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For worship planning ideas on Lord’s Days 15-16 , please link to our ministry partner at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and specifically to this page where you will find ideas for constructing a service around the theme of the identity of Jesus’ suffering and death:
(posted
on 11/7/2005)
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider
- In this section of the Catechism we are examining the articles of the Apostles’ Creed. Hence, the Catechism, like the Creed, jumps immediately from Christmas to Good Friday. It has long been observed that for all its strengths and historical durability, the Creed contains the oddity of skipping over the entire life and ministry of Jesus. All of it is somehow tamped down into that comma that separates the clauses, “born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Whether or not a sermon on Lord’s Day 15 needs to talk about the saving significance of also Jesus’ life, we should not forget that most of what we know about Jesus—and just about every single story about our Lord that we hold dear—comes between Christmas and Good Friday despite the Creed’s skipping of that material.
- Lord’s Day 15 also countenances that other curious feature about the great Creed: the inclusion of Pontius Pilate. Just how a second-rate Roman sub-official got memorialized for the ages in this statement of faith remains something of a mystery. Aside from nailing the story of Jesus down historically (which is itself no small thing), it’s difficult to know what to do with Pilate’s inclusion. Also, Q&A 38 claims that what is significant about Pilate is that he condemned Jesus despite Jesus’ innocence. But the gospel stories show us that Pilate famously washed his hands of this matter, declared Jesus’ blood to be on the heads of the roaring crowds, and as a matter of fact merely acquiesced AGAINST his better judgment. So this may be an instance where the Catechism, although largely accurate on even this point, should not make us forget the exact angularities and complexities of the actual story as it comes to us in the gospels.
- Another wrinkle: Q&A 37 says that throughout his life and certainly in the end on the cross, Jesus shouldered for us “the anger of God against the whole human race.” Certainly we cannot and must not dismiss what is in also the Bible a significant theme related to the wrath/anger of God. And certainly we do not want to trot down the Marcionite path of separating out the wrathful God of the Old Testament from the (supposedly different) God of grace found in the New Testament.
- But neither do we want to make the anger of God constitutive. That is to say, God is first and foremost a God of love and grace—it was out of the wealth of God’s love that he sent his Son to this world in the first place. God managed to love us “while we were yet sinners.” So we want to steer clear of the idea that God’s anger had to be appeased or extinguished SO THAT grace and love could take its place. In fact, because the picture of God as fundamentally wrathful is so common, a sermon on Lord’s Day 15 may be the chance overtly to say that whatever Jesus accomplished through his atoning sacrifice on the cross, it did not transform God from principally angry to basically nice. (This is the old “Umstimmung Gottes” theory that has long been repudiated in orthodox theology).
- However, that does not take away from the fact that sin is a real obstacle, a true barrier between God and us. Noting that grace is the keynote of the gospel before and after Jesus’ sacrificial death does not diminish the notion that sin offends God, angers God, and so must be put away by God in some way.
Possible Biblical Texts
I Peter 2:13-25: This passage has some historical difficulties inherent with it, not the least of which is the slavery issue and Peter’s advice that even the slaves of abusive masters should just “take it” because that’s the right thing to do. We may need to parse and apply that kind of material cautiously. However, what should not be missed is the notion that by submitting to an unjust death, Jesus has set a tone for all of our living. The Christian life assumes a humble, bowed-head posture. Jesus has shown us that the path that leads to life is a sacrificial path, a lowly and difficult path. Since “by his wounds” we have been healed, we are to take the hint and live for others in a way that will enhance also their lives even if that involves the diminishment of our own lives.
Isaiah 53:1-12: This soaring passage is so familiar that its connection to Lord’s Day 15 is maybe too obvious to mention! But if ever a passage set forth the nature of the Messiah as God’s Suffering Servant, this is it. The substitutionary nature of Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf is here laid out in clear language. As Isaiah says, when you behold someone suffering as much as we know Jesus ultimately did, we want to distance ourselves, we want to find a different explanation for this. And so we say, “He was stricken BY GOD, smitten and afflicted BY GOD.” That is, we think God did this to Jesus. But Isaiah won’t let us put daylight between Jesus’ suffering and ourselves. As a matter of fact, he has been smitten and afflicted BY US. It’s our wounds, the ugliness of our own sins that we see reflected on his anguished visage.
Illustration Idea
Illustration Idea #1: Lewis Smedes reminds us of a very curious contradiction. If I were to ask, "How many of you want to go to heaven?" likely all of you would raise your hands. But then if I asked, "How many want to go right now?" we'd probably wince and hesitate. Most of us, as Smedes writes, are not standing tiptoe on the tarmac eager to fly away to heaven before the sun sets. Maybe it's sheer lack of imagination. Maybe we're less than crazy about the fact that for now the cemetery is the only way we know of to get to heaven.
But maybe, just maybe, this quirky combination of longing simultaneously for heaven and earth tells us something about the way God wired us. The simple fact is that we were created to enjoy this world, to love other people, to revel in the splendors God made. We are properly loathe to leave all that. At the same time the ugliness of life is enough to make anybody sometimes wonder if the whole thing is really worth it. But somewhere between the tug of earth and the pull of heaven we discover the truth: the Creator himself wants to maintain this creation. So the Creator made himself into a creature just like us, soaked up all that is bad, promised to stay with us through our own periods of hurt, but then also said that through all of this blood, sweat, and tears this very creation would be saved.
And for all of us who live in the real world, for all of us who read newspapers, who watch the often-bloody evening news, who sit tensely waiting for lab results, or who love someone so much it scares us, for all such as this the idea that Jesus both understands suffering and has found a way to eradicate it is something more than good news--it's precious!
Whenever we talk about human suffering, we know that true suffering is never generic. All I have to do is scan the individual pews in this sanctuary and in my mind I can tick off a lot of very specific sufferings. And I don't even know a fraction of what goes on in your hearts and lives! We can be thankful we are not actively persecuted but that does not immunize us against pain: the pain of death, the fright of disease, the fracture of a broken family, the cloud of mental illness, the grip of addiction, the disappointment of unrealized dreams.
"There are times," C.S. Lewis once wrote, "when I think that I really do not desire heaven at all. But more often I find myself wondering if, in our heart of hearts, we have ever wanted anything else." And so we say, "Even so, Come, Lord Jesus! Come!"
Illustration Idea #2: When we look at what we dislike, what we despise, what we fear, we recoil, we go the other way, we pray that nothing like this will ever befall us. We may even call that a "natural" reaction. And perhaps it is. But maybe that is also why it took a supernatural reaction to save us. God did the unnatural, yet supernatural, thing of surveying the sum total of all that was fractured in this cosmos but then said, "All that must happen to me, too, and I am going to rush headlong into it in order, in the deep mysteries of my being, to triumph over it." God knew that were he to remain aloof from our sorrows, then his raw power would not be enough to deal with the brutal facts of our lives. We are not saved by power but weakness. That, my friends, is the heartbeat of the gospel.
And don't we now and again sense the dynamic here? You've perhaps heard this story before, but it bears repeating. The scene is the last day of school before the Christmas holiday. The boys and girls of an elementary school had just finished their Christmas program for the parents and now it was time to go home for the two-week vacation. One set of parents was waiting for Bobby, their Kindergartner who, along with all the other five- and six-year-olds, was carrying home a special project--the Christmas gift for Mom and Dad that the kids had been working on for weeks.
With great exuberance Bobby raced toward his folks trying to put on his coat and keep his backpack on his shoulder all the while. But Bobby tripped, and the special gift flew out of his hands, landing with a sickening ceramic crash. For a moment there was silence, and then Bobby wailed. His father quickly strode over and strongly said, "It's OK, Bob, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter." But his mother was wiser about such things and so she threw herself to the ground, embraced the tyke tightly and said, "Oh but it does matter, it matters a great deal indeed!" And she wept with her Bobby, she wept.
Who has understood our pain? Who knows to the depths our sorrows and the sufferings that sin has brought to every last person on this sad planet? God only knows that when it comes right down to it, you cannot erase this world's pain by waving it off and claiming it doesn't matter. It does matter. It matters a great deal indeed. And because our God in Christ knows that, he has mysteriously and profoundly made it possible one day to wipe away every tear from our eyes.
The bread and the wine of the holy table tell us that because Jesus let every ounce of joy get vacuumed out of his very soul, the day will come when he will say to each one of us, "My dear son, my dear daughter, enter now into the joy of my Father's kingdom." When that day comes, we won't even be tempted to ask, "How did you do this?" When you enter into joy, you will know that God in Christ did do it, and it will be enough. Eternally enough.