Sermon from April 9, 2006
Today begins Holy Week. More than 30% of the pages of our four Gospels tell what happened from Palm Sunday to Easter morning. It is a good time to take up a theme that lies at the heart of our faith – the doctrine of atonement. Let's begin with familiar things and then work our way back to a peculiarity of the New Testament.

I can remember in great detail what I was doing on November 22, 1963, when I heard that President Kennedy had been shot on the streets of Dallas. I can remember in great detail what I was doing and how I was feeling on January 28, 1986, when I heard that the space shuttle, Challenger, blew up 73 seconds after lift-off. That same vividness accompanies memories of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Most recently, details of September 11 remain fixed in memory.

After each of these events, sadness, disbelief, anger, and fear took hold of the nation. People spoke of those terrible events as tragedies. We saw the same images over and over. Grief was the order of the day. We canceled sporting events and civic events. We wondered why.

Don't you think that vivid memories and heavy emotion hung over Passover during the administration of Pontius Pilate, when he ordered Jesus of Nazareth to be executed for sedition against the Roman state? N.T. Wright has described that execution in bare-knuckled, political terms.

"Crucifixion was a powerful symbol throughout the Roman world. It was not just a means of liquidating undesirables; it did so with the maximum degradation and humiliation. It said, loud and clear: we are in charge here; you are our property; we can do what we like with you." (Jesus and the Victory of God, 543).

Right here, we come to a stunning peculiarity of the Bible. The New Testament never compares the death of Jesus to an execution, assassination, or tragedy. It doesn't say that Jesus was cut off in the prime of His life. All four Gospels report the crucifixion, but they spare us the gruesome details in which, e.g., Mel Gibson's movie specialized. The writers did not deny the gruesomeness; they had seen crucifixions, and they likely saw His; but their reporting and interpretation of that event ignored the gruesomeness altogether.

How do we account for this absence of language and detail in the New Testament that would naturally belong to any contemporary, journalistic account of Jesus' execution? What language does the Bible use instead, and where did the New Testament writers learn their different vocabulary?

Early Sermons
Answers begin with the sermons of Simon Peter. We need to pay attention to how he spoke about Jesus' death. Look at Acts 3:12-15. Peter and John were offering their explanation for the healing of a man crippled from birth (Acts 3:2).

"Men of Israel, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if by our own power or godliness we had made this man walk? The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus. You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witness of this." That is blunt talk about who was responsible for Jesus' death.

Now, look at Acts 4:8. "Rulers and elders of the people!" That narrows moral responsibility down considerably. In verse 11 he says of them, "He (Jesus) is 'the stone you builders rejected, which has become the capstone.'"

Acts 5 is even more specific. Verse 21 says that when the high priest and his associates arrived, they called together the Sanhedrin, the ruling body within Judaism. In verse 30 Peter said to the Sanhedrin, "The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead – whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree."

These accusations are what we might expect. Nothing surprising about them, except that no one expected Peter to have the courage to make them. Only a few weeks before, he had denied Jesus three times out of fear for his life. The rest had run away into hiding. That was not surprising, but laying moral responsibility for Jesus' death on the authorities publicly was unexpected.

And now we come to a watershed in the spiritual history of the world. The authorities were not the only ones Peter said were responsible for the death of Jesus. In Acts 2:22-23 Peter's first sermon had laid responsibility on his fellow Jews and on Gentiles for the death of Jesus. But the opening line of verse 23 might have stopped all the birds of Judea from singing. "This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge."

Responsibility for Jesus' death lay somehow with God. It was a powerful indicator that they had been thinking deeply about His death. Where did they get that idea? The answer takes us back to Mark 8:31.

At the Feet of the Master
Jesus had said that His violent death was inevitable. This verse gives the first of three predictions of His death and resurrection. He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. According to Mark 8:32, Peter spoke for everyone, when he rebuked Jesus for such fatalistic talk.

Peter would never forget Jesus' stinging rebuke in verse 33: "Out of my sight, Satan! You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men." Jesus' repeated predictions of His death were not fatalistic talk; they reflected His awareness of the will of God for Him. It was a short step from finally realizing that to Peter's declaration on the Day of Pentecost that Jesus' death was due not only to human agency but also to God's set purpose and foreknowledge.

But there was more. Jesus said that the Jewish scriptures anticipated His death. Look at Mark 9:12. Coming down from the Transfiguration, He asked His disciples, "Why then is it written that the Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected?" If Jesus was aware that it was God's will for Him to die, the Old Testament gave Him that awareness. Here are some examples.

Events in the last hours of Jesus' life fulfilled scripture. Look at Matthew 26:31. Then Jesus told them, "This very night you will all fall away on account of me, for it is written: 'I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.'" Look at Matthew 26:54. Jesus said of His refusal to call upon the angels to protect Him in Gethsemane: "But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?"

He was teaching the apostles how to read the Old Testament. Luke 24:27 reports that Jesus anchored both His suffering and His glory in the Old Testament. And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. Again, it is a short step from Jesus' instruction to Peter's declaration in Acts 3:18: "This is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer."

Peter's sermon on the Day of Pentecost raises a pivotal question: Why was it God's set purpose and foreknowledge that Jesus should die? Jesus offered a tantalizing answer in the central verse of the Gospel of Mark, Mark 10:45. "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Accumulating Questions
The resurrection of Jesus Christ forced the apostles to rethink everything. Events looked one way, if the death of Jesus was the end of the story. They looked very different, if He came back from death.

So, they looked back on the past. Jesus' predictions of His coming death, His insistence that His death fulfilled scripture, and his statement that He would give his life as a ransom for many took on new meaning. They gave His crucifixion a meaning altogether different from the ghastly, Roman instrument of intimidation that it was.

After all, if God somehow bore responsibility for the death of Christ and if scripture anticipated the death of Christ, there was no way the apostles could treat it as a tragedy or travesty of justice or assassination. Death by crucifixion was gruesome, but something so transcended the gruesomeness that to dwell on that missed the point.

And what exactly was the point? Well, yes, that is the question. The Lord's reference to His death as a ransom for many points in the direction of an answer, but it is not a straight answer. It raises other questions.

For example, if Jesus died in accordance with God's set purpose and foreknowledge, it implies that God saw His death to be a necessity. But what made it a necessity? Was there something in the human situation or in the nature of God or in both that limited God to this option of Jesus' death and no other?

The short answer is this: the expression ransom for many implies that humanity was in some kind of bondage from which it could not free itself. But if that bondage made the death of Jesus necessary in the eyes of God for setting man free, what dreadful bondage was it?

Here is an even more penetrating question. If Jesus' death was necessary to release humanity from its dreadful bondage, how did Jesus' death accomplish that? Think about that for a minute. The Christian gospel says that the death of Christ altered the human situation forever; but how could an event during the Jewish Passover affect human life a thousand miles away or 2000 years away? That seems foolish.

Furthermore, if Jesus was the Son of God, how could God allow the crucifixion to happen? How could Peter dare to say that Jesus died in accordance with God's set purpose and foreknowledge? Isn't that a scandalous, even blashpemous thing to say about God? And what kind of Messiah says that His mission is to die?

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
If you feel the force of these questions, then you are in touch with the skepticism people have toward the Christian message from the very start. The Apostle Paul acknowledged the skepticism. He answered it with a counter assertion that takes us deeper into the mystery of the meaning of the death of Christ. Look with me at 1 Corinthians 1:21-25.

For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolisness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.

Paul was saying nothing other than this: the death of Jesus was the wisest and the most powerful thing God could do. How could Paul say that? What did he and the rest of the apostles see that we don't see? This series of sermons is an effort to answer that question.

As we read the New Testatment, two features about the apostles' teaching stand out. First, they were unanimous about the meaning of Jesus' death. It really did alter the human situation forever, and it was the only way the situation could have been altered.

Second, they expressed that meaning in ways, which they learned from the Old Testament. "The Old Testament furnishes the essential thought-forms, and the essential language too, for conceiving and expressing salvation," (C.K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, 66). In trying to answer the questions we have raised today, I will rely heavily on the language of priest and sacrifice that we associate with the Jewish temple. The New Testament letter of Hebrews will be our guide.

A disclaimer is in order about the questions I have raised and the answers I will propose. It is both possible and acceptable to preach and to believe the good news about Jesus Christ without raising or answering these questions. Christ died. Christ has risen. Christ has authority over all the earth. Christ will return. Repent. Believe. You will be saved. That is the message, and we can't go wrong by proclaiming that message and believing that message.

However, the apostles were not content with proclamation. They probed deeply into the questions that we have raised today. Their example encourages us to do the same, as God enables us. Our failure to try may expose the gospel to the danger of becoming a religious cliché, words that mean less and less as we use them more and more.

On the other hand, the effort to understand more deeply and to explain more clearly the meaning of Jesus' death could become nothing more than an intellectual exercise. That would rob the Church of its heritage by turning our attention away from Christ to human cleverness.

However, in these sermons I am seeking more than understanding. The last book of the Bible points to the proper destination of these sermons. In Revelation 5:11-12 John said: Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang: "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!" Orthodoxy comes to fruition in doxology. It is proper that faith seek understanding. It is most proper that faith come to rest by adoring the mystery of God's love.