sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 04/17/2011
Palm Sunday is the day we remember how Jesus entered Jerusalem to great acclaim. A triumphal entry, it’s sometimes called, because people were excited, thinking that in Jesus they had found a king who would deliver them from the evil that afflicted them. They were right about one thing, but wrong about the more important things. They were right that Jesus was a king who was going to deliver them from the evil that afflicted them. But they were wrong that he was going to head up a military revolution against their oppressors. And because they were wrong about what Jesus was doing about the evil that afflicted them, they abandoned him as soon as they saw that his approach wasn’t their approach. In fact, when they saw his approach to evil, it was so different than what they expected, that they came to the conclusion he was doing nothing at all about the evil that afflicted them.
Have you ever felt that way? Ever gotten your hopes up that God was going to do something about the mess you were in, and then been devastated by the feeling that maybe he wasn’t doing anything at all?
King David expressed that feeling when he wrote psalm 22, 600 years before Palm Sunday.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from the words of my groaning?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest.
It’s a question we ask when we’re under assault from evil. It’s also the words of Jesus, uttered as a prayer while he hangs dying. It’s an intimate, gut wrenching question that’s in the orbit of one of the Big Questions lacing its way through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. A question on which everything rides. When it comes to evil, the question of what God is doing about it matters immediately and practically to us. The question is this: What, if anything, is God doing about evil?
We may have other questions about evil, like “Why does evil exist?”, “Where does evil come from?”, “How could evil exist in a universe ruled by a good God?”, and so on. Great questions. Perhaps even important questions. But asking those questions first is a bit like waking up and finding yourself in a freefall from an airplane and asking, “Why does gravity exist?” “Where does gravity come from?” “What does the existence of gravity say about the physical and moral makeup of the universe?” What you really need to know is, “Umm, can anybody hear me? Is anybody going to do something about this?”
Because if God’s not listening, if he’s not doing anything about it – if he has in fact forsaken us - then humanity is just a footnote in cosmic history. Evil will most certainly destroy us. Making the rest of our questions about it irrelevant. (We might as well enjoy the fall until impact…)
On the other hand, if God is doing something about it – if he is, in fact, not so far from saving us, not so far from the words of our groaning; if he does, in fact, answer; if we will, in fact, find rest – then we have good reason to hope. And hope gives us reason to act in cooperation with God. (Taking our free fall analogy further, if it turns out he’s falling right next to us, but has a way to land safely, that might inspire us to reach out and grab hold of him, and do whatever he instructs us to do…)
This week is Holy Week. The week we consider Jesus’ crucifixion and death, culminating in a day we call “Good” Friday. And we call it good because Jesus on the cross is the ultimate revelation of what God is doing about evil – Jesus on the cross is God’s answer to the words of our groaning. And it’s a good answer, the best answer. Jesus on the cross is God saying, “No, I haven’t forsaken you.”
Jesus on the cross is also God showing us how he’s defeating evil. If we want to know what God is doing about evil, so that we can have hope, and so that we can cooperate with him in our world, we’ve got to look intently at Jesus on the cross. If we look closely enough, and we have eyes to see, what we will see is that Jesus on the cross is God embracing the worst evil has to offer as he offers himself to love’s purposes, and exhausting evil’s power.
Which, like so many things about Jesus, is not at all what we might expect, is it?
Let’s back up a little and set the stage, so we can see the cross a little more clearly than the original Palm Sunday crowd did.
At the heart of the stories about Jesus is a knockdown, drag out fight with evil. When Jesus hits the scene, light is going toe to toe with darkness. Jesus regularly announced that the kingdom of God was at hand. And the kingdom of God is a meaningless phrase if it doesn’t include the defeat of evil.
Now, what evil hates most is love. And evil thinks by threatening our lives, or offering us an alternative source of life, it will cause us to abandon love. And usually evil is proven right. For a long stretch, in fact, evil had rarely been proven wrong.
Until evil meets love personified. Love that loves Love more than he loves his own life.
Take one of the first great symbols of evil, the wilderness. A stark reminder that a creation that started as a lush, richly inhabited garden has become a wilderness. What does Jesus do? Shazaam, turn it back into a garden? Nope. Goes out into it. For 40 days. Without eating. Alone. Totally exposed. Enduring the full hardships of life on this broken earth with all the rest of hungry, thirsty, and isolated humanity. And there, at his weakest point, encountering the Satan, the tempter, evil personified. And who comes away exhausted? Not Jesus. He comes away recharged and energized, ready to kick off his kingdom agenda. Jesus’ life is threatened in the wilderness, but he embraces the worst evil has to offer as he offers himself to Love’s purposes, and in the process, evil is exhausted, and Love’s purposes are accomplished.
How about the evil symbolized by sickness and injury and death? Jesus goes to the leper colonies and touches them, making himself vulnerable on the way to serving Love’s purposes, and in the process the lepers are healed. He lets himself be touched by the bleeding woman. He gets his hands dirty, spits on them, touches the blind man’s eyes. His good friend dies, and he opens his heart to the grief, weeping, and out of that grief Jesus raises Lazarus to life. Some aspect of Jesus’ well-being, his life, is threatened in all of these cases, but he embraces the worst evil has to offer as he offers himself to Love’s purposes, and in the process, evil is exhausted, and Love’s purposes are accomplished.
How about the evil symbolized by sinners and outcasts? He goes to eat with them, have dinner in their homes, tell stories, laugh with them, and in the end they are repenting and joining his kingdom mission. All at great cost to his own reputation and ritual righteousness. Jesus embraces the worst evil has to offer as he offers himself to Love’s purposes, and in the process, evil is exhausted, and Love’s purposes are accomplished.
Throughout Jesus’ life, evil threatens, sneers, makes horrible noises – storms, demons, opposition from powerful movers and shakers - but evil always runs out of steam in the face of Jesus’ love, unable to shake him loose from it.
Until finally, on Good Friday, evil makes good on its threats. Going to the cross, Jesus embraces fully and completely the full force of all the world’s evil as he supremely offers himself to Love’s ultimate purposes. And in the process, evil’s power is supremely exhausted, once and for all. And Love’s supreme purposes are supremely accomplished.
Introduce Mark 15:1-38…note major players: Pilate, Jewish leaders, crowd there for Passover, murdering revolutionaries, Roman soldiers. Encourage listeners to see all the different forms of evil colliding together at the cross (arrogance of Rome, corruption of Israel, ugliness of crowd, absence of disciples, shadowy, looming presence of demonic).
Play Mark 15:1-38 slides
Let’s spend the rest of our time today with Jesus in these last hours of his life, when Jesus is completely exposed, and all the evil in the universe has swept over the face of the earth, rushing together to gleefully destroy the very goodness of God.
At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.
This is something different from an eclipse [Passover takes place during a full moon – no solar eclipse possible during full moon]. This darkness is full of mystery and meaning. One of the towering stories in the Bible is the story of Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Often called the “Exodus” story. Prince of Egypt, 10 plagues, Moses, Pharaoh, parting of the Red Sea, etc. The 9th plague is 3 days of pitch darkness covering the land. Mark’s readers are meant to think of that story when they hear of these three hours of darkness. The 9th plague is terrifying enough in its own right, because it is the plague after which the Pharaoh puts all his cards on the table to Moses. “On the day you see my face,” Pharaoh said to Moses, “you will die.” The battle has escalated to the point of ultimatum.
But the real terror, the real horror of the 9th plague is that it immediately precedes the 10th plague. The killing of all the firstborn sons in Egypt. Including the Pharaoh’s firstborn. It is the 10th plague that makes the way for Israel’s exodus from slavery to Egypt. Israel was protected from the plague by the blood of sacrificial lambs on their doorposts – the angel of death passed over them, thus the name of the feast.
Jesus knows that he now is the firstborn who is to die to make the way for humanity’s exodus from slavery to evil. Not the son of the pharaoh, but the son of Man and the Son of God. Humanity has been crushed by the weight of sin and death and evil, and God sends his Son in to take their place, to feel its weight upon his own shoulders and to be crushed by it. To embrace the worst evil has to offer in all its fullness, and to exhaust evil’s power upon him at the cost of his very life. The blood on the doorpost to God’s kingdom is God’s own blood, the true lamb.
And so we hear him say those agonized words, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If there is an answer, we do not hear it on that Good Friday.
When evil is raging, questions abound and answers can be hard to come by. And on that Friday, evil is raging and good. It’s an ugly kind of rage: a drunken rage. Drunk with power, drunk with lust, drunk with arrogant pride, drunk with the certainty of victory, drunk with the blood of the innocent one. No, there might not be nearly as many answers as there are questions on that Friday, but there is one answer.
This is what God is doing about evil. He is coming into its playground. Getting his hands dirty. Getting his knees bloody. He is drawing all of evil’s attention upon himself. He is exposing himself to the fullness of evil’s power, and he is allowing it to exhaust itself upon him.
If we have eyes to see, let us see. The cross is what God is doing about evil. Let us look with holy awe at Jesus upon it. We know the weight of the evil we face in our lives today. On the cross, out of his love for us, he has embraced the full force of that same evil. Evil may huff and puff, and threaten to blow our houses down, but with Jesus’ last breath, he exhausted evil of its power over us. The shadow of darkness in our lives is overshadowed by the shadow of the cross.
Let us put our trust in Jesus as he put his trust in the Father even when it looked as if he was left alone. “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” is a prayer with seeds of hope at its heart, isn’t it? It’s my God. My God. Why have you… Even in the darkness, in the silence, He is ours and we are His. Not even the full force of evil can change that. Even in our confusion, in our frustration, in our blindness, our cry goes to God, because we know that he hears.
And we know that he will act on our behalf. Because there, as Jesus cried out with those words, the answer becomes clear. There on the cross, our words coming from his lips, our words in the face of evil, asked by Jesus on our behalf. And in that moment, the one asking the question for us becomes God’s answer to us. I am your God and you are my people as surely as this beaten and bloodied servant is my Son. I have not forsaken you as surely as my Son has not run from evil. I am near to saving you as surely as my Son is near to death. I am near to the words of your groaning as surely as my Son’s groaning is nearly at an end. [the question answered by the answerer asking it with us…]
Let us look to Jesus, yes, and trust in Jesus, yes, and learn from Jesus, too. Learn what he would teach us as we seek to implement his victory over evil in our lives and in our world. This is the way God’s kingdom is established, and this is how it takes new ground. We offer ourselves to Love’s purposes, embracing whatever Evil might throw at us along the way, in the confident expectation that Evil’s power has already been exhausted. This is why we call it faith, is it not…? A life that requires us to follow Jesus by learning to love Love more than we love our lives.
Practical Tips:
1. Memorize this refrain from Psalm 22, and pray it every day this week as a lament:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from the words of my groaning?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest.
2. For the sake of Love, enter someone’s mess with them, knowing that it will probably be messy for you as well. Not randomly, but because the Spirit is leading you. And stay there until Love’s purposes are accomplished. [personal and/or ministry application]
3. Repent of attachments to your life instead of Love. Have they prevented you – out of fear of Evil’s power to take life from you - from forgiving? From loving your enemies? From showing mercy? From blessing the poor? From praying for the sick? From casting out demons? From announcing good news?
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