What Wondrous Love!

 What Wondrous Love!

Mark 15:1-47[1]

Love is a mystery. It’s wonderful and painful. It can bring out the best and the worst in us. We long for love and yet at the same time we are at least a little afraid of it (or maybe a lot!). Hopefully, all of us at some time in our lives have someone who embodies the best of love. They love us “just because,” without any conditions, exclusions, or limitations. And they keep loving us that way for as long as they’re a part of our lives, no matter where we go or what we do. Unfortunately, one of the greatest tragedies in this life is the fact that some of us never get to experience that kind of love from another human being.

It’s not the same thing, but I think that recognizing the love of God expressed for us by Jesus Christ can help us here. The Bible speaks of God’s “unfailing love” long before Jesus was born. But I think in Jesus our Savior we see just how far that love extends. There is no place we can go in this life where we are excluded from God’s love. Wherever we may find ourselves, even the most hopeless places, God has already been there in Jesus Christ to pave the way back to his love. In truth, even the love of those people who have loved us so wonderfully is “complicated” by their humanity. That means all of us will come to the place in life where we must look to God’s love to sustain us, because his is the only love that truly never fails.

I see that unconditional, unlimited, and irrevocable love displayed in the story of Jesus’ experience of being arrested, tried, beaten, mocked, and crucified. Our Gospel lesson for today includes it all. And one thing that amazes me is the fact that Jesus—who was fully human and subject to our physical limitations—endured that whole ordeal out of his unwavering resolve to carry out God’s saving purpose for us fully. When I think about all that he went through over the course of about 18 hours that day, it’s overwhelming. It’s hard for me to grasp that Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior willingly subjected himself to it all out of his commitment to be “obedient to the point of death” (Phil. 2:8).

I thought we might walk through the events of that day in order to have a better sense of all that Jesus endured. Prior to our lesson, Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane. His prayer revealed his anguish about what was about to happen to him. And to get an idea of the emotional and physical toll of the stress he felt over what he knew was coming, Luke’s Gospel tells us he was sweating profusely as he prayed. He felt the dread that any person would feel when faced with impending trauma.

That evening, Jesus was arrested and taken before some of the Jewish religious leaders, where he was interrogated all night. He was bound and was subjected to constant questioning. Mark’s gospel tells us he was assaulted by the false accusations of “many” lying witnesses. That takes its toll emotionally and physically. Finally, at daybreak, they sent him off to Pontius Pilate, the Roman official who was governing the province of Judea.  We don’t know how long this interrogation lasted, but it seems that he endured more verbal attacks from his accusers for several hours. Remember that Jesus had been up all night, and the last food he had eaten was the evening before.

After that, Pilate brought Jesus and a rebel named Barabbas before the crowd, both of them bound as criminals. Perhaps he may have even recognized the faces of some of the people who had shouted, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” when he had entered Jerusalem a few days earlier (Mk 11:9). But now they were shouting, “Crucify him!” So Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified and had him beaten. Jesus was “scourged” with a whip made of leather straps to which were attached nails, glass, or rocks. Some who were “scourged” didn’t survive the beating. At this point, the soldiers who were going to crucify him staged a “mock coronation” for him as the “king of the Jews.” They struck him, they spat on him, and they placed a crown of thorns on his head.

Finally, they took Jesus to crucify him. He had endured the physical and emotional stress of no sleep, no food, and a constant barrage of verbal assaults. He was literally beaten to within an inch of his life. It’s no wonder he couldn’t carry the crossbeam they laid on him! One detail that sticks out to me is, after all that, Jesus still had the presence of mind to refuse the mixture of wine and myrrh that was intended to ease his pain. After all he had endured to this point, his determination to fulfill God’s saving purpose completely remained resolute. He was “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). After reading the full story, I think that may be something of an understatement!

When I stop to really think about all this, I find myself overwhelmed: I grieve to know that Jesus went through all of this for me. I’m humbled by his unflinching commitment. But perhaps most of all, I’m amazed by the love that I believe was behind it all, motivating him to endure everything he suffered for our sakes. As our affirmation of faith says it, “there is no sorrow he has not known, no grief he has not borne, and no price he was unwilling to pay” to enable us to know the unconditional, unlimited, and irrevocable love of God. All I can say in response is, “What wondrous love”![2]

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[1] © 2021 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm, Ph. D. on 3/28/2021 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 277: “There is no loneliness and no rejection which [God] has not taken to himself and assumed in the cross of Jesus.”

The Glory of God

The Glory of God

John 12:20-33[1]

From the days when our culture re-discovered the worth and value of the individual, we have had a hard time viewing reality apart from our own point of view. We perceive most of our reality from that perspective. I’m not passing judgment on that mindset. It’s simply the way we have learned to function in our culture. There are benefits and weaknesses to any way of looking at human life. Focusing on the individual can lead people to great achievements that benefit everyone. But it can also lead us into the pitfall of filtering everything through the lens of “What does this mean for me?”

We do this with our faith as much as the rest of our lives. We hear the lofty promises of Scripture about the kingdom of God and eternal life that can be hard for us to wrap our heads around, and we simplify them into a rather mundane system by which “I” get to go to heaven when I die. We take everything that God has done from creation to salvation, and we turn it into the notion that God is somehow “peddling” tickets to eternity. The grand scope of God’s amazing grace and unfailing love become a simple “transaction”: God making salvation available through Jesus, and we come up to the “counter” and “do” our part in order to complete the deal. It’s a perspective that makes what God is doing in our world incredibly trivial, but it’s the perspective that has dominated the thinking of believers for centuries.

In contrast with that way of thinking, I believe our Gospel lesson for today points us to a much bigger vision of what God is doing in our world. There is a great deal of irony in this section of John’s Gospel. After Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead in John 11, the Jewish leaders became increasingly worried about how their “whole world” was turning to him, meaning the Jewish world. And into that setting walk two “Greeks” seeking Jesus. The irony is that while they were wringing their hands about their power over the Jewish people, there was a much bigger world that was turning to Jesus!

In response to the appearance of these Greeks, Jesus declares that “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (12:23). Prior to this point in John’s Gospel, there is an emphasis on the fact that Jesus’ “hour had not yet come.” Something about the appearance of these “Greeks” leads Jesus to determine that his “hour” had indeed come. This theme in John’s Gospel signifies that Jesus has a sense that his mission and ministry are heading toward a conclusion. That conclusion is defined here, as elsewhere in the Gospel, as being “lifted up.” In John’s Gospel, that refers not only to Jesus’ being “lifted up” on a cross, but also to his being “lifted up” by being raised to life again, and his being “lifted up” by ascending to the glory he had with the Father from the beginning.

Since his “hour” has come, Jesus expresses a very understandable concern—his soul is “troubled” and he wonders whether to ask the Father to save him. Although the scene is similar to Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, here Jesus expresses his resolve to glorify the Father in all that he does, even by his death. And Jesus is answered by a “voice from heaven:” “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (Jn. 12:27). The focus of Jesus’ ministry in John’s Gospel has been glorifying the Father. The implication here seems to be that as Jesus glorifies the Father, the Father will glorify Jesus through his death, resurrection, and ascension.

The whole point of what Jesus does in his life and in his death is to glorify God. And in response, God promises to glorify Jesus. In truth, this is purpose and goal of the God’s whole project in the Bible from the beginning of creation to the fulfillment of salvation. In one respect, it’s not primarily about us at all; rather, it’s about the glory of God, which is revealed as his grace, mercy, and love are fulfilled throughout all creation. But, of course, this takes place as Jesus is “lifted up” in order to draw “all people” into that grace, mercy, and love. The glory of God is fully revealed when all people and all creation are set free to live in the love of God.

God’s whole saving endeavor is about more than just the fate of individuals. It’s about the fate of the whole creation! We will see the glory of God fulfilled when the whole world of humanity is restored to share the love that binds together the Father, Son, and Spirit. We will see the glory of God fulfilled when the whole realm of nature is healed so that all life can thrive together. We will see the glory of God fulfilled when the whole created cosmos comes together to accomplish the purpose for which God made it in the first place: to serve as a beautiful demonstration of the grace and mercy and love of God.[2]

The framework of what God is doing in this world is much bigger than the destiny of any one individual. In a very real sense, this framework is defined by the Lord’s prayer: that God’s name would be honored throughout the whole creation, that God’s grace and mercy and love would reign over all things, and that God’s “will” that all people share the bond of love that unites Father, Son, and Spirit would be fulfilled. The glory of God is not just some ethereal presence that happens in a dream. It’s a very real purpose that involves the restoration and renewal of all things and all people. When that happens, then God’s glory will be fulfilled.

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[1]  ©2021 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm, Ph. D. on 3/21/2021 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 209-222.

True Worship of God

 True Worship of God 

John 2:13-22[1]

Religion can be wonderful, and it can also be oppressive. And in both cases, those who practice their religion believe they are being “true” to God. Part of this is due to our human nature. As Bill Moyers famously observed, “we all know that religion has a healing side. But we also know it has a killing side.”[2] All the major religions in the world—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and even Christianity—have led their follows on “crusades” to kill in the name of “God.” It is a sad commentary on our capacity to completely distort even that which is intended to bring out the best in us.

If you’ve been reading the Bible with us this year, you know that there are some unsettling contents in some places. Whole books of the Bible are devoted to a concern for religious purity that is rigid and exclusive. In some places there is almost an obsession with what is “clean” and what is “unclean.” What drove that obsession was the belief that they had to keep what is holy separate from what is common. The result was a system of boundaries that feels very rigid and exclusive. It doesn’t sound much like the image of God we find in Jesus, who not only welcomed sinners, but also sought them out!

Right at the heart of the Jewish religion in Jesus’ day stood the Temple. It was a massive edifice that was built as a monument to the separation between the “holy” and the “common.” It literally set in stone the idea that ordinary people like you and me could only approach God’s presence through an officially designated priest. Our Gospel lesson for today has all of this in the background. It tells the story of how Jesus drove out of the temple courts those who were exchanging money and selling sacrificial animals.

The reason this market even existed at the Temple was that Jewish pilgrims came from all over the Mediterranean world to worship at Jerusalem. They could not bring with them sacrificial animals that had to be “without blemish” in order to offer them at the Temple. So first they had to exchange their Roman denarii or their Greek drachmae for the Temple Shekel. The problem with this was that it was taking place in what was known as “the Court of the Gentiles.” Essentially, the Temple was a series of “courtyards” that surrounded the “sanctuary” where God’s presence was believed to reside. The outermost courtyard was “the Court of the Gentiles.” This was the only place non-Jewish people could come to worship the one true and living God, and the Jewish religious leaders had allowed it to become a “marketplace”!

But there was a deeper problem than that. Like the prophets before him—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos—Jesus would not accept worship that consisted of “going through the motions.” I think that’s what we’re meant to hear when John tells us that Jesus did this out of his “zeal” for the true worship of God. The worship God seeks from us has always been something that changes our lives. In fact, Jesus will say later in this Gospel that “the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. … the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (Jn. 4:21, 23). That kind of “true worship of God” will leave its mark on the way a person lives.

While the other Gospels tell a different story about Jesus cleansing the Temple, they all seem to wind up in the same place. The Temple, with its elaborate system of sacrifices, and with its very structure reinforcing the notion that people had to keep their distance from God, would no longer be the focal point for the “true worship” of God. In one sense, Jesus’ very presence and his ministry had already begun this process. Instead of the idea that one could only approach God at a particular place, and at a particular time, and in a particular way, Jesus made it clear that God’s presence is available to all people, priests and commoners, men and women, Jewish and gentile, “righteous” and “sinners” alike.

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for those of us who seek to follow Jesus today to get caught up in some of the same limiting notions about God as the people of that day. In our concern for moral purity, we can become critical, rigid, and exclusive instead of welcoming and embracing all people in the name of Jesus. Those of us who have spent our whole lives in the church can easily develop an attitude that “despises” those who are “outside” the church.

But we cannot embrace the death, resurrection, ascension, and reign of the living Christ without recognizing that it has created a fundamental shift in the way we understand how to worship God.[3] The “true worship of God” should lead us to so deeply encounter God’s grace, mercy, and love, that we cannot help but share what we have received with all others, regardless of who they are or how they live. When we "truly" worship God, it will show up in the way we treat others.

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[1] © 2021 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm, Ph. D. on 3/7/2021 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] “Bill Moyers and Salman Rushdie,” interview for Bill Moyers On Faith & Reason, June 23, 2006, accessed on 4 Mar 2021 at https://www.pbs.org/moyers/ faithandreason/print/faithandreason101_print.html

[3] Cf. George R. Beasley-Murray, John, p. 39, where he says that Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple “provides a vital clue for grasping the nature and the course of our Lord’s work, his words and actions, his death and resurrection, and the outcome of it all in a new worship of God, born out of a new relation to God in and through the crucified-risen Christ.”