100 Sermon Illustrations on Good Friday

The sun bore down on my neck as I walked through the neatly laid stones, each row like another line in a massive book. My eyes strained to take in all of the information — name, age, rank, country — and perhaps also death itself, the fragility of life, the harsh reality of war. In that field of graves, a war memorial for men lost as prisoners of war, as slaves laboring to construct the Burma-Siam railway, I felt as the psalmist: “laid low in the dust” (Psalm 119:25). I felt like Job sitting among the dust and ashes of a great tragedy. Then one stone stopped my wandering and said what I could not. On an epitaph in the middle of the cemetery was written: “There shall be in that great earth, a richer dust concealed.”(1)

It is helpful, I think, to be reminded that we are dust. It is crucial to take this reminder with us as we approach the vast and terrible events of Holy Week. The season of Lent, the forty days in which we prepare to encounter the events of Easter, begins with Ash Wednesday. On this day, foreheads are marked with a bold and ashen cross of dust, recalling both our history and our future, invoking repentance, inciting stares. Marked with the Cross, we are Christ's own: pilgrims on a journey that proclaims death and resurrection all at once. The journey through Lent into the light and darkness of Holy Week is for those made in dust who will return to dust, those willing to trace the breath that began all of life to the place where Christ breathed his last. It is a journey that expends everything within us.

There is a Latin word that was once used to denote the provisions necessary for a person going on a journey -- the clothes, food, and money the traveler would need along the way. VIATICUM was a word often used by Roman magistrates. It was the payment or goods given to those who were sent into the provinces to exercise an office or perform a service. The viaticum was vital provision for an uncertain journey. Fittingly, the early church employed this image to speak of the Eucharist when it was administered to a dying person. The viaticum, the bread of Communion, was seen as sustenance for Christians on their way from this world into another. Sometime later, the word was used not only to describe a last Communion, but as the Sacrament of Communion for all people. It is as if to say: our communion with Christ is provision for the way home. The viaticum is God's answer to Jacob's vow, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father's house, then the LORD will be my God” (Genesis 28:20-22). It is what Christ offered when he said, “Take and eat. This is my body.” The journey from dust to dust and back to our Father's house would be too great without it.

As it is, we are flattened by the events of Holy Week. From the invitation of the Last Supper to the desolation of the Cross, we are undone by events that began before us and will continue after us. We are, in the words of Isaiah or the sentiments of the psalmist, like grass that withers, flowers that blow away like dust. But so we are, in this great earth, a richer dust concealed. Walking in cemeteries we realize this; following Christ we proclaim it. Standing before Holy Week as dust and ashes bids us to see again our need for God's unchanging provision. He offers the Cross, the communion of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, and the life everlasting.

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1. This is a line from a poem of Rupert Brookes entitled “1914.”

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Copyright © 2006 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

We have heard the phrase “take up your cross and follow me” and the words of Paul that we should “glory in the cross” so often that the meaning of the Cross and of the Passion is often lost to us. They tend to become for us mere theory, for in practice we set up reservations and limitations too readily. Sometimes our exodus and freedom are such though that the cross becomes literally real for us. On this heaviest of days, hear the last words of Alfons Maria Wachsmann, a German priest executed in 1944 for opposing Hitler. The letter was written, with manacled hands, to his sister one hour before he was beheaded:

In one hour I am going to die, and my passover will be completed. In one hour I will pass over into the glory of the living God, to whom I have given myself over wholly and without reservation. In his hand I am sheltered. God will care for you. Do not lose courage. Trust in him who has not forsaken me. I have prepared for this hour by 8 months of Lent in prison, difficult yet very beautiful. On the Way of the Cross I am approaching the last station. There has been darkness, but the day is dawning. They come for me now, and I must go home through the narrow gates of the guillotine. I die always your brother and a priest of the Church of God. In thee, O Lord, have I hoped. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Alleluia.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #21443]

"It is a good thing to learn early that God and suffering are not opposites but rather one and the same thing and necessarily so; for me, the idea that God himself suffers is far and away the most convincing piece of Christian doctrine."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Letters and Papers from Prison"

Tomorrow is Good Friday, the day when Christians all over the world recall Jesus’ Passion: the suffering that procured our salvation.

Given the centrality of the Passion to the Christian faith — and Christianity’s role in shaping Western civilization — it is no surprise that the Passion has inspired some of the West’s greatest art, including the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Between 1724 and 1731, Bach set at least three, and possibly all four, of the Gospels’ accounts of the Lord’s Passion to music.

Unfortunately, only two of these survive in their entirety, but what we have are among Western civilization’s greatest achievements — music that should inspire our gratitude on several levels.

The first of these, the “St. John Passion,” was performed as part of a church service during Holy Week in 1724. Its text is based on Martin Luther’s translation of John 18 and 19.

Bach sets the mood immediately with the opening chorale, “Lord, our Master.” After acknowledging that God’s glory fills all of the earth, the choir, on our behalf, asks Him to show us how triumph can come out of the deepest humiliation.

Three years later, on Good Friday in 1727, what is regarded as Bach’s greatest work, the “St. Matthew Passion,” was first performed at the Thomas church in Leipzig. Like the “St. John Passion,” it combines the biblical text with commentary and meditation.

Unlike the “St. John Passion,” though, you have probably heard parts of this one in popular music. Excerpts from it have figured prominently in many movies — not only those with religious themes, but also in movies like THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY or even DEMOLITION MAN.

Listening to it, it’s easy to see why: Rarely, if ever, have love, sacrifice, devotion, and tenderness been brought together like this. When the soloist sings “make yourself pure, my heart” and urges the world to depart so that only Jesus may dwell within, his longing becomes our own.

Unbelievably, Bach’s music was largely forgotten after his death until Felix Mendelssohn rediscovered the “St. Matthew Passion” ninety years later — a rediscovery for which we should all be grateful.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Broadly speaking, there have been three ways in which Christ’s death has been explained in the church. Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin, and of what is needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours. It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each.

There is first, the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men, whether by revealing God’s love to us, or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins, or by setting us a supreme example of godliness, or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow, or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us, or by all these modes together. It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life; all that is needed to set, us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points, and this Christ’s death brings about. The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem; as soon as we are changed we become forgivable, and are then forgiven at once. This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution, since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us.

A second type of account sees Christ’s death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom. The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion, just as David went forth as Israel’s champion to fight Goliath. Through the cross these hostile forces, however conceived -- whether as sin and death, Satan and his hosts, the demonic in society and its structures, the powers of God’s wrath and curse, or anything else -- are overcome and nullified, so that Christians are not in bondage to them, but share Christ’s triumph over them. The assumption here is that man’s plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God; yet, seeing Jesus as our champion, exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute, just as all the Israelites who declined Goliath’s challenge in 1 Samuel 17:8-11 could properly call David their substitute. Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative, so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute. What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ, whose victory secured our release, was our representative substitute.

The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete. It that there is biblical support for all they say, but it goes further. It grounds man’s plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that, for all God’s daily goodness to him, as a sinner he stands under divine judgment, and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence, and unless God’s rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever. On this view, Christ’s death had its effect first on God, who was hereby propitiated (or, better, who hereby propitiated himself), and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of God’s seeking and saving love. The thought here is that by dying Christ offered to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins, satisfaction which God’s own character dictated as the only means whereby his ‘no’ to us could become a ‘yes’, Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself, or death as the perfecting of holy obedience, or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell, which is God’s final judgment on sin, or a perfect confession of man’s sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification, or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together), the shape of this view remains the same -- that by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins, propitiated our Maker, turned God’s ‘no’ to us into a ‘yes’, and so saved us. All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact, whether or not they call him that, but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal.

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From Packer's 1973 Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture at Cambridge University.

The Very Reverend Dr. Jeffrey Philip Hywel John believes that the church’s traditional understanding of the cross of Christ is both “repulsive” and “insane.” His comments on the cross and atonement ignited a firestorm in Great Britain and the controversy has now spread to America as well. Anglicanism does not seem to have whatever it takes to deal with heretics these days, and so the church simply leaves them in places of influence, such as Dr. John’s position as Dean of St. Albans.

As a report published in THE TELEGRAPH [London] makes clear, the controversy over his latest comments came even before his message was broadcast on the BBC:

The Very Rev Jeffrey John, who had to withdraw before taking up an appointment as bishop of Reading in 2003 after it emerged he was in a long-term homosexual relationship, is set to ignite a row over one of the most fundamental tenets of Christian belief.

Clergy who preach this Easter that Christ was sent to earth to die in atonement for the sins of mankind are “making God sound like a psychopath”, he will say.

In a BBC Radio 4 show, Mr John, who is now Dean of St Albans, urges a revision of the traditional explanation, known as “penal substitution.”

A look at Dr. John’s message will reveal that he does not call for a revision of the penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement. Instead, he calls for its repudiation. Here he describes what he was taught as a child:

The explanation I was given went something like this. God was very angry with us for our sins, and because he is a just God, our sin had to be punished. But instead of punishing us he sent his Son, Jesus, as a substitute to suffer and die in our place. The blood of Jesus paid the price of our sins, and because of him God stopped being angry with us. In other words, Jesus took the rap, and we got forgiven, provided we said we believed in him.

In other words, he was taught the biblical understanding of the cross and its significance. Now, this is the very understanding he describes as “insane.” In his words:

Well, I don’t know about you, but even at the age of ten I thought this explanation was pretty repulsive as well as nonsensical. What sort of God was this, getting so angry with the world and the people he created, and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of his own Son? And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing somebody else? It was worse than illogical, it was insane. It made God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this we’d say they were a monster.

Well, I haven’t changed my mind since. That explanation of the cross just doesn’t work, though sadly it’s one that’s still all too often preached. It just doesn’t make sense to talk about a nice Jesus down here, placating the wrath of a nasty, angry Father God in heaven. Christians believe Jesus is God incarnate. As he said, ‘Whoever sees me has seen the Father’. Jesus is what God is: he is the one who shows us God’s nature. And the most basic truth about God’s nature is that He is Love, not wrath and punishment.

So Dr. John will now discard the idea that Jesus died on the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice, and will invent a meaning for the cross more in line with his own theological prejudices.

What Dr. John repudiates is precisely what the Bible teaches. The Bible does not merely assert that Christ died on the cross for our sins -- it goes on to explain why this substitutionary death was necessary. In Romans 3, the Apostle Paul explains that God put forth Jesus on the cross as a propitiatory sacrifice for our sins. God’s love is demonstrated in the fact that, even as his own righteousness demanded a perfect sacrifice for sin, He determined to send the Son as that perfect sacrifice. In Paul’s words, this means that God is both just AND the justifier. He rightly DEMANDED an acceptable sacrifice in order to satisfy His wrath, but He also PROVIDED that same sacrifice.

This same understanding of the cross is taught by Jesus as He told the disciples of his impending death FOR sinners. It is the logic of the link between the sacrifices of the Old Testament and the sacrifice of the very Son of God, the foundation of the new covenant. This is the teaching of the Apostles on the day of Pentecost and of the entire book of Hebrews.

There are really only two options available for explaining what the Son of God was accomplishing on that cross. The first option is that taught by the church for centuries -- that the meaning of the cross is objective, revealing God’s objective satisfaction in accepting the obedience of the Son, even unto death on a cross, as the payment for sin. This is what Dr. John now explicitly rejects.

The second option is to define the meaning of the cross in essentially subjective terms, arguing that Christ dies in order to effect a change in us, rather than in God. This is a foundational teaching of Protestant liberalism, but it creeps into far too many evangelical pulpits as well.

Here is how Dr. John describes the meaning of the cross:

On the cross God absorbs into himself our fallenness and its consequences and offers us a new relationship. God shows he knows what it’s like to be the loser; God hurts and weeps and bleeds and dies. It’s a mystery we can hardly glimpse, let alone grasp; and if there is an answer to the problem of suffering, perhaps it’s one for the heart, not the reason. Because the answer God’s given is simply himself; to show that, so far from inflicting suffering as a punishment, he bears our griefs and shares our sorrow. From Good Friday on, God is no longer “God up there”, inscrutably allotting rewards and retributions. On the Cross, even more than in the crib, he is Immanuel, God down here, God with us.

The ground of our salvation is the substitutionary atonement accomplished by Christ. Our response in faith to Christ is essential to our experience of salvation, but the work of our salvation is fully accomplished by Christ.

What will Dr. John do with Paul’s explanation of the Gospel and the meaning of the cross? Well, probably something like what he does with Paul’s teachings on homosexuality. It takes no genius to detect a pattern here. Dr. John, who entered into a homosexual civil union last year, obviously disregards the Apostle Paul’s very clear teachings on homosexuality. What would keep him from doing the same with an atonement theology he finds to be “insane?” Obviously, the answer to that question is “nothing.”

He explicitly rejects the wrath of God. His authority for doing so is Julian of Norwich, who wrote, “For I saw that there is no manner of wrath in God, neither for short time nor for long;-for in sooth, if God be wroth for an instant, we should never have life nor place nor being.”

The only obstacle to accepting that argument is the Bible. As represented in that quotation, Julian of Norwich denies what the Bible unquestionably declares -- the God will pour out His wrath upon sin.

Writing in THE GUARDIAN [London], Giles Fraser throws his lot in with Dr. John. In his words, “For, once again, what [John] has been saying is nothing other than a truth known by most people in the pews: that the idea of God murdering his son for the salvation of the world is barbaric and morally indefensible. It turns Christianity into “cosmic child abuse”.

We are left with an unavoidable choice. We must stand with the Apostle Paul in seeing the cross as the place where God is shown to be both “just AND the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” Or, we must stand with Dr. John and Mr. Fraser in describing the New Testament’s teaching of the cross as “insane” and a form of “cosmic child abuse.” On this question there is no middle ground.

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FOR FURTHER REFLECTION:

No model or theory of the atonement can exhaust all the biblical materials on the glory of the cross. We must insist that the penal substitutionary understanding of the cross is central and essential, but that does not mean that we deny that other models can extend and enrich our understanding of the cross.

As He approached His 33rd birthday, Jesus must have been thinking of His mission. He came to dwell among us as a human being.

The great secret about Christ is that He is, was and always will be God Himself. Thomas, seeing the risen Christ after Easter, proclaimed, “My Lord and My God!” (John 20:28). The apostle John explained, “And the Word (Jesus Christ) was God ... and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1,14).

Christmas celebrates the moment our eternal God entered the human race through the womb of a virgin upon whom the Holy Spirit had come in history’s greatest miracle of conception and birth.

Many people today go through the Christmas season with faulty spiritual eyesight, not recognizing that the Babe in the manger is the King of the universe:

• He came to die for every person

Jesus came to die for every person. All of us have sinned and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). You or I might be the best person in the world, but there is a great chasm between our morality and God’s holiness. No one can achieve God’s glory; we have all sinned and fallen short. Our inability to be holy separates us from God, resulting in our being in a state of spiritual death.

Christ -- perfect God and perfect Man -- died in our place. We can put our trust in One who truly measures up and who, as the perfect sacrifice, died on the cross for us.

Crucifixion was death by torture; it was designed to be both excruciating and bloody. It had to be that way to reveal the ugliness of sin, the terror of death, and the power of His redeeming blood. How deeply Jesus must have felt the shadow of the Cross as He celebrated his 33rd birthday.

• He came to deliver us from the fear of death

Jesus’ death for us destroyed the power of death, removed its sting; and it frees us from the fear of death. He came into this world at Bethlehem to dwell among us, to die for every person and to deliver us all from the fear of death. He was born to die, that we might die to death and be born into God’s eternal kingdom.

• He came to demonstrate his love for us

His birthday also demonstrates His love for us. Jesus Christ was born in a manger and became one of us so He could walk the same path we walk. When we go to Him in prayer for comfort, we know He understands. There’s nothing you’ve ever experienced that the Lord didn’t know in His flesh when He walked upon this earth.

Christmas is not just the pageantry of a little baby born in a manger. It is the story of a God who loves us so much. He knew that the only way to redeem and save us was to send His own Son to be one of us. In that moment in Bethlehem, God invaded humanity. That was God in the manger; and as He grew, it was God walking around in a body. As He celebrated His fleeting birthdays, it was to mark the passing years of a divine life lived with an ultimate purpose in mind. As He was crucified, it was God hanging between heaven and earth, God forsaken by God. Who can understand it?

And yet it is the mystery of our salvation. He was born to die, but He rose again to give life freely, abundantly and eternally. As you celebrate His birth this year, think of how He must have felt as He marked each passing birthday during His short span on earth. It sobers us; but it gladdens us, too. Contained in His birthday are the secrets of the new birth for each of us. In His cradle is our life; on His cross is our forgiveness; and in His resurrection is our hope.

Alleluia! O how the angels sang.

Alleluia! How it rang!

And the sky was bright with a holy light

‘Twas the birthday of a King.

(From the Christmas song, “Birthday of a King.”)

What is the Mormon Teaching about the Atonement?

THE GREATEST SUFFERING OF THE SAVIOR: IN THE GARDEN OR ON THE CROSS?

One year my wife visited a Mormon ward on an Easter Sunday. Strangely, for three hours they had nothing to say about Jesus Christ dying on the cross or His resurrection from the dead. Christians tend to get confused about the Mormon view of salvation and the cross. Why? Do the LDS believe in it or not? The LDS [Latter Day Saints] respond, “Yes, we do,” and then offer some statements and pictures to prove it. CLARIFICATION: Mormons affirm that Jesus Christ died on a cross but they reject God’s purposes in the crucifixion and what Jesus Christ accomplished there. For anyone to miss the gospel message of the cross and the resurrection, where does that leave one’s faith? Lost from God! Meaningless and empty - as “your faith IS vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17b).

Then what does Mormonism believe? To abandon the gospel, what has become their alternative? The LDS faith launched into a lot of high-sounding nonsense. What they convince millions of people to believe is just about enough to “blow your mind.” They have emptied the cross of its meaning into just a secondary role.

While we cannot and would not diminish our Lord’s struggle within the Garden of Gethsemane, that account in no way is described by God’s Word as being the atonement. So here is the question: How can anyone think themselves credible while elevating the garden to be above the cross?

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, WHERE DID THE ATONEMENT TAKE PLACE? As clarified by one of their prophets, “What happened in that garden, said President Ezra Taft Benson, ‘was the greatest single act of love in recorded history ... It was in GETHSEMANE that Jesus took on Himself the sins of the world, in GETHSEMANE that His pain was equivalent to the cumulative burden of all men, in GETHSEMANE that He descended below all things so that all could repent and come to Him ... That holy, unselfish act of voluntarily taking on Himself the sins of all other men is called the ATONEMENT’” (Church News, 1 June 1991, p.14). If that was it, why would Jesus still die upon the cross? LDS prophet Benson emphasized Gethsemane three times in one sentence when “Gethsemane” is only found twice in the whole Bible, and never described as the atonement for sin. See Matthew 26:36 and Mark 14:32.

According to God’s Word, did Jesus bare our sin in the garden where He prayed or upon the cross where He died? “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.... reconciled to God by the death of his Son ... by whom we have now received the ATONEMENT.” (Romans 5:8-11).

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, WHERE DID CHRIST SUFFER FOR SIN? “In the Garden of GETHSEMANE, Christ suffered for the sins of all mankind, thus opening the way for all of us to repent and free ourselves from the bondage of sin” (Ensign Magazine, April, 1981, p.19).

According to God’s Word, sin is connected to His death, so did Jesus die in the garden or on a cross? “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit” (1 Pet. 3:18).

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, DO CHRISTIANS OVEREMPHASIZE THE CROSS? “Jesus then went into the Garden of GETHSEMANE. There he suffered most. He suffered greatly on the cross, of course, but other men had died by crucifixion; in fact, a man hung on either side of him as he died on the cross. But no man, nor set of men, nor all men put together, ever suffered what the Redeemer suffered in the garden. He went there to pray and suffer’” (Conference Report, Marion Romney of the LDS First Presidency, Oct. 1953, p.35).

According to God’s Word, where should the emphasis be? “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14). Mormonism is impressed with the garden but the theme of scripture is, “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, HOW ARE WE FORGIVEN? “Forgiveness is available because Christ the Lord sweat great drops of blood in GETHSEMANE as he bore the incalculable weight of the sins of all who ever had or ever would repent ... In a garden called GETHSEMANE, outside Jerusalem’s walls, in agony beyond compare, he took upon himself the sins of all men on condition of repentance” (The Promised Messiah, LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, p. 337 & 552).

According to God’s Word, was forgiveness provided in the garden or through the cross? “And you, being dead in your sins ... having forgiven you ... nailing it to his cross” (Col. 2:13-14). Total forgiveness is available right now through the blood of the cross. “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins” (Eph. 1:7).

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, IS THIS FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE SWEATING OR SHEDDING OF BLOOD? “Forgiveness is available because Christ the Lord sweat great drops of blood in GETHSEMANE . . .” (The Promised Messiah, LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, p. 337).

According to God’s Word, did Jesus perspire or die for sin? “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). You must not trust in the sweating when “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Heb. 9:22). Of the four accounts of the Garden of Gethsemane, only one mentions this blood in Gethsemane and never in the redemptive sense. Mormon leaders miss a very significant point. Sin is not cleansed because Jesus perspired as it were great drops of blood; it is based upon the fact that our substitute died.

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, HOW DOES CHRIST’S CRUCIFIXION COMPARE TO OTHERS? “And as he came out of the Garden, delivering himself voluntarily into the hands of wicked men, the victory had been won. There remained yet the shame and the pain of his attest, his trials, and his cross. But all these were overshadowed by the agonies and sufferings in GETHSEMANE. It was on the cross that he ‘suffered death in the flesh,’ even as many have suffered agonizing deaths, but it was in GETHSEMANE that ‘he suffered the pain of all men, that all men might repent and come unto him’” (The Mortal Messiah, LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, pp. 127-128).

According to God’s Word, what is unique about the cross? As one man with a match can start a forest fire, picture another single-handedly putting out the fire over millions of acres and to save millions of lives. The Lord’s redemption is great enough to save every trusting soul, which depends entirely upon the blood of the infinite God-Man, “the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Pet. 1:18-19). Mormonism totally misses the impact of the gospel and the sufficiency of the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ. Jesus, as every sacrificial lamb, was born to shed His blood and die as a sacrifice. How did God purchase the church of God? - “with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). How absurd to turn anyone’s faith to trust in what happened in the garden for an atonement for sin!

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, LDS TEMPLES ACCOMPLISH WHAT THE CROSS COULD NOT. Temple rituals are thought necessary to reach exaltation or to be with God in their highest level of heaven. Whereas Christians might display the cross, the LDS replace it to reverence temple pictures in their homes.

According to God’s Word, the temple veil was torn to confirm that the way to God is through the blood of the cross, not temples (Mat. 27:51). “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19). Christians are the temples of God now, not manmade buildings (1 Cor. 3:16-17; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16). The temple in Heaven makes LDS temples comparatively disgusting (Rev. 11:19; 14:17). Israel as God’s people had only one temple at a time, not over a hundred baptizing people for the dead. The living God does not dwell in temples made by hands (Acts 7:48; 17:24).

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, WHY IS IT WRONG FOR CHRISTIANS TO DISPLAY THE CROSS? The cross is “inharmonious with the quiet spirit of worship and reverence” (Mormon Doctrine, LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, p.172). What a pitiful, simplistic remark! However, to remind the LDS of their temple covenants, they do have Masonic symbols on their underwear. Is that superior to the cross?

According to God’s Word, who would oppose the cross and what is their destiny? The Apostle Paul was grieved to say, “and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: Whose end is destruction” (Phil. 3:18-19). Under attack by the cults and at the very heart of the gospel is God’s message of the cross! The cross proves the immensity of the love of God. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). The cross reminds Christians of the shed blood of Jesus Christ for the remission of sin. As the symbol for the Christian faith, the cross is superior to a crucifix because the Savior was not perpetually nailed to the cross. Now since He arose, we have the empty cross and an empty tomb. Jesus Christ has conquered sin, death and hell for every one who will trust completely in Him.

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, ARE PENTAGRAMS WORTHY SYMBOLS? Mormonism makes little of the cross as it is never on LDS buildings. For being so strongly against the symbol of the cross, how peculiar that Satanic pentagrams are on the Nauvoo and Salt Lake City temples! In “Mormonism, Magic and Masonry, p. 68,” pentagrams are the symbol for the occult. “The Pentagram, the sign of the Microcosm, was held to be the most powerful means of conjuration in any rite.... with two points in the ascendant [upside-down star] it was the sign of Satan” (The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, Vol. 2, p. 552). Furthermore, Joseph Smith was not wearing a cross at his death, he wore “a silver Jupiter medallion constructed according to the instructions for making ‘Magic Seals, or Talismans,’ in Barrett’s 1801 The Magus” (Mormonism and the Magic World View, Mormon author D. Michael Quinn, p. 66).

According to the God’s Word, these occult activities are an extreme abomination (Deut. 18:9-14). Who is behind this apostasy taking people away from the basic essentials of the faith? “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1 Tim. 4:1). The LDS religion is of the devil.

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, WHAT IS THE VALUE OF THE CROSS? The cross is inadequate. Christ’s sacrifice atoned only for Adam’s sin. For personal sin we read, “It is by grace that we are saved, AFTER ALL WE CAN DO” (Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 25:23). “To receive this great gift, we must do more than repent of our sins and be baptized and confirmed by appropriate priesthood authority. Men must receive the Melchizedek Priesthood, and all Church members must make and keep sacred covenants in the temple, including eternal marriage.” (TRUE TO THE FAITH, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, p. 153). It’s all about works inside of Mormonism to get there. Generally, a Mormon claiming to be “saved” only means that he will be resurrected from the dead. In other words, no big deal as “there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust” (Acts 24:15). That means everyone! So that would make all of the Bible references to qualify only those who are saved totally pointless. And for the unjust, how could the LDS identify a resurrection to the Great White Throne judgment as being saved? (Rev. 20:11-15)

According to the God’s Word, “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us FROM ALL SIN” (1 John 1:7). “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: NOT OF WORKS, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2:8-9).

ACCORDING TO MORMONISM, WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? “The central doctrine of the gospel is the atonement of Jesus Christ. The Prophet Joseph Smith said, ‘The first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost’ (Articles of Faith 1:4). In it’s fullness, the gospel includes all the doctrines, principles, laws, ordinances, and covenants necessary for us to be exalted in the celestial kingdom.” (TRUE TO THE FAITH, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, p. 76).

According to the God’s Word, how is the gospel defined? There are many manmade gospels, so which gospel saves? “I declare unto you the gospel ... By which also ye are SAVED ... how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:1-4). What is the opposite of SAVED? - To be lost! “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them” (2 Cor. 4:3-4). Now why are Mormon people blind and lost? Are we instructed to preach the garden or the cross? “But we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23). Do LDS temples, commandments and works bring anyone the power of God? “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 1:16). See what is missing from those who diminish the cross? God’s message is to “preach the gospel ... For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:17-18). Did Christ redeem us in the garden? “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Gal. 3:13).

HOW CAN WE COME TO GOD? God sent His Son to the cross to pay for your sins. To say in effect that Your Son is not good enough is to offend God. The result is to hear God say, then you are not good enough into enter My heaven. “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ ... by the cross” (Eph. 2:13-16). Salvation is through the blood of the cross!

IS PEACE WITH GOD OFFERED THROUGH GETHSEMANE, LDS TEMPLES AND OBEDIENCE TO MORMON COMMANDMENTS? There is only one way to have peace with God as Christ “made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself” (Col. 1:20).

BUT DON’T YOU BELIEVE THAT MORMONS ARE GOOD PEOPLE? For those who defend the merits of Mormonism, what are you saying? What virtues are so important that you would support what God abhors? Do the LDS differ from the seemingly nice Jehovah’s Witness who come to doors to spread Watchtower poison? How can you defend any cult that purposefully usurps God’s way to install their own? Do you bid God speed by telling how you are so impressed by their dedication? “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Pro. 14:12). The LDS church is taking people to hell. The obituary columns are filled with LDS faces being destined to eternal, outer darkness because they believed the Mormon church over God. Walter Martin described Mormonism as the devil’s best lie!

DECEIVERS OR DECEIVED? But on the other hand, what sympathy is there for lost LDS souls? Please separate in your thinking the deceivers from the deceived, “even weeping” to have compassion for those being betrayed (Phil. 3:18-19). If you have no concern for that long line of millions of Mormons marching towards a Christless eternity, you need to check you heart, because how can you honestly be right with God?

A central statement in traditional Christian creeds is that Jesus was crucified “under Pontius Pilate.” But the majority of Christians have only the vaguest sense what the phrase represents, and most non-Christians probably can’t imagine why it’s such an integral part of Christian faith. “Crucified under Pontius Pilate” provides the Jesus story with its most obvious link to larger human history. Pilate was a historical figure, the Roman procurator of Judea; he was referred to in other sources of the time and even mentioned in an inscription found at the site of ancient Caesarea in Israel. Linking Jesus’ death with Pilate represents the insistence that Jesus was a real person, not merely a figure of myth or legend. More than this, the phrase also communicates concisely some pretty important specifics of that historical event.

For one thing, the statement asserts that Jesus didn’t simply die; he was killed. This was a young man’s death in pain and public humiliation, not a peaceful end to a long life. Also, this wasn’t a mob action. Jesus is said to have been executed, not lynched, and by the duly appointed governmental authority of Roman Judea. There was a hearing of some sort, and the official responsible for civil order and Roman peace and justice condemned Jesus. This means that Pilate found something so serious as to warrant the death penalty.

But this was also a particular kind of death penalty. The Romans had an assortment of means by which to carry out a judicial execution; some, such as beheading, were quicker and less painful than crucifixion. Death by crucifixion was reserved for particular crimes and particular classes. Those with proper Roman citizenship were supposed to be immune from crucifixion, although they might be executed by other means. Crucifixion was commonly regarded as not only frighteningly painful but also the most shameful of deaths. Essentially, it was reserved for those who were perceived as raising their hands against Roman rule or those who in some other way seemed to challenge the social order — for example, slaves who attacked their masters, and insurrectionists, such as the many Jews crucified by Roman Gen. Vespasian in the Jewish rebellion of 66-72.

So the most likely crime for which Jesus was crucified is reflected in the Gospels’ account of the charge attached to Jesus’ cross: “King of the Jews.” That is, either Jesus himself claimed to be the Jewish royal messiah, or his followers put out this claim. That would do to get yourself crucified by the Romans.

Indeed, one criterion that ought to be applied more rigorously in modern scholarly proposals about the “historical Jesus” is what we might call the condition of “crucifiability”: You ought to produce a picture of Jesus that accounts for him being crucified. Urging people to be kind to one another, or advocating a more flexible interpretation of Jewish law, or even condemning the Temple and its leadership — none of these crimes is likely to have led to crucifixion. For example, first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus tells of a man who prophesied against the Temple. Instead of condemning him, the governor decided that he was harmless, although somewhat deranged and annoying to the Temple priests. So, after being flogged, he was released.

The royal-messiah claim would also help explain why Jesus was executed but his followers were not. This wasn’t a cell of plotters. Jesus himself was the issue. Furthermore, Pilate took some serious flak for being a bit too violent in his response to Jews and Samaritans who simply demonstrated vigorously against his policies. Pilate probably decided that publicly executing Jesus would snuff out the messianic enthusiasm of his followers without racking up more Jewish bodies than necessary.

Of course, the Gospels also implicate Jewish religious authorities — specifically, the priestly leaders who managed the Jerusalem Temple under franchise from the Roman government. Many scholars, including E.P. Sanders in JESUS AND JUDAISM, conclude that the Temple leaders were likely involved in Jesus coming to the attention of Pilate. After all, the high priest and his retinue held their posts by demonstrating continuing loyalty to Rome. If they judged that Jesus represented some threat to Roman rule, they were obliged to denounce him. Also, it is not so difficult to grant a certain likelihood to the Gospels’ claim that the Temple authorities were at least partly motivated by a resentment of Jesus’ criticism of their administration of the Temple, as may be reflected in the account of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers who operated in the premises under license from the high priest. But Jewish leaders didn’t crucify Jesus. “Crucified under Pontius Pilate” points to where that responsibility lies, with the Roman administration.

It’s rather clear what St. Paul meant by saying that “the preaching of the cross is foolishness” to most people of his day. As Martin Hengel showed in CRUCIFIXION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD AND THE FOLLY OF THE MESSAGE OF THE CROSS, Roman-era writers deemed crucifixion the worst imaginable fate, a punishment of unspeakable shamefulness. Celsus, a Roman critic of Christianity, ridiculed Christians for treating as divine someone who had been crucified. A second-century anti-Christian graffito from Rome, well-known among historians who study the time period, depicts a crudely drawn crucified man with a donkey’s head; under it stands a human figure, and beneath this is a derisive scrawl: “Alexamenos worships his god.”

There was, in short, little to be gained in proclaiming a crucified saviour in that setting in which crucifixion was a grisly reality. Some early Christians tried to avoid reference to Jesus’ crucifixion, while others preferred one or another alternate scenario. In one version, in a Christian apocryphal text, the soldiers confuse a bystander with Jesus, crucifying him instead, while Jesus is pictured as laughing at their folly. This idea is likely also reflected later in the Muslim tradition that a person from the crowd was mistakenly crucified as Jesus escaped. Many devout Muslims believe that Jesus was a true prophet, so it is simply inconceivable that God would have allowed him to die such a shameful death. Clearly, at least some early Christians felt the same way.

In fact, Jesus’ crucifixion posed a whole clutch of potential problems for early Christians. It meant that at the origin and heart of their faith was a state execution and that their revered savior had been tried and found guilty by the representative of Roman imperial authority. This likely made a good many people wonder if the Christians weren’t some seriously subversive movement. It was, at least, not the sort of group that readily appealed to those who cared about their social standing.

Jesus’ crucifixion represented a collision between Jesus and Roman governmental authority, an obvious liability to early Christian efforts to promote their faith. Yet, remarkably, they somehow succeeded. Centuries of subsequent Christian tradition have made the image of the crucified Jesus so familiar that the offensiveness of the event that it portrays has been almost completely lost.

Jesus, as described in the New Testament, was most likely crucified on Friday April 3, A.D. 33.

The latest investigation, reported in the journal International Geology Review, focused on earthquake activity at the Dead Sea, located 13 miles from Jerusalem. The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 27, mentions that an earthquake coincided with the crucifixion:

“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open.”

To analyze earthquake activity in the region, geologist Jefferson Williams of Supersonic Geophysical and colleagues Markus Schwab and Achim Brauer of the German Research Center for Geosciences studied three cores from the beach of the Ein Gedi Spa adjacent to the Dead Sea.

Varves, which are annual layers of deposition in the sediments, reveal that at least two major earthquakes affected the core: a widespread earthquake in 31 B.C. and an early first century seismic event that happened sometime between A.D. 26 and A.D. 36.

The latter period occurred during “the years when Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea and when the earthquake of the Gospel of Matthew is historically constrained,” Williams said.

“The day and date of the crucifixion (Good Friday) are known with a fair degree of precision,” he said. But the year has been in question.

In terms of textual clues to the date of the crucifixion, Williams quoted a Nature paper authored by Colin Humphreys and Graeme Waddington. Williams summarized their work as follows:

All four gospels and Tacitus in Annals (XV,44) agree that the crucifixion occurred when Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea from A.D. 26-36.

All four gospels say the crucifixion occurred on a Friday.

All four gospels agree that Jesus died a few hours before the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath (nightfall on a Friday).

The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) indicate that Jesus died before nightfall on the 14th day of Nisan; right before the start of the Passover meal.

John’s gospel differs from the synoptics; apparently indicating that Jesus died before nightfall on the 15th day of Nisan.

When data about the Jewish calendar and astronomical calculations are factored in, a handful of possible dates result, with Friday April 3, A.D. 33 being the best match, according to the researchers.

In terms of the earthquake data alone, Williams and his team acknowledge that the seismic activity associated with the crucifixion could refer to “an earthquake that occurred sometime before or after the crucifixion and was in effect ‘borrowed’ by the author of the Gospel of Matthew, and a local earthquake between 26 and A.D. 36 that was sufficiently energetic to deform the sediments of Ein Gedi but not energetic enough to produce a still extant and extra-biblical historical record.”

“If the last possibility is true, this would mean that the report of an earthquake in the Gospel of Matthew is a type of allegory,” they write.

Williams is studying yet another possible natural happening associated with the crucifixion - darkness.

Three of the four canonical gospels report darkness from noon to 3 PM after the crucifixion. Such darkness could have been caused by a dust storm, he believes.

Williams is investigating if there are dust storm deposits in the sediments coincident with the early first century Jerusalem region earthquake.

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This story was provided by Discovery News.

My childhood was different than most. I grew up in the home of a funeral director. For the first years of my life, we literally lived in the funeral home itself in an apartment above the family rooms, casket room and chapel.

Far earlier than most, I learned an essential truth about life: Death is inevitable for all.

My father handled funerals for the elderly and the young, the healthy and the sick, the wealthy and the poor, the unknown and the famous, including a service for the Big Bopper, whose huge hit “Chantilly Lace” made him a household name until a plane crash ended his life.

Some deaths were expected and natural; others were shocking and tragic. The causes of death varied widely, and the timing of death was often unpredictable. But whatever the cause or whenever the timing, death was, is, and ever will be the experience of all who live, whether we like it or not. Many seek to avoid this truth, but none can avoid its reality.

I walked into the back of the funeral home very early one Saturday morning during high school and saw the name Walter Portius on the board listing those who passed away overnight. We were in class together on Friday morning, but he died in a wreck that night. We chatted about weekend plans and then he was gone forever. Death is inevitable for all.

This child of a funeral director also learned a second truth early in life: People react to death differently. Some are calm and quiet. Others are hysterical and grief-stricken. Most are sad, but some are grateful, for a variety of reasons both good and bad. A surprising number of people die alone, unmourned. Some families go through the motions to get the funeral behind them as quickly as possible. Others take great care to celebrate and show respect for the one who passed.

I drove the limousine to and from the graveside for many families, who sat in pervasive silence, or with tears flowing freely, or with laughter and joy growing out of family memories and experiences. While death is a reality all must face, we will not face it in identical ways.

This opportunity to observe and serve those in the process of grief, loss and death over and over again through my adolescence made a third truth quite clear to me: The death and resurrection of Jesus makes a huge difference in how one handles the inescapable reality of death.

On Good Friday, Jesus died and was buried. Because He went before us, we need not fear what lies ahead. A favorite preacher once said, “He cleaned out the grave and made it a pleasant place to be!” Jesus died and was buried. However, He went one step further. Jesus overcame death and rose from the grave. He demonstrated that death may be inevitable, but it is not undefeatable!

As I grew up in the family of a funeral director, I saw again and again the enormous difference the resurrection of Christ makes to Christians when death comes calling on people of faith. Week after week and year after year, I watched 1 Corinthians 15:54-55 come vividly to life as Christians passed through my father’s funeral home:

“So when this corruption shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?”

The experience of death and funerals was consistently different for those who embraced Jesus. The sadness was real as it is for most, but the certain hope of death’s ultimate defeat was also present, and that hope made all the difference.

This is why you and your family need to fully embrace and celebrate Good Friday and Easter this year. In fact, don’t call it Easter. Call it Resurrection Day. Death is coming for us all, but for every believer so is the unquenchable, eternal life of Jesus!

The cross of Christ may not be pretty, but it certainly is beautiful.

Sometimes persistent questions demand a response. The question I would like us to ask and answer this morning is will beauty save the world? It may sound like an odd question. It’s a question occasioned by Dostoevsky the great Russian novelist, in his work The Idiot — a novel drenched in Christian content and deeply engaged with Christian theology. Beauty will save the world. Is that a Christian affirmation or not? When Dostoevsky said that beauty will save the world, how was he defining beauty?

I want us to consider two biblical texts in response to this question. First Isaiah 53:1-10.

“Who has believed what he has heard from us?

And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young plant,

and like a root out of dry ground;

he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,

and no beauty that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;

and as one from whom men hide their faces

he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he has borne our griefs

and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

smitten by God, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

and with his wounds we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;

we have turned — every one — to his own way;

and the LORD has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,

yet he opened not his mouth;

like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,

and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,

so he opened not his mouth.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away;

and as for his generation, who considered

that he was cut off out of the land of the living,

stricken for the transgression of my people?

And they made his grave with the wicked

and with a rich man in his death,

although he had done no violence,

and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him;

he has put him to grief;

when his soul makes an offering for guilt,

he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;

the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.”

Isaiah, in this great Christological prophecy, says, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him and no beauty that we should desire him.” But now compare this with the Psalmist’s declaration of the Lord’s beauty in Psalm 27:4, “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.”

What do we make of that juxtaposition? In Isaiah 53 the Christ has “no beauty” as people gazed upon him; rather, he was stricken and afflicted. He was one from whom men turned their faces. Now, is that talking primarily about his physical appearance? Clearly not. Isaiah has in view Christ’s substitutionary atonement and the judgment on sin that occurs in that great event. Yet the Psalmist requests “that [he] may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.” What do we make of this? Are the works of God in Christ beautiful or are they not?

In one sense, the Bible begins and ends in beauty. In Genesis, Moses repeatedly emphasizes that God’s verdict on His creation is that “it was good,” even “it was very good.” But this statement has a deeper meaning than our English word “good.” Instead the Hebrew also carries the connotation “beautiful.” It was beautiful. It was very beautiful.

Now consider how the Scripture ends [Revelation 21:22-27] as the apostle John describes the New Jerusalem: “And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day — and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” The New Jerusalem and the river of life are a testimony to beauty.

Humans are instinctively drawn to beauty. This fact is the reason why we go to museums, art shows, or even the Grand Canyon. But how should we think about beauty from a Christian worldview? How does beauty fit within our understanding of the framework of redemption? Consider with me the problem of beauty, the priority of beauty, and the power of beauty.

The Problem of Beauty

Beauty itself is not necessarily problematic. The problem is that humans are not good at recognizing true beauty when they see it. In a fallen world, even our perception of beauty has been corrupted by sin. This is nowhere more evident than in the magazine racks found at checkout lines of grocery stores. Magazines that airbrush models and artificially mask a person’s physical flaws are making claims about the character of beauty. But while these images may be “pretty,” they are certainly not, from a biblical perspective, beautiful.

The Christian worldview posits that anything pure and good finds its ultimate source in the self-existent, omnipotent God who is infinite in all his perfections. Thus the Christian worldview reminds us that the “transcendentals” — the good, the true, and the beautiful — are inseparable. Thus when Psalm 27 speaks of the beauty of the Lord, the Psalmist is also making a claim about the goodness of the Lord and the truthfulness of the Lord. While we distinguish God’s attributes from one another in order to understand them better, we must also recognize that these attributes are inseparable from one another.

In our fallen state we often separate the good, the true, and the beautiful from one another. But the Bible reminds us that if something is true then it is good and beautiful. If something is good, then it is beautiful and true. Finally, if something is beautiful, then it is good and true. Thus, while beauty magazines may present an image that is “pretty,” those images are not rightly beautiful because they do not faithfully represent the truth. But the Christian Worldview teaches that the face of a child with Downs Syndrome is far more beautiful than any photo-shopped (and therefore fake) image of a professional model. True beauty is found in what is good and true.

Similarly, the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ is certainly not attractive from the world’s perspective. The agony of the Savior, the blood of his self-sacrifice, and the horror of crucifixion are not pretty. Yet, while the cross is not pretty, it is certainly beautiful. The cross is beautiful because on it Jesus paid the penalty for sin. The cross is beautiful because in it we see the grace and justice of God. The cross is beautiful because it is also good and true. So Dostoyevsky was right, beauty will save the world. Our job as Christians is to remember the difference between the beautiful and the pretty.

The Priority of Beauty

We must also recognize the priority of beauty in every human heart. Part of what it means to be made in the image of God is that we yearn for things that are genuinely beautiful. Even the most hardened secularist marvels at a sunset or stands breathless at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Augustine explained in his Confessions that every human heart is directed to beauty. The problem with the sinful human heart is that we can be bought off by something less than beauty. Of course, Augustine also pointed to the fact that the human craving for beauty was not mere sentiment. Rather, true beauty reveals an objective origin and source of beauty, God himself. Our longing for beauty ultimately reveals our desperate need for God.

The Power of Beauty

Dostoevsky asserted that beauty would save the world. I’m entirely confident that beauty will indeed save the world because nothing could be more beautiful than the work of Jesus. And because Jesus’ work is beautiful, it is also true. And because his sacrifice is true, it is also good. The atoning work of the Lord Jesus is the epicenter of all that is true, good, and beautiful. The cross of Christ may not be pretty, but it certainly is beautiful.

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This post is an edited transcript of a chapel message from September 1, 2016.

Can it really be just three months ago we gathered with loved ones to celebrate Christmas? What joy we felt as we celebrated the birth of the baby Jesus. Emmanuel. God with us.

But today, on Good Friday, we reflect on how that beautiful babe in the manger came to fulfill a mission. A terrible and glorious mission! God invaded planet Earth. He became a human child, to live as one of us, to call us to repent, to love God with our whole heart, minds, and souls, and our neighbors as ourselves.

And today we should tremble and shudder as we remember the horrible climax of His mission. Beaten, scourged, mocked, and stabbed, Jesus mounted the cross, receiving the just punishment for your sins. For my sins. For the sins of the world.

This is why He came and died.

Yes, Easter is coming. The light is at the end of the tunnel. But that’s days away. Today, stop. Think about why He came and died.

He came because He knew that mankind was lost. He knew that we would kill our own babies in the womb by the millions. And that many would call this horrible evil good.

This is why He came and died.

He knew that hatred would drive men and women to strap bombs to themselves to kill innocent people in the name of religion.

This is why He came and died.

He knew that man would deny that God was his creator. That man would seek to remake himself in his own image, tamper with the genetic code, and treat human life as mere test-tube material.

This is why He came and died.

And He knew that His own bride, the Church, would grow cold and distant, forgetful of the faith given once for all. Comfortable with the world and its ways. Seeking relevance instead of love, pleasure instead of holiness.

This is why He came and died.

And He knew that you and I, covered with sin, could never stand before God, our all-holy Father, without His supreme sacrifice.

So today, don’t look ahead to Easter. Instead, reflect on the Passion. Examine your life. And repent! Repent of your sins, repent of your coldness of heart. Ask God to grant you the desire to serve Him, your Lord and Master, with all your strength.

And then, please, ask God for a spirit of repentance and revival to sweep down upon the Church — and upon the nations of the world. It is our only hope in these terrible, dark times.

We speak so often on BreakPoint about Christianity being not just a relationship with Jesus, but an all-encompassing worldview — a way to see and understand all reality. But the Christian worldview is brought into focus only by the cross.

Indeed, if the joy of Christmas and the glory of Easter are the light by which we see all reality, then the cross, Good Friday, is the lens through which we see it.

Allow me to recommend a wonderful resource to help you meditate on the depth and wonder of Good Friday — and how it defines all of reality. It’s called Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus, written by my dear friend, the late Richard John Neuhaus. You can learn more about it at BreakPoint.org.

May God bless you on this terrible, wonderful day.

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Copyright (c) 2010 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Answer: The Bible does not explicitly state on which day of the week Jesus was crucified. The two most widely held views are Friday and Wednesday. Some, however, using a synthesis of both the Friday and Wednesday arguments, argue for Thursday as the day.

Jesus said in Matthew 12:40, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Those who argue for a Friday crucifixion say that there is still a valid way in which He could have been considered in the grave for three days. In the Jewish mind of the first century, a part of day was considered as a full day. Since Jesus was in the grave for part of Friday, all of Saturday, and part of Sunday — He could be considered to have been in the grave for three days. One of the principal arguments for Friday is found in Mark 15:42, which notes that Jesus was crucified “the day before the Sabbath.” If that was the weekly Sabbath, i.e. Saturday, then that fact leads to a Friday crucifixion. Another argument for Friday says that verses such as Matthew 16:21 and Luke 9:22 teach that Jesus would rise on the third day; therefore, He would not need to be in the grave a full three days and nights. But while some translations use “on the third day” for these verses, not all do, and not everyone agrees that “on the third day” is the best way to translate these verses. Furthermore, Mark 8:31 says that Jesus will be raised “after” three days.

The Thursday argument expands on the Friday view and argues mainly that there are too many events (some count as many as twenty) happening between Christ’s burial and Sunday morning to occur from Friday evening to Sunday morning. Proponents of the Thursday view point out that this is especially a problem when the only full day between Friday and Sunday was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. An extra day or two eliminates that problem. The Thursday advocates could reason thus: suppose you haven’t seen a friend since Monday evening. The next time you see him it is Thursday morning and you say, “I haven’t seen you in three days” even though it had technically only been 60 hours (2.5 days). If Jesus was crucified on Thursday, this example shows how it could be considered three days.

The Wednesday opinion states that there were two Sabbaths that week. After the first one (the one that occurred on the evening of the crucifixion [Mark 15:42; Luke 23:52-54]), the women purchased spices — note that they made their purchase after the Sabbath (Mark 16:1). The Wednesday view holds that this “Sabbath” was the Passover (see Leviticus 16:29-31, 23:24-32, 39, where high holy days that are not necessarily the seventh day of the week are referred to as the Sabbath). The second Sabbath that week was the normal weekly Sabbath. Note that in Luke 23:56, the women who had purchased spices after the first Sabbath returned and prepared the spices, then “rested on the Sabbath” (Luke 23:56). The argument states that they could not purchase the spices after the Sabbath, yet prepare those spices before the Sabbath — unless there were two Sabbaths. With the two-Sabbath view, if Christ was crucified on Thursday, then the high holy Sabbath (the Passover) would have begun Thursday at sundown and ended at Friday sundown — at the beginning of the weekly Sabbath or Saturday. Purchasing the spices after the first Sabbath (Passover) would have meant they purchased them on Saturday and were breaking the Sabbath.

Therefore, according to the Wednesday viewpoint, the only explanation that does not violate the biblical account of the women and the spices and holds to a literal understanding of Matthew 12:40, is that Christ was crucified on Wednesday. The Sabbath that was a high holy day (Passover) occurred on Thursday, the women purchased spices (after that) on Friday and returned and prepared the spices on the same day, they rested on Saturday which was the weekly Sabbath, then brought the spices to the tomb early Sunday. Jesus was buried near sundown on Wednesday, which began Thursday in the Jewish calendar. Using a Jewish calendar, you have Thursday night (night one), Thursday day (day one), Friday night (night two), Friday day (day two), Saturday night (night three), Saturday day (day three). We do not know exactly when He rose, but we do know that it was before sunrise on Sunday (John 20:1, Mary Magdalene came “while it was still dark”), so He could have risen as early as just after sunset Saturday evening, which began the first day of the week to the Jews.

A possible problem with the Wednesday view is that the disciples who walked with Jesus on the road to Emmaus did so on “the same day” of His resurrection (Luke 24:13). The disciples, who do not recognize Jesus, tell Him of Jesus’ crucifixion (24:21) and say that “today is the third day since these things happened” (24:22). Wednesday to Sunday is four days. A possible explanation is that they may have been counting since Wednesday evening at Christ’s burial, which begins the Jewish Thursday, and Thursday to Sunday could be counted as three days.

In the grand scheme of things, it is not all that important to know what day of the week Christ was crucified. If it were very important, then God’s Word would have clearly communicated the day and timeframe. What is important is that He did die and that He physically, bodily rose from the dead. What is equally important is the reason He died — to take the punishment that all sinners deserve. John 3:16 and 3:36 both proclaim that putting your trust in Him results in eternal life! This is equally true whether He was crucified on a Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.

The 1976 mini-series “Jesus of Nazareth,” directed by Franco Zeffirelli, is an eight-hour special that is still shown on television every year around Easter.

Jesus was played by the British actor Robert Powell; Olivia Hussey portrayed Mary, his mother; and Anne Bancroft was Mary Magdalene. Ernest Borgnine had a small but crucial role as the centurion who was present at the crucifixion.

When it came time for Borgnine’s scene during the crucifixion, the weather was chilly and gray. The camera was to be focused on him at the foot of the cross, so it was not necessary for Robert Powell, the actor who portrayed Jesus, to be there. Instead, Zeffirelli put a chalk mark on a piece of scenery beside the cameraman. “I want you to look up at that mark,” he told Borgnine, “as if you were looking at Jesus.”

Borgnine hesitated. Somehow he wasn’t ready. He was uneasy. He asked the director, “Do you think it would be possible for somebody to read from the Bible the words Jesus said as He hung on the cross?”

Borgnine knew the words well from the days of his childhood in an Italian-American family in Connecticut. He had also read them in preparation for the film. Even so, he wanted to hear them now.

Zeffirelli said, “I will do it myself.” He found a Bible, opened it to the Book of Luke, and signaled for the camera to start rolling.

As Zeffirelli began reading Christ’s words aloud, Borgnine stared up at that chalk mark, thinking what might have gone through the centurion’s mind.

That poor Man up there, he thought. Jesus says He is the Son of God, an unfortunate claim during these perilous times. But I know Jesus is innocent of any crime.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” The voice was Zeffirelli’s, but the words burned into Borgnine -- the words of Jesus. (Luke 23:34-46)

Forgive me, Father, for even being here, was the centurion’s prayer that formed in Borgnine’s thoughts. I am so ashamed, so ashamed. “Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise,” said Jesus to the thief hanging next to Him.

If Jesus can forgive that criminal, then He will forgive me, Borgnine thought.

I will lay down my sword and retire to my little farm outside of Rome.

Then it happened. As Borgnine stared upward, instead of the chalk mark, he suddenly saw the face of Jesus Christ, lifelike and clear. It was not the face of actor Robert Powell he was used to seeing, but the most beautiful, gentle visage he have ever known. Pain-seared, sweat-stained, with blood flowing down from thorns pressed deep, His face was still filled with compassion. Jesus looked down at Borgnine through tragic, sorrowful eyes with an expression of love beyond description.

Then Jesus’ cry rose against the desert wind. Not the voice of Zeffirelli, reading from the Bible, but the voice of Jesus Himself: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

In awe Borgnine watched Jesus’ head slump to one side. He knew He was dead. A terrible grief welled within him, and completely oblivious of the camera, Borgnine started sobbing uncontrollably.

“Cut!” yelled Zeffirelli. Olivia Hussey and Anne Bancroft were crying, too. Borgnine wiped his eyes and looked up again to where he had seen Jesus. He was gone.

Borgnine reflected:

“Whether I saw a vision of Jesus that windswept day or whether it was only something in my mind, I do not know. It doesn’t matter. For I do know that it was a profound spiritual experience and that I have not been quite the same person since. I believe that I take my faith more seriously. I like to think that I’m more forgiving than I used to be. As that centurion learned two thousand years ago, I too have found that you simply cannot come close to Jesus without being changed.”

The Christian faith is not a mere collection of doctrines — a bag of truths. Christianity is a comprehensive truth claim that encompasses every aspect of revealed doctrine, but is centered in the gospel of Jesus Christ. And, as the apostolic preaching makes clear, the gospel is the priority.

The Apostle Paul affirms this priority when he writes to the Christians in Corinth. In the opening verses of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul sets out his case:

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you — unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

Paul points directly to the events of the cross and resurrection of Christ. He is not concerned with just any gospel, but with the only gospel that saves. This is “the gospel I preached to you,” Paul reminds the Corinthians. The same Paul who so forcefully warned the Galatians against accepting any false gospel reminds the church at Corinth that the very “gospel I preached to you” is the gospel “by which you are being saved.” Their stewardship of the gospel is underlined in Paul’s words, “if you hold fast to the word I preached to you.”

Paul’s statement of priority is a vital corrective for our confused times. Without hesitation, Paul writes with urgency about the truths that are “as of first importance.” All revealed truth is vital, invaluable, life-changing truth to which every disciple of Christ is fully accountable. But certain truths are of highest importance, and that is the language Paul uses without qualification.

And what is of first importance? “That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,” and “that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” The cross and the empty tomb stand at the center of the Christian faith. Without these, there is no good news — no salvation.

Paul gets right to the heart of the matter in setting out those truths that are “of first importance.” Following his example, we can do no less. These twin truths remain “as of first importance,” and no sermon is complete without the explicit affirmation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So it was then, so it is now, and so it ever shall be until Christ claims his church.

As Paul reminded the Corinthians — and now instructs us — the gospel is at the center of our faith, and the cross and the empty tomb are at the center of the gospel. “So we preach, and so you believed,” Paul encourages us. [1 Cor. 15:11]

May the power of the cross and the victory of the empty tomb fill every pulpit, every pew, and every Christian heart — and may the Good News of the gospel be received with joy by sinners in need of a Savior.

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. [1 Corinthians 15:56-58]

On Pascha, Orthodox Christians everywhere sing, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.” We affirm boldly and with great joy our belief in Christ’s real, historical resurrection from the dead, which is the basis for our faith and hope.

Reared on happy consumerism, one might feel satisfied to view holidays such as Easter (or Pascha) in isolation, a special day that is set apart to celebrate an event that has significance for us only insofar as it appeals to our sense of convention and propriety. Even if we are moderately religious, we cannot escape the cultural fascination with secular tropes, where the “special day” adheres in our consciousness as a celebration not of an historical event that has immediate significance even now, but which appeals to us mainly from the basis of what we experienced in our own childhoods, the memory of our own individual Easter celebrations or family rituals, whether idealized or not. Even those who despise “organized religion” and treat it with contempt do not seem to mind an only somewhat disorganized religious ritualism that is signified by bunnies and eggs, dressing up for a religious service on hopefully a beautiful spring day, hidden eggs colored a variety of shades of blue and pink and yellow and red, often dyed the night before by excited children, and baskets filled with chocolate and other goodies.

In the context of the worship of the Church among those believers who participate in the fasts and feasts of the Church calendar year, the celebration of Pascha is not just one special day of revelry to commemorate a specific religious event, but it resides within the context of a much longer story, one that continues throughout the entire year, but narrows in intensity during Lent. People who pop into services once a year to celebrate Easter in the same spirit as one might go to a movie or stand on the side of the road to watch a parade may find themselves made happy by the celebration, which is a good thing in itself; but they miss so much of the substance of it that it might be compared to reading the CliffsNotes or mistaking the preview for the movie.

But that also is a bad comparison -- the difference might actually be between watching the preview and playing a role in the film as an actor, familiar with the subject, filled with the raw experience of the life of Jesus Christ, who comes not in order to entertain us, nor to judge us, nor to teach a particular branch of science or an ethical system. But he comes, we find in the icon of the Nativity, peculiarly wrapped in what appears to be graveclothes, his cradle oddly resembling a coffin, the cave in which the baby lies not just a random hole in the earth, but made by his presence into the entrance to the very heart of the earth. He comes to die, and those who follow him do not merely watch, but die with him, baptized into his death in a manner that is above all rationality.

So during Holy Week we follow the Passion, not to meditate on the violence done to Jesus nor to feel sorry for him, but to mourn our own weaknesses and sins. We do not engage in the process of reflection on our own behavior in order to try to feel pathologically guilty or to punish ourselves, but in order to turn away from the behaviors which ruin us and other people, so that we might progress to mutual healing and communion. During Lent and Holy Week we seek forgiveness from every creature for the nasty things, or perhaps just the unkind things, we have done in our lives. We seek to humble ourselves with Christ as if we too might be humbled to the point of death, in Him, not as a mere memory, but as a mystery of the unity and communion in Christ that not only breaks the barriers between the physical and immaterial worlds, but transcends space and time as well.

We do not attend for a mere memorial or to play with dead symbols in meaningless ceremonies, but we identify with Christ in his Passion, and we identify with those who killed him for whom he prays when he is held aloft on the cross that they would be forgiven. If Christ does not rise from death, thereby trampling down death by death, then we remain dead, victims of death and undone by the tragedy of death. If his resurrection is merely a myth to imbue our lives with meaning, the meaning is spoiled by its lack of veracity and it becomes as insubstantial as stories of the Easter Bunny. St. Paul writes, “...if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile.” But if it is a myth that is also true, both historically and subjectively, that Jesus died and was resurrected so that when we die in Him we may also be raised with Him, then it has the power and potential to transform all death, all separation, all tragedy, all failure and all suffering into a path that leads to resurrection, life, justice, beauty and communion with God.

As the late theologian, Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes:

All Christianity, therefore, is the experience of faith repeated again and again as if for the first time, through its incarnation in rites, words, music, and colors. To the unbeliever, it may indeed seem like a mirage; he hears only words, he sees only incomprehensible ceremonies, and he understands them only outwardly. But for believers, all of this radiates from within, and not as proof of his faith, but as its result, as its life in the world, in the soul, in history. Therefore the darkness and sadness of Holy Friday is for us something real, alive, contemporary; we can cry at the cross and experience everything that took place in that triumph of evil, treachery, cowardice, and betrayal; we can contemplate the life-bearing tomb on Holy Saturday with excitement and hope. And therefore, every year we can celebrate Easter, Pascha, the Resurrection. For Easter is not the remembrance of an event in the past. It is the real encounter in happiness and joy, with him whom our hearts long ago knew and encountered as the life and light of all light. Easter night testifies that Christ is alive and with us, and that we are alive with him. The entire celebration is an invitation to look at the world and life, and to behold the dawning of the mystical day of the Kingdom of light. “Today the scent of Spring begins,” sings the church, “and the new creation exults...” It exults in faith, in love and in hope.

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[The original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #13290]

This hymn “Friday Morning” by Sydney Carter is controversial. May it serve as a meditation on the extraordinary (dare I say divine?) irony of the crucifixion, so central to the Christian faith.

FRIDAY MORNING

It was on a Friday morning that they took me from the cell

and I saw they had a carpenter to crucify as well

You can blame it on to Pilate

You can blame it on the Jews

You can blame it on the Devil

But it’s God that I accuse

It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me

I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree

You can blame it on to Adam

You can blame it on to Eve

You can blame it on the apple,

but that I can’t believe

It was God that made the Devil

And the woman and the man

And there wouldn’t be an apple

If it wasn’t in the plan

It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me

I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree

Now Barabbas was a killer

And they let Barabbas go

But you are being crucified

For nothing that I know

And God is up in Heaven

and He doesn’t do a thing

With a million angels watching

and they never move a wing

It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me

I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree

To hell with Jehovah

To the carpenter I said

I wish that a carpenter

had made the world instead

Goodbye and good luck to you

our ways they will divide

Remember me in heaven

The man you hung beside

It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me

I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree

The problem of suffering and evil is perhaps the strongest objection to the existence of the Christian God, a God who is simultaneously proclaimed to all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. There is unjust suffering in the world. A good God would want to remedy the injustice. A wise God would know how to do it. An all-powerful God would be able to intervene however he wanted. So whence suffering? Whence evil? How did it ever arise, and why doesn’t God do anything about it?

About a year ago, we held a friendly debate within these ivy-covered walls of Harvard College on the problem of suffering and evil. Harvard College Faith and Action and the Harvard Community of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics represented opposite viewpoints on this most difficult of theological problems. Philosophical arguments were advanced and rebuttals ventured. But it seems to me that even the most philosophically rigorous response to the problem of suffering cannot help but feel hollow.

That is why I am sharing this hymn. Much like the Grand Inquisitor passage from The Brothers Karamazov, it is highly ambiguous as to whether or how this solves the problem. (I, for one, consider the Grand Inquisitor passage to be an extremely profound refutation of the problem of suffering; atheists who read it tend to think quite the opposite.) I don’t think this ambiguity is a bad thing. I think it is an honest means of communication, and entirely commensurate to the nature of the problem. Life is highly ambiguous. Our stories often have two sides. The story of the cross, as presented in the hymn “Friday Morning,” is such a story. Which prisoner do you think is the narrator in this song? How are we meant to understand his accusations? I wonder what Jesus would have said. I wonder if it might it have been, “Oh my son. If only you knew.”

At the center of the Gospel,

at the center of the Christian religion,

at the center of everything,

is a broken, bloodied, tortured Middle Eastern Jew

hanging on a cross between a couple of criminals,

abandoned by his disciples

with only a few loved ones brave enough to linger and look on.

And we have come here today to honor this bitter truth:

That for you and me to be made whole,

The Son of God had to die in this fashion,

And in a bizarre twist,

We call this day “good”.

You know, I really only have one “Good Friday story.” The memories we associate with this day are often too intangible to lend themselves well to storytelling, and yet, there is this one that jumps out at me.

In the spring of 2009, I was preparing to graduate from Kenyon College, having only just renewed my relationship with God and accepted a call to ministry a few months before. To give you an idea what sort of environment Kenyon was, the most celebrated athletic event in our 190-year history was a debate over whether the word “myriad” was a noun or an adjective. Yeah, it was that kind of school.

Kenyon was a place swarming with artists and writers and actors and musicians. It was a place where everything was achievable with an open mind and a diligent work ethic– where even the most banal of fraternity parties might be littered with conversations about Aristotle and Dante and Nietzsche. It was the sort of place where a religious studies major could write his senior thesis in the form of a 425-page comic book about the afterlife ... which I completely lost when my hard drive crashed a month after graduation. It was this comic book that got me into the most uncomfortable church experience I have ever had, and it all happened on Good Friday.

Given that many of the creative types who inhabited the college also attended the campus chapel, the minister there came up with a novel approach to Good Friday. She assembled a group of artists, playwrights, poets, even a local novelist, and created a sort of holy coffeehouse. There was only one rule: each work presented that night had to address the issue of human suffering. She called it “The Good Friday Project”.

Flattered to be one of the few student participants among a group of faculty and local celebrities, I prepared a short animated version of my comic book (essentially a cartoon) and checked out a projector from the library so I could show it.

It was a dark evening, and there was still just a bit of a chill in the air when we all gathered in the campus chapel that night. A member of the drama department led off with a short play that he had written from the perspective of Job. Telling the tale of the most famously tortured man in history, this play featured Job’s conscience and inner demons debating how he should respond to his circumstances. We were off to a heavy start. Next came a musician playing doleful melodies on a slightly detuned violin, and she was followed by a poet who had written extensively on the subject of his own mortality.

From there, things took an appropriately dark turn. The novelist got up and read an excerpt from his latest book (which chronicled the experiences of a woman trying to care for her terminally ill husband who only knew how to respond with anger and abuse). To call the reading “emotional” would be an understatement. Audience members recoiled in their seats as the novelist screamed obscenities at the top of his lungs, and only later did I learn that it was the true story of his wife’s experiences trying to care for him when his future looked bleakest.

Arguably the climax of the evening was a film cropped together by another drama professor. With melancholy music underneath, scenes flashed by on the screen of some of the greatest moments of suffering in human history: the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, protestors in other countries being mowed down by machine gun fire, images of children starving in the ghettos of unidentified cities– it was a nightmare captured on film.

This was an evening of agony, and all of it was intended to catch but a glimpse of the pain Christ endured on the cross.

And then it was my turn.

Throughout the entire event, I had been getting progressively more nervous. You see, unlike any of these other presenters, my comic book had a happy ending. The main character succeeded on his journey of self-discovery, acquiring a new appreciation for life and even getting the girl in the process! The whole thing was –dare I say it– uplifting. As I hooked my laptop into the projector, I was terrified.

I was about to show something unmistakably happy at The Good Friday Project.

I was about to ruin the atmosphere that these artists had worked so hard to cultivate.

I was about to undercut the entire point of the evening.

As the intro music started to play, I closed my eyes in fear of these artists’ judgment. I braced for impact, and that’s when the most beautiful thing that could’ve happened happened:

With my eyes closed, I heard a quick pop and a hiss,

And when I opened my eyes again, I saw it–

The projector bulb had burned out, and the screen was now blank.

No one was there who could fix it, and there was no backup projector.

So to this day, I am the only person who has ever seen my full Good Friday Project presentation.

As I stood there and stared dumbfounded at the broken projector, the room around me was totally silent. The audience was completely shocked. They were embarrassed for me, and a few even offered their sympathies, but something overcame me in that moment. It was like feeling God’s reassuring hand on my shoulder, and I did the most inappropriate thing I could have: I started laughing.

And we’re not talking about little chuckles here. This was doubled-over, tears-welling-up, side-aching laughter. The audience looked at me like I had lost my mind, but I just found the whole thing so funny. Here I had been, so scared of my too-upbeat presentation, and I was saved by a burned out projector bulb. Only God could have that kind of comic timing, and I could feel Him there in the room.

By now, the event coordinators were assuming I was hysterical, so at their quiet urging, I excused myself from the room as quietly as I could and guffawed my way down the steps to the chapel lawn.

It was a good five or ten minutes before I could stop laughing, and as I looked up at the starry Ohio sky, one thought occupied my mind:

“God, You are the greatest practical joker of all time.

For three days, you let the entire cosmos believe

that the Trinity had been broken,

that Death had claimed Christ forever,

and that we would be doomed to pay a price that we couldn’t.

But the whole time,

The whole time,

You knew.

That’s why it’s called Good Friday.

Because amid all the suffering and loss and pain

That the Son of Man endured

Is an inescapable truth:

That You knew what You were doing,

And You wouldn’t just abandon us to sin and death and damnation.

Suffering would not have the last laugh.

No. You saved us.

You saved us with what You did on that cross.”

And so now, you and I find ourselves in a strange situation.

We gather around the cross and behold there

the broken, bloodied, beaten Son of God

dying.

Dying so that you and I won’t have to.

Dying so that the children of God will not be lost to sin.

Dying so that the will of God might be fulfilled

and love might reign forever in His perfect Kingdom.

And you and I, through the mercies of hindsight

Are in on the biggest practical joke in history.

Death and Sin conspired at the foot of the cross,

Thinking their victory was assured.

They celebrated as Christ was laid in the tomb.

God was dead.

But they didn’t know

What we know,

That a resurrection is coming,

And that, that, is what makes this day so good.

“Don’t Cry for Jesus” was one of the most memorable sermons I have ever heard. It was given by Dr. Lewis Smedes (1921-2002) at a Fuller Seminary chapel service. I was there as a student during Holy Week in hopes of being better prepared to fully appreciate Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. My prayers were answered that day. I heard a message that has stuck with me ever since.

What was Professor Smedes getting at that struck me as being so profoundly right? He wanted us to see as clearly and precisely as possible that Jesus was no victim and that he didn’t want us to pity him or feel sorry for him. I thought at the time, “What? How can we not feel sorry for him, after all he went through for us?” As Smedes developed the message I saw what he meant and how true it was. Professor Smedes had us consider two things: first, the way the story of Jesus is told to us by the New Testament writers and second, a comparison of Jesus with the Greek tragic heroes like the demigod Achilles.

Let me first briefly recount for you the upshot of that comparison. The Greek gods suffered often because of their own immoral activities and those involving the other gods. But their greatest sufferings were tragic because they were due to circumstances beyond their own control. These gods were born with their various strengths and weaknesses. No one of them “had it all.” They were always born into situations not of their own making and often involving jealousies, revenge plots and grabs for power between various other gods.

These tragic heroes were always victims of their circumstances as the inevitable wheel of fate turned against them at some point. It was their vulnerabilities that would lead to their most tragic suffering and defeat, like Achilles’ lamentable heel. Were it not for the fact that despite all his armor, Achilles’ heel was exposed and that his goddess mother was prevented by his unwitting mortal father from completing the daily rituals that would have made Achilles immortal, Paris’ arrow would never have found its fatal target. In some versions of the myth, the god Apollo, for his own reasons, intervened and guided that arrow to pierce Achilles just at that one and only tiny unprotected point. How can you not feel sorry for Achilles? The unfairness of it all. Through no fault of his own, the greatest of all Greek warriors was brought down.

Though we don’t think of Jesus as a Greek tragic hero, I realized upon further reflection that his cross is often described in tragic terms. Jesus is often portrayed as a victim of circumstances that go all the way back to the fall of humanity. Jesus is sent to be our Savior because humanity has rebelled and needs to be reconciled and regenerated if we are to share in God’s eternal and triune fellowship and communion and for God’s original intention at creation to be realized.

In the New Testament we find Jesus, the Son of God, living at a time when the Jewish nation is occupied by the pagan Romans. Among his own people, the Pharisees and Sadducees are involved in their own disputes with each other. Yet they manage to form an alliance to plot Jesus’ arrest and execution. Closer to him, there is a traitor among his own disciples, Judas, who betrays him — with a kiss, no less. Jesus is betrayed first into the hands of the court of the high priests and then into the hands of Pilate, who is himself caught between the rival forces of the Emperor and the potentially riotous crowds. Finally, Jesus suffers the brutally cruel treatment of the Roman soldiers who strip, mock and whip him, then lead him to Golgotha, where he is put to death on the machinery of Roman execution, a cross.

Given these tragic circumstances surrounding Jesus’ sacrifice, why should we not consider Jesus a tragic victim? Not because he didn’t pay an unimaginably high price for us and our salvation. Not because he didn’t actually suffer and die. But simply because he was no victim of those circumstances and because he had no fatal flaw!

The cost of our salvation was foreseen and anticipated before the foundations of the earth were even laid. God was not taken by surprise at the Fall nor by our subsequent need for costly deliverance. But our God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, counted the cost (as it were) from all eternity and agreed they were ready and willing to gladly pay the price for our deliverance from evil and for our reconciliation. So the plan for creation was carried out knowing full well the price to be paid to put things right, for God’s righteousness to be done.

Jesus knew why he had come and what his saving work would cost. His mission was freely chosen. He was freely sent and freely given by the Father out of their joint abounding love for the world. Jesus repeatedly told his disciples what he would have to go through, even though they could not imagine his being so completely rejected by their religious leaders and political authorities that it would lead to his death. Jesus was anything but unaware or naive about the path he would have to take to make all things new.

Jesus tells us that, like a good shepherd, when danger comes to his sheep, he lays his life down — and also takes it up (John 10:17). Jesus freely, voluntarily, not only gives up his life but also receives it back. When Pilate reminds Jesus that he has the power of life and death over him, Jesus reminds Pilate that he has no power except what has been allowed him by God, his Father (John 19:10-11).

In the garden, when one of his disciples takes it upon himself to defend Jesus with a sword, Jesus reminds them that all of his Father’s angelic hosts are available to protect him at any moment if he were to call on them (Matthew 26:53). Jesus is no victim of fate, of circumstances, or of powers greater than himself. He is in charge. He goes forth to Jerusalem only when his hour has come — not sooner, not later.

Jesus’ suffering is not the result of any large or small flaw in him. Far from it. There is not even a fleeting shadow of personal weakness evident in his confident exercise of divine omnipotence as he fulfills his redemptive mission. Rather, it is by means of his strength and authority operating in full concert with his Father that he arrives at the right moment to exert saving power over sin, evil and death itself. His act of self-giving is a work of deliberate might based on the strength of his holy love. Jesus is no tragic hero, but the willing, omnipotent, Lord and Savior.

Perhaps most astonishing are Jesus’ words spoken on the way to Golgotha, even as he bore the heavy weight of the cross-beam of his own crucifixion. Seeing the women standing by, no doubt exceedingly distraught and anguished, welling up from the depths of his compassion, Jesus found the strength to tell them something they and we need to know: “Daughters of Jerusalem, don’t weep for me” (Luke 23:28).

Jesus does not want us to pity him as a hapless victim who suffers because it couldn’t be avoided, because it was inevitable, destined by forces he could not resist. He is not looking for our pity — he trod that road, the Via Dolorosa as it is called, on purpose, by divine design. He intentionally took that journey and nothing, not even torture at the violent hands of human wickedness, could stop him. We may weep for ourselves, if we must, that is, be sorrowful for our sins. But Jesus didn’t come looking to gather our tears. Rather, his costly love calls for giving him our thanks, our praise, our gratitude, our love, our absolute trust and loyalty — indeed our very lives in eternal worship.

Jesus not only freely but also gladly gave his life that we might have resurrected life in him. So the author of Hebrews sums it up: “For the joy set before him, he endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). For joy? Yes, for joy. But how can that be? In short, because Jesus was no fool. The price he paid was worth it and he knew it. He has no regrets! He did not enjoy the suffering. Not at all. It was excruciating. But he rejoiced in what he with the Father and Spirit would accomplish by means of his extravagant self-sacrifice. Jesus was no victim but the victor. The surety of his victory gave him a great joy that saw him through his agonies. Crucifixion would lead by the grace and power of God to resurrection and a new heaven and earth.

Jesus was no reluctant Savior, but the conquering Servant-King of all creation. That’s the good news that Professor Smedes preached, and from that moment on, I saw that I could no longer think, preach or teach as if Jesus was a victim that we should feel sorry for.

All those illustrations of the cross that I had heard in both liberal and conservative Christian contexts that made it seem that Jesus was a victim, I had to forswear. These made Jesus out to be anything and everything — from a mother rabbit frozen in a blizzard to save her little bunny child, to an innocent toddler run over by a train or ground up in the gears of a drawbridge — all this occurring while his helpless father looks on in horror from a distance. Somehow caught off-guard and facing a horrible dilemma, this father-victim had to choose between his son and humanity. And so he pulls the lever that seals their respective fates. In these illustrations both the Son and the Father are depicted as victims of circumstances and of their own limitations that call for our pity. As tragic characters they match, if not exceed, the sorry state memorialized in the myth of Achilles.

Perhaps more theological than these misguided analogies are certain interpretations of the cross that pit the Father against the Son. The Father is sometimes said to be taking his wrath out on the Son — punishing him to satisfy his righteousness. In this case, the tragedy occurs between the Father and the Son (some, who have rejected the idea of the cross altogether, have gone so far as to claim that if so, the Father is the victimizer and the Son the victim!). Or the Son is depicted as having to overcome the resistance of the Father to being merciful and forgiving by appealing to his own suffering to gain the Father’s pity and so get him to relent of his wrath. From these perspectives, the wills, attitudes and aims of the Father and the Son are at odds and can be resolved only by the Son’s suffering. How tragic! “Only that it wasn’t so!” we reply out of pity.

Sometimes we imagine a modern adversarial court scene where the Father is represented as the judge who wants to condemn the guilty party, and Jesus is the defense lawyer hoping to help the defendant avoid the penalty required by the law. Fortunately, Jesus figures out a way to keep us from the punishment we deserve. It’s a plan that the Father can’t argue with since it doesn’t seem to involve any violation of the law. Finding no grounds for objection, the Father-Judge has to concede: Jesus wins the court case for us.

But the biblical revelation shows us the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are of one mind, one purpose, united in being, acting for the one and same end: our salvation. The Father sends the Son in the power of the Spirit. The Son freely comes and serves out of love for the Father and with joy in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit empowers the Son to overcome temptation and undo evil itself in order to set free the captives, open the eyes of the blind, set at liberty those who are oppressed and bring in the Lord’s promised Jubilee (Luke 4:18-19).

At the cross, no exception is made. Our sin is judged and condemned in Jesus. The wrath of God aims to burn away evil and the sin in us that has corrupted our very natures. Dying in him, we are separated and rescued from the evil in us for eternal life. We are given a share in Christ’s restored and sanctified humanity. God’s wrath serves his mercy. His righteousness serves his love. There is no tension between the attributes of God nor between the Father and the Son. There is no tragic relationship at the heart of the gospel. At the cross the Son “through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished [without flaw] to God” (Hebrews 9:14). Our salvation is the united work of the whole Triune God, our Savior — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

At the foot of the cross, Christ doesn’t call us to join him in a great pity-party: the Father feeling sorry for the Son, the Son feeling sorry for the Father, Jesus feeling sorry for us and we feeling oh so sorry for him. For Jesus was no tragic victim. Rather, we gather at the foot of the cross to worship in unspeakable awe, with adoration, thanksgiving, praise and prayer for the costly victory of Christ. By his joyful and freely given life, he righteously restored us to fellowship and eternal communion with God our Triune Redeemer.

When we say “Jesus died for our sins,” what does that mean? It’s undeniably an essential confession of Christian faith, but how does it work? This much I’m sure of, it’s not reducible to just one thing. I’ve just finished preaching eight sermons on “The Crucified God” and I know I’ve barely scratched the surface of what the cross means. To try to reduce the death of Jesus to a single meaning is an impoverished approach to the mystery of the cross. I’m especially talking about those tidy explanations of the cross known as “atonement theories.” I find most of them inadequate; others I find repellent. Particularly abhorrent are those theories that portray the Father of Jesus as a pagan deity who can only be placated by the barbarism of child sacrifice. The god who is mollified by throwing a virgin into a volcano or by nailing his son to a tree is not the Abba of Jesus!

Neither is the death of Jesus a kind of quid pro quo by which God gains the necessary capital to forgive sinners. No! Jesus does not save us from God; Jesus reveals God! Jesus does not provide God with the capacity to forgive; Jesus reveals God as forgiving love. An “economic model” of the cross just won’t work. It’s not as if God is saying, “Look, I’d love to forgive you, but I’ve got to pay off Justice first, and, you know how she is, she’s a tough goddess, she requires due payment.” This understanding of the cross begs the question of who exactly is in charge — the Father of Jesus or some abstract ideal called “Justice”?

When we confess with Paul that “Christ died for our sins,” we don’t mean that God required the vicious murder of his Son in order to forgive. How would that work anyway? Did God have some scale of torture that once met would “satisfy his wrath?” Think it through and you’ll see the problem. Was death not enough to satisfy this god? Did it have to be death by crucifixion? Did torture have to be part of the equation? And how does that work? Was there a minimum number of lashes required in the scourging? Did the thorny crown have to have a certain number of thorns in order for this god to call the scales balanced?

Are you squirming yet? Do you want to say, “Well, some of the abuse Jesus suffered was gratuitous torture by the hands of cruel men.” But if that’s the case, how does this division of labor work? How much was necessary to “satisfy God” and how much was just for the sport of it? No, this approach to understanding Jesus dying for our sins clearly won’t work.

So what do we do? Let’s begin here: Before the cross is anything else, it is a catastrophe. It is the unjust lynching of an innocent man. This is precisely how the Apostles spoke of the crucifixion of Jesus in the book of Acts.

“This Jesus ... you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.” – Acts 2:23

“You killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead.” – Acts 3:15

“God raised up Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree.” – Acts 5:30

“The Righteous One you have now betrayed and murdered.” – Acts 7:52

The Bible is clear, God did not kill Jesus. Jesus was offered as a sacrifice in that the Father was willing to send his Son into our sinful system in order to expose it as utterly sinful and provide us with another way. The death of Jesus was a sacrifice in that sense. But it was not a sacrifice to appease a wrathful deity or to provide payment for a penultimate god subordinate to Justice.

Let me suggest that when we say Jesus died for our sins, we mean something like this: We violently sinned our sins into Jesus, and Jesus revealed the heart of God by forgiving us. When Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them,” he was not asking God to act contrary to his nature. When Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them,” he was, as always, revealing the very heart of God!

At the cross we violently sinned our sins into Jesus, and Jesus absorbed them, died because of them, carried them into death, and rose on the third day to speak the first world of the new world: “Peace be with you.”

When I say “we” violently sinned our sins into Jesus, I mean that all of us are more or less implicated by our explicit or tacit support of the systems of violent power that frame our world. These are the very political and religious systems that executed Jesus. At the cross we see where Adam and Eve’s penchant for blame and Cain’s capacity for killing have led us — to the murder of God! At Golgotha human sin is seen as utterly sinful. God did not require the death of Jesus — but we did!

So let’s be clear, the cross is not about the appeasement of a monster god. The cross is about the revelation of a merciful God. At the cross we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. The cross is where God in Christ absorbs sin and recycles it into forgiveness. The cross is not what God inflicts upon Christ in order to forgive. The cross is what God endures in Christ as he forgives. Once we understand this, we know what we are seeing when we look at the cross: We are seeing the lengths to which a God of love will go in forgiving sin.

The cross is both ugly and beautiful. It’s as ugly as human sin and as beautiful as divine love. But in the end, love and beauty win.

It doesn’t happen every year, but this year it did. Yesterday, Maundy Thursday fell on the first full day of the Jewish Passover. What makes this an especially poignant convergence is that the meal we remember every Maundy Thursday, which the disciples shared with Jesus on the Thursday of Holy Week, was the Passover Seder.

The roots of the Christian faith are, of course, Jewish. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the Father of Jesus. Of course, followers of Jesus are no longer bound to the Old Testament requirement to observe Passover. In fact, Jesus Himself replaced the command for God’s people to observe Passover with a “new command,” to remember His body broken for us and His blood shed for us.

Still, there’s so much beauty here in the Passover.

As a Jew, Jesus would have celebrated Passover, diligently, every year of His life. All Israelites were to remember and celebrate how God delivered the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. When the Angel of Death, seeing the lamb’s blood on their doorposts, passed over Israel and plagued the Egyptians, four-hundred years of bondage came to an end.

Immediately, even as the original Exodus was unfolding, God instituted its remembrance. On the night before God sent the angel of death, He made a plea to Moses: “Celebrate this feast,” God tells him in Exodus 12. And when your children ask you what you’re doing, tell them what I did for you.

One of our worst faults, as God knows, is that we are very forgetful creatures. Our memories are, at their best, selective and, at their worst, untrustworthy. So much of the Old Testament reads like bad deja vu: God delivers His people, from thirst or hunger or their enemies, and they quickly forget. It’s almost like the Old Testament authors simply copied and pasted the phrase, “The people of Israel grumbled against the Lord who brought them out of Egypt” over and over again.

In fact, immediately after the Exodus, the Israelites proved they need reminding to remember. “Did you save us just to leave us in the desert?” they ask. “We were better off in Egypt.” How quickly, how shamefully, we forget.

The Passover gave flesh to the spiritual discipline of remembering. The Mishnah, one of the oldest Jewish texts about Passover observance, instructs Jews “of every generation to regard themselves as being personally freed from Egypt.” By remembering, observers are brought into the pain of slavery, so that they can experience more fully the shock and the sweetness of freedom.

Passover also points to a Savior who brings that freedom. The lamb shank bone on the Seder plate is a reminder of the lamb without blemish, whose blood the Israelites painted on their doorposts as a sign to the Angel of Death to pass over their houses.

The first time John the Baptist saw Jesus as an adult, he yelled (rather shockingly, actually) “Behold the Lamb of God!” Paul called Jesus “Christ, our Passover Lamb” in First Corinthians. Jesus knew that in breaking the matzah and calling it His body, and in drinking the cup and calling it a New Covenant, He was translating to onlookers that He Himself is the true Passover Lamb, the one without blemish whose blood will save those who paint it on the doorposts of their own lives.

We are just as forgetful as the fathers of our faith were in the deserts outside of Egypt, especially in times of crisis like these. That’s why it’s so important that we remember, intentionally, the times God has delivered us from our spiritual Egypts and from eternal death. Today, Good Friday, is an especially good day to remember that God’s faithfulness isn’t just an emotional salve during our times of distress, but by the blood of Christ our sin is forgiven and our guilt taken away.

________

Copyright (c) 2020 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Among the many hymns with deep roots in the history of the Church, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” is based on a 900-year-old poem written by theologian and mystic Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard was a towering figure in the political, intellectual, and religious life of 12th-century Europe.

In 1113, Bernard became a member of a new religious order known as the Cistercians. The group followed a strict monastic life of prayer, labor, and austerity. Two years later, he was sent by the order to found a new monastery that he named Clairvaux.

Bernard quickly became one of the leading reformers in the Church of his day. He participated in Church councils, worked to heal schisms over who was the legitimate pope, helped to found and promote the Knights Templar, and preached the Second Crusade, even convincing King Louis VII of France and Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III to join the expedition. He was also involved in intellectual and theological debates, most notably opposing some of the teachings of Peter Abelard.

Bernard’s greatest contributions were in the realm of spirituality. While earlier spirituality in Western Europe tended to emphasize Christ’s divinity, primarily portraying Him as a victorious warrior over the powers of Hell, Bernard focused on divine love, particularly demonstrated in the Incarnation and revealed in Christ’s suffering. Jesus’ love for us was so great that He chose to suffer for us, providing forgiveness of sins and identifying with humanity’s weakness and suffering. Thus, from Christ we learn compassion and mercy from both a human and divine perspective.

To Bernard, the only proper response to God’s love in Christ is to love Him in return and to imitate Him by loving our neighbor. Love was so central to Bernard’s spirituality that Dante portrays him as the one who leads to the highest levels of heaven in the Divine Comedy.

Bernard’s emphasis on a deeply personal relationship with God built on faith and love anticipated, in many ways, Protestant ideas. Both Martin Luther and John Calvin quoted Bernard in support of justification by faith; Calvin also quoted him in support of imputed righteousness.

Bernard also promoted lectio divina, an approach to meditation on Scripture designed to help the practitioner hear the Holy Spirit speaking and to increase personal connection with God. He wrote on many other areas of theology as well, particularly about the Virgin Mary. He also wrote extensively on the theology of music and authored many hymns and poems.

One of Bernard’s poems was the source of “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.” “Salve Mundi Salutare” consists of seven sections, each addressing a part of Christ’s body (specifically, His feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and head) as He hung on the cross. Throughout, Christ’s suffering is portrayed as the ultimate expression of divine love, and it calls for a response of love from us in return.

The season of Lent and Holy Week is an appropriate time to meditate on Christ, His Divine and Human natures, His sufferings on our behalf, the love that prompted them, and what that love has accomplished on our behalf.

O Sacred Head by Bernard of Clairvaux is a wonderful, time-tested resource to reflect on these realities.

O sacred Head, now wounded,

with grief and shame weighed down,

now scornfully surrounded

with thorns, thine only crown!

O sacred Head, what glory,

what bliss till now was thine!

Yet, though despised and gory,

I joy to call thee mine.

2 What thou, my Lord, hast suffered

was all for sinners’ gain.

Mine, mine was the transgression,

but thine the deadly pain.

Lo, here I fall, my Savior!

‘Tis I deserve thy place.

Look on me with thy favor,

and grant to me thy grace.

3 What language shall I borrow

to thank thee, dearest Friend,

for this, thy dying sorrow,

thy pity without end?

Oh, make me thine forever,

and should I fainting be,

Lord, let me never, never

outlive my love to thee.

4 Be near when I am dying,

oh, show thy cross to me,

and for my rescue, flying,

come, Lord, and set me free!

These eyes, new faith receiving,

________

Jesus shall not move,

for one who dies believing

dies safely, through thy love.

________

Copyright (c) 2023 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

My top ten surprises.

--------------------

As a writer, I have the wonderful privilege of researching and meditating on one topic for months at a time. My latest project allowed me to focus on the grandest subject of all: Jesus. Growing up in the church, I learned his name as soon as I learned the names of my family members. But now, as an adult, what did I truly think about him? Which childhood impressions had been confirmed and which ones overturned?

As I reflect on what I learned in the process of writing "The Jesus I Never Knew," I have come up with a "top ten" list. Please forgive me if the form seems irreverent. David Letterman style, it begins with number 10 and works upward.

10. JESUS WAS A JEW

I knew that, of course. But the more I studied Jesus, the more I realized that his humanity had receded far away. Every week in church I would repeat the creed, which, significantly, hustles through Jesus' life. "... Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate," it says. Did anything happen in the interval between birth and death?

Somehow, everything Jesus said and did in 33 years on earth gets swept aside in the rush to interpret his life correctly. For me, as for many others raised in the Christian tradition, the man who walked the dusty roads of Palestine had been all but lost. I knew Christ -- "Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made" -- but not Jesus, or Rabbi Jeshua bar-Joseph, the Jew from Nazareth.

A remarkable change has taken place in recent years, I learned during my library research: interest in Jesus is resurging among the Jews. In 1925, the Hebrew scholar Joseph Klausner could find only three full-length treatments of Jesus' life by contemporary Jewish scholars. Now there are hundreds, including some of the most illuminating studies available. Modern Israeli schoolchildren learn that Jesus was a great teacher, perhaps the greatest Jewish teacher, who was subsequently "co-opted" by the Gentiles.

Jesus' true-blue Jewishness leaps out from Matthew's very first sentence, which introduces him as "the son of David, the son of Abraham." Roughly, that might parallel an American politician being introduced as "the son of Abraham Lincoln, the son of George Washington." Jesus grew up in an era of Jewish pride, when families were adopting names that harked back to the times of the patriarchs and the Exodus from Egypt (not unlike ethnic Americans who choose African names for their children). Circumcised as a baby, Jesus attended religious festivals in Jerusalem as a young man, and as an adult he worshiped in the synagogue and temple. Even his controversies with other Jews, such as the Pharisees, underscored the fact that they expected him to share their values and act more like them.

Growing up, I did not know a single Jew. I do now. I know something of their culture: the close ties that keep sacred holidays alive even for families who no longer believe in their meaning; the passionate arguments that at first unsettled me but soon attracted me as a style of personal engagement; the respect, even reverence, for legalism amid a society that mainly values autonomy; the ability to link arms and dance and sing and laugh even when the world offers scant reason for celebration.

This was the culture Jesus grew up in, a Jewish culture. Yes, he changed it, but always from his starting point as a Jew. Now when I find myself wondering what Jesus was like as a teenager, I think of Jewish boys I know in Chicago. When the thought jars me, I remember that in his own day Jesus got the opposite reaction. A Jewish teenager, surely -- but the Son of God?

9. YET JESUS DID NOT ACT LIKE A JEW

The very architecture of the temple expressed Jewish belief in a ladder of hierarchy reaching higher and higher toward God. Gentiles and "half-breeds" like the Samaritans could enter the outer Court of the Gentiles; a wall separated them from the next partition, which admitted Jewish women. Jewish men could proceed one stage farther, and then only priests could enter the sacred areas.

The society was, in effect, a religious caste system based on steps toward holiness, and the Pharisees' scrupulosity reinforced the system daily. All their rules on washing hands and avoiding defilement were an attempt to make themselves acceptable to God. Had not God set forth lists of desirable (spotless) and undesirable (flawed, unclean) animals for use in sacrifice? Had not God banned sinners, menstruating women, the physically deformed, and other "undesirables" from the temple?

In the midst of this tight religious caste system, Jesus appeared, with no qualms about socializing with children or sinners or even Samaritans. He touched, or was touched by, the "unclean": those with leprosy, the deformed, a hemorrhaging woman, the lunatic and possessed. Although Levitical laws prescribed a day of purification after touching a sick person, Jesus conducted mass healings in which he touched scores; he never concerned himself with the rules of defilement after contact with the sick or even the dead.

Indeed, Jesus turned upside down the accepted wisdom of the day. Pharisees believed that touching an unclean person polluted the one who touched. Yet when Jesus touched a person with leprosy, Jesus did not become soiled -- the leprous became clean. When an immoral woman washed Jesus' feet, she went away forgiven and transformed. When Jesus defied custom to enter a pagan's house, the pagan's servant was healed. As Walter Wink puts it, "The contagion of holiness overcomes the contagion of uncleanness."

In short, Jesus moved the emphasis from God's holiness (exclusive) to God's mercy (inclusive). Instead of the message "No undesirables allowed," he proclaimed, "In God's kingdom, no one is any longer an undesirable."

Jesus' attitude convicts me today, because I sense a movement in the reverse direction. The church is becoming more and more politicized. As society unravels and immorality increases, I hear many calls that we show less mercy and more morality. Stigmatize homosexuals, shame unwed mothers, harass the homeless, punish law-breakers. I share a deep concern for our society, and obviously Christians need to be a moral voice. In doing so, though, we must follow Jesus' example, "loving the sinner while hating the sin." I am struck by the power of mercy as demonstrated by Jesus, who came for the sick and not the well, for sinners and not for the righteous. I spent half my life rebelling against the legalism of my childhood; when I tasted the first draught of the Living Water offered by Jesus, I knew I was changed forever.

8. JESUS LOST THE "CULTURE WARS" [used 9/29/96]

Not long ago I addressed the topic "Culture Wars" before a large gathering that was tilted toward the liberal Democratic persuasion and included a strong minority of Jews. I had been selected as the token evangelical Christian on a panel that included the presidents of the Disney Channel and Warner Brothers, as well as the president of Wellesley College and Anita Hill's personal attorney.

To prepare for my talk, I went through the Gospels for guidance, only to be reminded how unpolitical Jesus was. Today, each time an election rolls around, Christians debate whether this or that candidate is "God's man" for the White House. Projecting myself back into Jesus' time, I had difficulty imagining him pondering whether Tiberius, Octavius, or Julius Caesar was "God's man" for the empire.

I was also struck by what happens when Christians lose the culture wars. In Communist countries -- Albania, the Soviet Union, China -- the Christians' worst nightmares came true. These governments forced the church to go underground. (A missionary in Afghanistan told me that after bulldozing the only Christian church in the country, the Afghans dug a huge hole underneath its foundation; they had heard rumors about an underground church!) In waves of persecution during the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, Chinese believers were fined, imprisoned, and tortured. Yet, despite this government oppression, a spiritual revival broke out that could well be the largest in the history of the church. As many as 50 million believers gave their allegiance to an invisible kingdom even as the visible kingdom made them suffer for it.

When my turn came to speak, I said that the man I follow, a Palestinian Jew from the first century, had also been involved in a culture war. He went up against a rigid religious establishment and a pagan empire. The two powers, often at odds, conspired together to eliminate him. His response? Not to fight, but to give his life for these his enemies, and to point to that gift as proof of his love. Among the last words he said before death were, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

After the panel, a television celebrity came up to me whose name every reader would recognize. "I've got to tell you, what you said stabbed me right in the heart," he said. "I was prepared to dislike you because I dislike all right-wing Christians, and I assumed you were one. I don't follow Jesus -- I'm a Jew. But when you told about Jesus forgiving his enemies, I realized how far from that spirit I am. I fight my enemies, especially the right-wingers. I don't forgive them. I have much to learn from the spirit of Jesus."

7. JESUS WAS A POOR SALESMAN

Sometimes I wonder how Jesus would have fared in this day of mass media and high-tech ministry. I can't picture him worrying about the details of running a large organization. I can't see him letting some make-up artist improve his looks before a TV appearance. And I have a hard time imagining the fundraising letters Jesus might write.

Investigative reporters on television like to do exposes of evangelists who claim powers of supernatural healing with little evidence to back them up. In direct contrast, Jesus, who had manifest supernatural powers, tended to downplay them. Seven times in Mark's gospel he told a healed person, "Tell no one!" When crowds pressed around him, he fled to solitude, or rowed across a lake.

We sometimes use the term "savior complex" to describe an unhealthy syndrome of obsession over solving others' problems. Ironically, the true Savior seemed remarkably free of such a complex. He had no compulsion to convert the entire world in his lifetime or to cure people who were not ready to be cured.

I never sensed Jesus twisting a person's arm. Rather, he stated the consequences of a choice, then threw the decision back to the other party. For example, he once answered a wealthy man's question with uncompromising words, then let him walk away. Mark pointedly adds this comment about the man who rejected Jesus' advice, "Jesus looked at him and loved him."

In short, Jesus showed an incredible respect for human freedom. Those of us in ministry need the kind of "Savior complex" that Jesus demonstrated. As Elton Trueblood has observed, the major symbols of invitation that Jesus used had a severe, even offensive quality: the yoke of burden, the cup of suffering, the towel of servanthood. "Take up your cross and follow me," he said, in the least manipulative invitation that has ever been given.

6. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT JESUS LOOKED LIKE

John's gospel records this hyperbolic comment: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written." After spending time in seminary libraries browsing through the thousands of books on Jesus, I had the eerie sense that John's prophecy was coming true.

And yet, here is a strange thing: with this preponderance of scholarship, we still lack certain basic information about Jesus. The four Gospels skip over nine-tenths of his life, omitting much that would interest modern readers. We have only one scene from his adolescence and know nothing about his schooling. Details of his family life are so scant that scholars still debate how many brothers and sisters he had. The facts of biography considered essential to modern readers simply did not concern the gospel writers.

We also know nothing about Jesus' shape or stature or eye color, and thus, as a writer, I could not begin where I normally begin in reporting on a person -- by describing what he looked like. The first semirealistic portraits of Jesus did not come until the fifth century, and these were pure speculation; until then, the Greeks had portrayed him as a young, beardless figure resembling the god Apollo.

I once showed to a class several dozen art slides portraying Jesus in a variety of forms -- African, Korean, Chinese -- and then asked the class to describe what they thought Jesus looked like. Virtually everyone suggested he was tall (unlikely for a first-century Jew), most said handsome, and no one said overweight. I showed a BBC film on the life of Christ that featured a fat actor in the title role, and some in the class found it offensive. We prefer a tall, handsome, and above all, slender Jesus.

One tradition dating back to the second century suggested Jesus was a hunchback, and in the Middle Ages, Christians widely believed that Jesus had suffered from leprosy. Most Christians today would find such notions repulsive and perhaps heretical. Was he not a perfect specimen of humanity? Yet in all the Bible I can find only one physical description of sorts, a prophecy written hundreds of years before Christ's birth. Here is Isaiah's portrayal, in the midst of a passage that the New Testament applies to the life of Jesus:

Just as there were many who were appalled at him -- his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness..... He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Evidently our glamorized representations of Jesus say more about us than about him.

5. YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE WANTED JESUS AT YOUR BACKYARD BARBECUE

In writing a book about Jesus, one impression struck me more forcefully than any other: we have tamed him. The Jesus I learned about as a child was sweet and inoffensive, the kind of person whose lap you want to climb on, Mister Rogers with a beard. Indeed, Jesus did have qualities of gentleness and compassion that attracted little children. Mister Rogers, however, he assuredly was not.

I realized this fact when I studied the Sermon on the Mount. "Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the persecuted. Blessed are those who mourn." These sayings have a soft, proverbial ring to them -- unless you happen to know someone poor, persecuted, or mourning. The homeless huddling over heating grates in our major cities, the tortured prisoners whose pictures are distributed by Amnesty International, the families of the Oklahoma City bombing victims we see interviewed on television -- who would think of calling them blessed, or "lucky"?

In all the movies about Jesus' life, surely the most provocative -- and perhaps the most accurate -- portrayal of the Sermon on the Mount appears in a low-budget BBC production entitled "Son of Man." The director, Dennis Potter, sets the Sermon on the Mount against a background of violence and chaos. Roman soldiers have just invaded a Galilean village to exact vengeance for some trespass against the empire. They have strung up Jewish men of fighting age, shoved their hysterical wives to the ground, even speared babies in order to "teach these Jews a lesson." Into that tumultuous scene of blood and tears and keening for the dead strides Jesus with eyes ablaze. "I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you," he shouts above the groans.

I say it's easy to love your own brother, to love those who love you. Even tax collectors do that! You want me to congratulate you for loving your own kinsmen? No, Love your enemy. Love the man who would kick you and spit at you. Love the soldier who would drive his sword in your belly. Love the brigand who robs and tortures you.

Listen to me! Love your enemy! If a Roman soldier hits you on the left cheek, offer him the right one. If a man in authority orders you to walk one mile, walk two miles. If a man sues you for your coat, give him the shirt off your back. Listen! I tell you, it is hard to follow me. What I'm saying to you hasn't been said since the world began!

You can imagine the villagers' response to such unwelcome advice. The Sermon on the Mount did not soothe them; it infuriated them.

I came away from my study of Jesus both comforted and terrified. Jesus came to earth "full of grace and truth," said John: his truth comforts my intellectual doubts even as his grace comforts my emotional doubts. And yet, I also encountered a terrifying aspect of Jesus, one that I had never learned about in Sunday school. Did anyone go away from Jesus' presence feeling satisfied about his or her life?

Few people felt comfortable around Jesus; those who did were the type no one else felt comfortable around. The Jesus I met in the Gospels was anything but tame.

4. JESUS IS NOT THE CHURCH

George Buttrick, former chaplain at Harvard, recalls that students would come into his office, plop down on a chair and declare, "I don't believe in God." Buttrick would give this disarming reply: "Sit down and tell me what kind of God you don't believe in. I probably don't believe in that God either."

Many people who reject Jesus are rejecting not Jesus, but a distortion of him as presented by the church. To our everlasting shame, the watching world judges Jesus by a church whose history includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquistadores in Latin America, and a slave ship called the Good Ship Jesus.

In order to get to know Jesus, I had to strip away layers of dust and grime applied by the church itself. In my case, the image of Jesus was obscured by the racism, intolerance, and petty legalism of fundamentalist churches in the South. A Russian or a European Catholic confronts a very different restoration process. "For not only dust, but also too much gold can cover up the true figure," wrote Hans Kung about his own search. Many abandon the quest entirely; rebuffed by the church, they never make it to Jesus.

I often wish that we could somehow set aside church history, remove the church's many layers of interpretation, and encounter the words of the Gospels for the first time. Not everyone would accept Jesus -- they did not in his own day -- but at least people would not reject him for the wrong reasons.

Once I was able to cut through the fog still clinging from my own upbringing, my opinion of Jesus changed remarkably. Brilliant, untamed, tender, creative, merciful, slippery, loving, irreducible, paradoxically humble -- Jesus stands up to scrutiny. He is who I want my God to be.

3. YET THE CHURCH IS JESUS

What I have just longed for, nonetheless, is not only impossible; it is unscriptural. Jesus planned from the beginning to die so that we his church could take his place. ("Once again," as Robert Farrar Capon reminds us, "God was -- and still is -- throwing sinkers.") He stayed just long enough to gather around him followers who could carry the message to others. Killing Jesus, says Walter Wink, was like trying to destroy a dandelion seed-head by blowing on it.

The church is where God lives. What Jesus brought to a few -- healing, grace, the good-news message of God's love -- the church can now bring to all. "Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies," he explained, "it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds."

As I worked through the Gospels I concluded that the Ascension represents my greatest struggle of faith -- not whether it happened, but why. It challenges me more than belief in the Resurrection and other miracles.

It seems odd to admit such a notion -- I have never read a book or article designed to answer doubts about the Ascension -- yet for me what has happened since Jesus' departure strikes at the core of my faith. Would it not have been better if Jesus had stayed on earth to direct us?

"It is for your good that I am going away," Jesus told his disciples, who had the same question. "Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you." I find it much easier to accept the fact of God incarnating in Jesus of Nazareth than in the people who attend my local church -- and in me. Yet that is what we are asked to believe; that is how we are asked to live. Jesus played his part and then left. Now it is up to us, the body of Christ.

2. CATHOLICS ARE BETTER AT CALENDARS THAN PROTESTANTS

The church I grew up in skipped past the events of Holy Week in a rush to hear the cymbal sounds of Easter. We never held a service on Good Friday. We celebrated the Lord's Supper only once a quarter. Roman Catholics did not believe in the Resurrection, I was told, which explained why Catholic girls wore crosses "with the little man on them." They celebrated Mass daily, a symptom of their fixation with death. We Protestants were different. We saved our best clothes, our rousing hymns, and our few sanctuary decorations for Easter.

When I began to study theology and church history, I found that my church was wrong about the Catholics, who believed in Easter as strongly as we did. From the Gospels I also learned that, unlike my church, the biblical record slows down rather than speeds up when it gets to Holy Week. The Gospels, said one early Christian commentator, are chronicles of Jesus' final week with extended introductions.

The author and preacher Tony Campolo delivers a stirring sermon adapted from an elderly black pastor at his church in Philadelphia. "It's Friday, but Sunday's Comin'" is the title of the sermon, and once you know the title you know the whole sermon. In a cadence that increases in tempo and in volume, Campolo contrasts how the world looked on Friday -- when the forces of evil won over the forces of good, when every friend and disciple fled in fear, when the Son of God died on a cross -- with how it looked on Easter Sunday. The disciples who lived through both days, Friday and Sunday, learned that when God seems most absent he may be closest of all; when God looks most powerless he may be most powerful; when God looks most dead he may be coming back to life. They learned never to count God out.

Campolo's sermon skips one day, though. The other two days, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, are perhaps the most significant days on the entire church calendar, and yet, in a real sense, we live our lives on Saturday, the day in between. Can we trust that God can make something holy and beautiful and good out of a world that includes Bosnia and Rwanda and inner-city ghettoes in the richest nation on earth? Human history grinds on, between the time of promise and fulfillment. It's Saturday on planet Earth; will Sunday ever come?

Perhaps that is why the authors of the Gospels devoted so much more space to Jesus' last week than to the several weeks when he was making resurrection appearances. They knew that the history to follow would often resemble Saturday, the in-between day, more than Sunday, the day of rejoicing. It is a good thing to remember that in the cosmic drama, we live out our days on Saturday, the day with no name.

1. JESUS SAVES MY FAITH

"Why am I a Christian?" I sometimes ask myself, and to be perfectly honest, the reasons reduce to two: (1) the lack of good alternatives and (2) Jesus.

Martin Luther encouraged his students to flee the hidden God and run to Christ, and I now know why. If I use a magnifying glass to examine a fine painting, the object in the center of the glass stays crisp and clear, while around the edges the view grows increasingly distorted. For me, Jesus has become the focal point. I learned, in the process of writing this book, to keep the magnifying glass of my faith focused on Jesus.

I tend to spend a lot of time pondering unanswerable questions such as the problem of pain or providence versus free will. When I do so, everything becomes fuzzy. But if I look at Jesus, clarity is restored.

Jesus gave no philosophical answer to the problem of pain, but he did give an existential answer. I cannot learn from him why bad things occur, but I can learn how God feels about it. I look at how Jesus responds to the sisters of his good friend Lazarus, or to a leprosy patient banned from the town gates. Jesus gives God a face, and that face is streaked with tears.

Why doesn't God answer my prayers? I do not know, but it helps me to realize that Jesus himself knew something of that feeling. He prayed all night over his choice of disciples, and still that list included one named Judas. In Gethsemane he threw himself on the ground, crying out for some other way, but there was no other way. At its core, Gethsemane depicts, after all, the story of an unanswered prayer. The cup of suffering was not removed.

I can worry myself into a state of spiritual paralysis over questions like "What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything?" Jesus silences such questions: If Jesus saw the need to pray, so should I.

Mostly, Jesus corrects my fuzzy conceptions of God. Left on my own, I would come up with a very different notion of God. My God would be static, unchanging. Because of Jesus, however, I must adjust those instinctive notions. (Perhaps that lay at the heart of his mission?) Jesus reveals a God who comes in search of us, a God who makes room for our freedom even when it costs the Son's life, a God who is vulnerable. Above all, Jesus reveals a God who is love.

On our own, would any of us come up with the notion of a God who loves and yearns to be loved? Those raised in a Christian tradition may miss the shock of Jesus' message, but in truth, love has never been a normal way of describing what happens between human beings and their God. Not once does the Qur'an apply the word love to God. Aristotle stated bluntly, "It would be eccentric for anyone to claim that he loved Zeus" -- or that Zeus loved a human being, for that matter. In dazzling contrast, the Christian Bible affirms, "God is love" and cites love as the main reason Jesus came to earth: "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him."

I remember a long night sitting in uncomfortable Naugahyde chairs in O'Hare Airport, waiting impatiently for a flight that was delayed for five hours. Author Karen Mains happened to be traveling to the same conference. The long delay and the late hour combined to create a melancholy mood. I was writing the book "Disappointment with God" at the time, and I felt burdened by other people's pains and sorrows, doubts and unanswered prayers.

Karen listened to me in silence for a very long time, and then out of nowhere she asked a question that has always stayed with me. "Philip, do you ever just let God love you?" she said. "It's pretty important, I think."

I realized with a start that she had brought to light a gaping hole in my spiritual life. For all my absorption in the Christian faith, I had missed the most important message of all. The story of Jesus is the story of a celebration, a story of love. It involves pain and disappointment, yes, for God as well as for us. But Jesus embodies the promise of a God who will go to any length to get his family back.

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Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./CHRISTIANITY TODAY Magazine June 17, 1996, Vol. 40, No. 7, Page 29

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As He approached His 33rd birthday, Jesus must have been thinking of His mission. He came to dwell among us as a human being.

The great secret about Christ is that He is, was and always will be God Himself. Thomas, seeing the risen Christ after Easter, proclaimed, “My Lord and My God!” (John 20:28). The apostle John explained, “And the Word (Jesus Christ) was God ... and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1,14).

Christmas celebrates the moment our eternal God entered the human race through the womb of a virgin upon whom the Holy Spirit had come in history’s greatest miracle of conception and birth.

Many people today go through the Christmas season with faulty spiritual eyesight, not recognizing that the Babe in the manger is the King of the universe:

• He came to die for every person

Jesus came to die for every person. All of us have sinned and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). You or I might be the best person in the world, but there is a great chasm between our morality and God’s holiness. No one can achieve God’s glory; we have all sinned and fallen short. Our inability to be holy separates us from God, resulting in our being in a state of spiritual death.

Christ -- perfect God and perfect Man -- died in our place. We can put our trust in One who truly measures up and who, as the perfect sacrifice, died on the cross for us.

Crucifixion was death by torture; it was designed to be both excruciating and bloody. It had to be that way to reveal the ugliness of sin, the terror of death, and the power of His redeeming blood. How deeply Jesus must have felt the shadow of the Cross as He celebrated his 33rd birthday.

• He came to deliver us from the fear of death

Jesus’ death for us destroyed the power of death, removed its sting; and it frees us from the fear of death. He came into this world at Bethlehem to dwell among us, to die for every person and to deliver us all from the fear of death. He was born to die, that we might die to death and be born into God’s eternal kingdom.

• He came to demonstrate his love for us

His birthday also demonstrates His love for us. Jesus Christ was born in a manger and became one of us so He could walk the same path we walk. When we go to Him in prayer for comfort, we know He understands. There’s nothing you’ve ever experienced that the Lord didn’t know in His flesh when He walked upon this earth.

Christmas is not just the pageantry of a little baby born in a manger. It is the story of a God who loves us so much. He knew that the only way to redeem and save us was to send His own Son to be one of us. In that moment in Bethlehem, God invaded humanity. That was God in the manger; and as He grew, it was God walking around in a body. As He celebrated His fleeting birthdays, it was to mark the passing years of a divine life lived with an ultimate purpose in mind. As He was crucified, it was God hanging between heaven and earth, God forsaken by God. Who can understand it?

And yet it is the mystery of our salvation. He was born to die, but He rose again to give life freely, abundantly and eternally. As you celebrate His birth this year, think of how He must have felt as He marked each passing birthday during His short span on earth. It sobers us; but it gladdens us, too. Contained in His birthday are the secrets of the new birth for each of us. In His cradle is our life; on His cross is our forgiveness; and in His resurrection is our hope.

Alleluia! O how the angels sang.

Alleluia! How it rang!

And the sky was bright with a holy light

‘Twas the birthday of a King.

(From the Christmas song, “Birthday of a King.”)