Can’t We Talk About Something Else?

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

February 14, 2016

First Sunday in Lent

Can’t We Talk About Something Else?

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

When I came to you, brothers and sisters,

I did not come proclaiming

the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom.

For I decided to know nothing among you

except Jesus Christ,

and him crucified.

And I came to you in weakness and in fear

and in much trembling.

My speech and my proclamation were not

with plausible words of wisdom,

but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power,

so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom

but on the power of God.

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If we had screens here in the Sanctuary,

I would put an image up on them,

the way I do regularly

in my Wednesday morning Bible Study class,

an image of a painting,

a magnificent painting done 500 years ago,

part of an altarpiece created

for a monastery in France.

It is called the Isenheim Altarpiece

and it is actually a combination of

sculpture and painting,

large, and profoundly visceral,

even when you see it on a computer screen.

The main image in the center of the altarpiece

is a painting,

a painting of our Lord Jesus Christ,

a painting of Christ nailed to the cross.

The artist, Mathias Grunewald,

captured the horror of the crucifixion

in a way that I think eluded many other artists.

It is painful to look at the image of our Lord

his body broken, limp, lifeless.

Most churches of the Reformed tradition

don’t use scenes of the crucifixion.

In Protestant churches like ours,

the cross that hangs in the Sanctuary,

or on walls in offices and classrooms,

is empty,

reflecting our focus on the risen Christ,

the Christ of the resurrection,

the living Christ.

Go into a Roman Catholic Church, though,

or churches of some other denominations,

and you will see the crucified Christ:

Christ nailed to the cross,

Christ dead on the cross;

The Good Friday Christ,

rather than the Easter Christ.

Both depictions are correct,

both biblical,

and both appropriate.

In fact, both are necessary,

powerful reminders of our Lord’s death,

and our Lord’s resurrection;

of what happened on Good Friday,

as well as what happened on that first Easter.

Still, we have a tendency to skip over

the Good Friday Christ,

the Christ of the crucifix,

the Christ on the cross.

But we shouldn’t.

Artwork – paintings, sculptures,

works like the Isenheim altarpiece,

force us to stop, look, think,

take it in:

the Christ Paul preached,

the crucified Christ.

The cross for us is now a

symbol of the power of Christ,

but back in Jesus’ day

it was a symbol of death,

of degradation.

There was no more horrible way to die,

no more humiliating way to be executed,

than to be hung on the Roman executioner’s

favorite tool,

the tool used for the worst criminals,

“escaped slaves

or rebels against the Roman empire.”

(Moltmann, 33)

The hill called Golgotha

on the west side of Jerusalem

was lined with crosses,

a grim reminder to anyone

coming into the city from the west

that Jerusalem was in the iron grip

of the Roman empire,

and that obedience to Rome without question

was the wisest, safest road to walk.

The odiousness of the cross did not stop there;

for a Jew to be hung on the cross

was also to be cursed,

the words of scripture so painfully clear:

“anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse”

(Deuteronomy 21:23)

It was on such a cross,

on such a cursed tree,

that our Lord was nailed,

that our Lord was hung;

it was on such a cross that our Lord died.

Can’t we change the subject?

Can’t we talk about something lighter,

more pleasant?

It’s a cold winter’s day;

can’t we talk about something

that will warm us?

No.

Paul didn’t.

He didn’t tell his listeners in Corinth

that he was there to tell them about Jesus

as their “personal Lord and Savior;”

as the one who was going to

open the floodgates of abundance to them.

No – we heard Paul:

“For I decided to know nothing among you

except Jesus Christ,

and him crucified.”

We can change the subject…

but not until after Lent.

Lent is the time when we should

walk with our Lord to Jerusalem,

take every painful step,

including the walk to Golgotha,

the walk to the cross.

Even pastors find it much more appealing

to leap from the exuberant

Hosannas of Palm Sunday

to the joyful alleluias of Easter.

But we cannot get to the alleluias of Easter

without going through Good Friday,

without letting the sounds of Hosanna fade

to be replaced by the shouts of

“Crucify! Crucify!”

We cannot get to Easter

without coming face to face with

the abhorrent reality of the crucifixion.

We must face the reality that our Lord died,

as the Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge has written,

“horribly,

rejected and condemned

by religious and secular authorities alike,

discarded onto the garbage heap of humanity,

scornfully forsaken by both

elites and common folk,”

(“The Crucifixion”)

The cross troubles us,

confounds us,

unnerves us,

unsettles us.

Why did our Lord have to die such a horrible death?

Why did Jesus have to be the fulfilment

of the words of the prophet:

“By a perversion of justice he was taken away.

…For he was cut off from the land of the living,

…They made his grave with the wicked

…although he had done no violence,

and there was no deceit in his mouth.”

(Isaiah 53:8ff)

As God reminds us,

“My thoughts are not your thoughts

nor are your ways my ways…

for as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

(Isaiah 55:8)

We’ll never know the mind of God.

But what we can understand is that

the cross was the decisive turning point

in human history,

an end as sure and certain

as when God brought the rains in Noah’s day.

Only this time,

God didn’t scrub the world of sinful humans.

Instead, God scrubbed the world of sinfulness,

by taking on humanity’s sin himself

in the form of his Son on the cross.

The crucifixion revealed the callowness,

the shallowness,

the sheer hypocrisy of what

was called religion,

of faith practices,

and not just of those who were the leaders,

but of all the people.

The crucifixion cast a bright light

on God’s words through the prophet Isaiah:

“these people draw near with their mouths

and honor me with their lips,

while their hearts are far from me,
and their worship of me

is a human commandment learned by rote;”

(Isaiah 29:13)

Through the cross,

God’s children were

forgiven their callowness,

their shallowness,

their hypocrisy –

and called to new life.

And it is no different for us,

even two thousand years later:

through the crucifixion,

we too are forgiven

our callowness, our shallowness,

our hypocrisy,

and called to new life.

Paul puts this new life squarely before us,

so we will not misunderstand:

“How can we who died to sin

go on living in it?

Do you not know that all of us

who have been baptized into Christ Jesus

were baptized into his death?

Therefore we have been buried with him

by baptism into death,

so that, just as Christ was

raised from the dead

by the glory of the Father,

so we too might walk in newness of life.”

(Romans 6:2-4)

And this new life calls us

not to a life of consumerism,

materialism,

not to indulge ourselves

in endless, resolute ideological fulminations,

not to be puffed up with pride,

or walk through life indifferent

to the needs of those we don’t call friends,

but to live as Christ did,

the Christ “who,

though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross.

(Philippians 2:6-8)

This is the Christ we are called to follow,

the Christ who says to us,

“If any want to become my followers,

let them deny themselves

and take up their cross and follow me.”

(Mark 8:34)

The Christ who shakes us

to the bottom of our sandy foundations

with his words,

“For those who want to save their life

will lose it,

and those who lose their life for my sake,

and for the sake of the gospel

will save it.”

(Mark 8:35)

This is the Christ Paul knew.

This is the Christ Paul followed.

This is the Christ Paul preached.

This is the Christ Paul calls us to join him in following:

humble,

obedient,

a man, fully human,

who lived not for glory,

or for honor,

or for riches,

or even comfort,

but for compassion,

goodness,

for mercy, for love,

the Christ who broke down barriers

as reached out to all,

but especially the outcast.

The theologian Jurgen Moltmann has observed,

“the symbol of the cross in the church

points to the God who was crucified

not between two candles on an altar,

but between two thieves

in the place of the skull,

where outcasts belong,

outside the gates of the city.”

(Moltmann 40)

This is the Christ we are called to follow.

As you begin your Lenten journey,

walk with Christ,

all the way to Golgotha,

making Paul’s words your own:

“I have been crucified with Christ;

and it is no longer I who live,

but it is Christ who lives in me.

And the life I now live in the flesh

I live by faith in the Son of God,

who loved me and gave himself for me.”

(Galatians 2:19-20)

AMEN