucifixion is Jesus dealing with our alienation, our separation from God. People have given many meanings to Jesus’ words, ‘My God why have you forsaken me?’ But whatever else Jesus experienced, for those three hours of darkness, he suffered absolute dereliction, abandonment
– from his community (the people called for his crucifixion),
– from his friends (the disciples fled),
– from creation (the sun was darkened) and most agonising of all,
– from God. The Father turned his face away from his Son at the repulsiveness of our sins.
When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden the consequence was separation from God. They were barred from the presence of God. Sin always separates us from God.
When Jesus hung on the cross as our substitute, carrying our sin, for three awful, awesome hours, the Son was abandoned by the Father.
- S. Lewis the famous Christian apologist points out that abandonment is most painful when it comes from those who are closest to us. The checkout girl at Coles’ supermarket rebuffs us and we think, ‘what’s bugging her?’ The neighbour down the road, whose garden we’ve watered, and whose dog we’ve looked after, pointedly ignores us and it hurts, but we think, ‘Well what’s his problem?’
But if my wife, with whom I’ve spent nearly my whole adult life, cuts off all communication with me – that really hurts, that really matters.
‘My God’ – not ‘Father’, not ‘Abba’, like Jesus would usually address God – but ‘God’, a formal, distant word, ‘why have you abandoned me?’
No theologian or scholar can adequately explain what really took place within the Trinity on that day.
Later, writing to Christians in Galatia Paul says the ‘Son became a curse for us.’
To people in Corinth Paul explains, “God made him, who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
No matter how we try to explain the mystery in inadequate human words, one thing is certain, nothing can now separate us from God if we are in Christ. God has dealt decisively with our alienation.
This is so beautifully and dramatically demonstrated in the tearing of the temple curtain. When Jesus dies the heavy, purple, gold decorated curtain separating the main sanctuary in the temple (the Holy place), from the inner sanctuary (the Holy of Holies) is supernaturally torn in two.
The temple layout was a reflection of what people believed about their relationship with God.
There was the outer court, the court of the Gentiles. They were the really unclean. They couldn’t get within a bull’s roar of God. Then a little closer to the centre of the Temple was the court of women. They could hear what was going on in the temple ritual and leave gifts for the expenses of the services, but not see. Then there was the Court of Israel, for the everyday person, still one removed from the altar. At the Feast of Tabernacles they would be allowed to enter the inner court, the Priest’s court. Only the priests could enter the sanctuary, the Holy place, and only the High Priest, once a year, could go into the Holy of Holies where God’s presence was symbolised by the Ark of the Covenant and the Mercy Seat and the Seraphim.
At the moment of Jesus’ death, when the priests would have been busy with the evening sacrifice, the curtain to the Holy of Holies is torn in two and Jesus, as the great High Priest, after suffering God’s abandonment, opens the way for all believers to enter into the presence of God. Never to be separated from God again. Gentiles, women, children, poor, rich – no longer alienated from their God.
In the cross God meets our loneliness
A common theme among many writers is the cries of the heart as the various authors explore some of the pains and the emptiness the human heart experiences. The cries are their in society all around us: the cry to know God; the cry to feel my faith; the cry for reason in suffering; the cry of a guilty conscience.
One of the most universal cries is the cry of the lonely heart.
The novelist Thomas Wolfe, some of whose books you may have read, wrote:
The whole conviction of my life now rest upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary people, is the central and inevitable feature of human existence.
We have all experienced loneliness – loneliness of relationships… loneliness of the soul… and worst of all, the loneliness of lack of meaning.
Not long ago we had Archie Roach, the aboriginal folk singer at our school. Archie Roach is one of the stolen generation. He was taken away from his parents as a child and put into a home. As a Christian he has long forgiven the injustice and the dislocation of his life. But as he sings his haunting song, ‘Took the children away, they took the children away,’ you can still hear the pain of his loneliness.
On the cross Jesus felt the loneliness of separation from the Father, one of the most important of relationships. And as substitute, as representative of all of Adams descendants, he carried the loneliness of all those who feel the emptiness of abandonment, desertion, forsakenness, of lack of meaning
– people who feel friendless
– people with shattered relationships
– kids or parents who can’t or won’t communicate
– husbands and wives who have lost their loved ones
– people who feel neglected.
The message of the cross is:– you are loved, God embraces you, you are held in his arms. His Son was forsaken so that you might always be in God’s care.
In the cross God begins the renewal of a spoiled creation.
Congregation, I don’t know what you make of this business of the earth shaking, rocks splitting, tombs breaking open and graves giving up their dead.
As far as I am aware only Matthew mentions these things in his Gospel and you wonder how they are meant to be understood.
In Paul’s letter to Christians in Rome we are told that the creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth.
Every death and funeral, every flood and drought and fire disaster, every oil spill, the destruction of the ozone layer, the pollution of our river systems, reminds us of a world in pain.
But, says Paul, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”
Matthew suggests that at Jesus’ death we see the signs of a new beginning, a world about to be reborn. Not just individual salvation, not just people reconciled with God, but the whole of creation brought back into harmony.
* * * * * *
Congregation how do you respond to Good Friday? How do you respond to the cross? The cross always calls for a response.
It took the church some three hundred years to come to grips with the scandal, the obscenity, the infamy of the cross. It was a symbol of suffering, humiliation, defeat.
The early church Fathers forbade any depiction of the cross in art. Then, in 312 AD the Roman emperor Constantine was supposed to have seen a vision of the cross before a decisive battle, with the words ‘Hoc Signo Vinces’ (in this sign conquer). He made his soldiers paint the cross on their shields and he defeated his enemy and became supreme emperor of the western Roman Empire. Constantine banned crucifixion as a method of execution. The cross became a symbol of faith and a symbol of victory and triumph.
Matthew records the response of another Roman, a captain in charge of the soldiers guarding the crucifixion proceedings. This man too was a pagan like Constantine.
He heard Jesus cry of loneliness, ‘God why have you forsaken me?’ He felt the earth tremble and heard about the tearing of the temple curtain, and he exclaimed in awe and worship, ‘Surely he was the Son of God.” “This has to be the Son of God.”
Two thousand years later people still stand at the foot of the cross. A few well-meaning souls say, ‘let’s not show the Exorcist today, let’s not play football, let’s not have the pubs open’. Let’s respect the day. Let’s keep it holy.
Instead we are invited to fall on our knees in worship, in awe, in gratitude and say with the centurion, ‘this has to be the Son of God!’ – Lord take my life, everything that I am and have, and make it yours. Lord take my brokenness, my loneliness, my failures, my rebellion, my disappointments, my struggles, my hurts. I leave them all at the foot of the cross. Remove them as far as the east is from the west and embrace me as your child.