"HIS PAIN--OUR GAIN"
Good Friday, the Crucifixion of Our Lord
April 14, 2017
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
He was wounded for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His stripes we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5 (ESV)
This particular day of the church year has every appearance of being a day that seems to be somewhat ambiguous. It is called "Good" Friday, and yet it seems to take on the appearance of being anything but good. On this day, unlike any other, the chancels of Christian churches all over the world are either adorned in black or left bare. Many Christians, out of devotion to their Savior, choose to observe a fast on this day. For some Christians of a high liturgical orientation today is the only day in the church year when the Lord's Supper is not celebrated. Even we come together this evening with mixed feelings of a sort: We are the same people that we always are, gathered together in the same spirit of thanksgiving to the same Lord, but tonight we come with a somewhat different mood and demeanor. Our joy in Christ is subdued somewhat today with a seriousness that we don't see or feel very often anymore in this world that we live in--a world that is often characterized by self-indulgence and frivolity.
Good Friday conjures up within us these ambiguous feelings for the simple reason that the suffering and death of Jesus Christ conjure up ambiguous feelings within us. Is the crucifixion of Jesus something good or something bad? Is it something that we should be joyful about or something that should make us feel sad? The answer to all of these questions is yes. The suffering and death of Jesus are all of these things. They are something terrible--even to the point of being inhuman, and yet they are something wonderful--even to the point of being divine. They are something so sad that they make us scratch our heads with wonder at how such suffering can possibly be inflicted or endured, and yet they give us the joy of salvation that carries us even through our darkest days of uncertainty and grief. As we sit this evening in spirit at foot of Jesus' cross, let's gaze upon the Crucified One with an eye for what there is here for us to feel bad about and grieve over and what there is for us to feel good about and to rejoice in.
The suffering and death of our Savior is something for us to feel bad about because it arouses within us bad feelings as we think about the extent of His suffering. We hear and read every day on the news reports about various sentences that are handed down in our courts that are thought by many to be "cruel and unusual punishment," and yet there is nothing in the world that can compare with the cruelty of crucifixion. This method of capital punishment was intended to be more than just putting a man to death; it was to totally humiliate him in the eyes of all and at the same time to make a public example of him. It was not uncommon for crucified men to hang on their crosses, naked and in agony, for several days before they mercifully breathed their last. They were put on display, together with the charge against them, as if to say to those passing by, "This is how you will end up if you do what he did." The very thought that humans beings are capable of such cruelty to their own makes us recoil in disgust.
Our bad feelings about the suffering and death of Jesus become even more intense if we are honest enough and brave enough to acknowledge and think about the real reason for this ghastly episode of violence and torment. There is a lot more taking place here than simply the harshness of Roman justice, more than mere human cruelty, more than just the barbarism of an earlier and more violent day and age. What we are seeing when we look at the cross of Jesus is God's righteous judgment against our sin. Those countless ways in which we rebel against God and His Law every day--all of those little things that we so often dismiss as being harmless and perhaps even cute--God takes these things very seriously. And if you ever have any doubts about that, just look at the cross of Jesus. Here is where we see what God really thinks of our sin. Here is where we see the righteous God of perfect justice punishing our sin. That should certainly should conjure up a sobering thought within us--an uncomfortable feeling--a realization on the part of each of us that that really should be me on that cross, suffering and dying in agony and shame. It is the guilt of my sin that is being punished there.
But there is even more than that here. The eye of faith also sees something in the suffering and death of Jesus for us to feel good about and to rejoice in. If the cross of Jesus reveals God's perfect justice against sin, it reveals also His perfect love for sinners. If the cross of Jesus shows us how severely God punishes sin, it also shows us how much He loves sinners. In the suffering and death of Christ we see how far God was willing to go in order to win us back from sin, Satan, death, and hell. This was not just one more poor, innocent Victim of human cruelty; this is God Himself--in the flesh--taking upon Himself the punishment that His own justice mandates for sin. The apostle Paul explains it in this way: "In Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them" (2 Corinthians 5:19). The suffering and death of Jesus is something for us to feel good about because it reveals to us the glorious fact that, out of His love for us and for all sinners, God was willing to become our Substitute in Christ--bearing the punishment that we deserve so that we might be forgiven of our sins and reconciled to the holy God whom we have offended.
Another good feeling that we can derive from the suffering and death of Jesus Christ is the certainty that our sins are completely atoned for. Because Jesus is the Fulfillment of everything that God had promised through the centuries to deal once and for all with the problem of our sin, we can rest assured that in His perfect life and His innocent suffering and death our sin has been laid to rest forever. No longer are we rebels and enemies of God; we are now once again His beloved children because of what Christ has done for us. Whenever we sense the ancient accuser, Satan himself, trying to arouse doubts within us as to whether or not God will accept us, sinners that we are, all we need to do is look to the cross of Jesus and know that when He said on that cross "It is finished!" (John 19:30), He meant it. The case against us in God's court of perfect justice has been dismissed. We have been acquitted--not because we're not guilty and not because we have a good lawyer, but because Jesus has suffered our punishment in our place. He has paid our debt in full.
In our place--those three little words are the theme of the entire Gospel and especially of the Passion story. Jesus lived the perfect life under the Law of God in our place and He suffered and died on the cross under God's judgment in our place. Because He did this for us, we are forgiven, accepted, and restored as the beloved children of God that our Creator intended us to be from the very beginning. My prayer is that we may daily find in the cross of our Savior a profound sense of what He did for us and why He had to do it. May the Holy Spirit, through our meditation on Christ's suffering and death, fill us with a profound joy in His wounds, where alone we find healing for our biggest hurt--the hurt inflicted by our own sin. And may it cheer us with the confidence that we are at peace with God because of His redeeming love for us.
Amen.
May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own bloo