Hilton Head Island, SC – December 1, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
John 12:27-41; Matthew 21:33-44
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes?’” – Matthew 21:42 (RSV)
What we choose to believe has consequences. An agreement with Iran regarding nuclear enrichment has great risks. Those who choose to believe it is a mistake will do everything they can to nullify such an agreement. Those who choose to believe it can lead to better things down the line will do everything they can to maintain the agreement. Those who choose to believe Obamacare was a huge error from the beginning will do everything they can to derail it. Those who choose to believe that Obamacare is a vital step toward health care for all Americans will do whatever they can to support it, despite the very serious problems it has had in being implemented. In the past several days we have seen that those who choose to believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy tend to be more supportive of government in general, while those who choose to believe there was a conspiracy tend to distrust government. What we choose to believe always has consequences. And often, perhaps always, belief is a matter of choice; it is not a “given” or a requirement for anyone.
There is no question that the theological victors in the Early Church chose to believe that God foreordained that Jesus of Nazareth should end up on a cross. Many people did not agree with that conclusion, but early on they lost out in the debate, and they passed into theological oblivion. By about the year 400 it had become the orthodox position that the crucifixion of Jesus was a foregone divine necessity, because by it God intended to save all the people who chose to believe that is the purpose for which the cross was divinely foreordained. Without the crucifixion salvation for anyone was impossible. However, believing that was a theological necessity.
Most Christian hymns which focus on Good Friday declare the universality of what became the Christian position regarding the crucifixion of Jesus. “Content to let the world go by/ To know no gain nor loss/ My sinful self my only shame/ My glory all the cross.” “Who was the guilty?/ Who brought this upon Thee?/ Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone Thee/ ‘Twas I. Lord Jesus, I it was denied Thee/ I crucified Thee.” “What Thou, my Lord, has suffered/ Was all for sinners’ gain/ Mine, mine was the transgression/ But Thine the deadly pain.” “See from His head, His hands, His feet/ Sorrow and love flow mingled down/ Did e’er such love and sorrow meet/ Or thorns compose so rich a crown?” In other words, Jesus was sacrificed on our behalf.
Today I am beginning a four-part series of sermons called A Reverse Retrospective on the Life of Jesus. We will work backwards from the crucifixion of Jesus to his birth in Bethlehem, and that last sermon will be delivered on the Sunday before Christmas. But the question in all of these sermons will be this: Why did the life of Jesus commence as it did? What were some of the historical factors, looking back, which resulted in Jesus dying on a cross? Did God intend the crucifixion from before the foundation of the world, or did it become inevitable because of human factors over which God chose to take no control?
According to the Gospel of John, on the day before the Last Supper, it had become painfully evident that many of the people of Judea did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. But Jesus insisted this was to fulfill what the prophet Isaiah had said: “Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? …He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they should see with their eyes and perceive with their heart, and turn for me to heal them” (John 12:38,40). In other words, God deliberately prevented most people from believing in Jesus, so that a few others would believe in him. If you find that hard to believe, you’re not alone.
It says in Matthew’s Gospel that a day or two before the crucifixion, Jesus told a parable about a man who owned a vineyard. Just before the harvest of the grapes, the owner sent his servants into the vineyard to get the grape harvest from the tenants who were caring for the vineyard. But the tenants beat one of the owner’s servants, stoned another, and killed a third. He sent other servants, and the same thing happened. Then he sent his own son, saying surely the tenants would not harm his own son. But they killed the son as well.
The point of this parable is crystal clear, at least to early Christians who read it many years after the crucifixion. God’s Son was murdered by wicked people. Matthew strongly suggests that Jesus knew this would happen, because Matthew had Jesus quote Isaiah, who said, “The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” Both Matthew and John go out of their way to cite verses from the Hebrew Bible which they believed foretold the death of Jesus by crucifixion.
Now you need to pay close attention to a theological warning. What I am going to be saying this morning is not the ecclesiastically orthodox understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus. Furthermore, I am going to be saying something about the nature of God which is a minority opinion in Christianity, but which has never been rejected altogether by the mainstream Church, whatever that term might mean to anyone.
First to the minority opinion. For a number of reasons I shall neither enumerate nor specify, I do not believe it is possible to verify that God intervenes directly in the lives of any human beings, including Jesus of Nazareth. I hasten to add that I believe He could intervene if He chose to do so, but for reasons known essentially to Him alone, He does not choose to do so.
As an illustration of this concept, let me give you an illustration. One day an atheist was out in a beautiful mountainside forest in Yellowstone National Park. He was struck by the beauties of nature --- the trees, the animals, the rock formations, the color of the sky. Suddenly a huge grizzly bear loomed up in front of him. He began running down hill as fast as he could go, but the bear kept gaining on him. He gave it his all, but he tripped on a root, and sprawled in a heap, unable to move. The bear was on him in a flash, heavily pinning him down with one front paw, and raising up the other to strike him senseless.
“O God, help me!” the atheist said. Instantaneously the bear became motionless, and the forest became absolutely silent. A bright light appeared, and from the light the atheist heard a voice. “You deny my existence all these years, teach others I don’t exist, say creation is a cosmic accident, and now do you expect me to consider you a believer?” “Well,” said the terrified hiker, “it would be hypocritical to treat me like a Christian, God, but would you mind turning the bear into a Christian?” “Very well,” said the voice from the light, whereupon the light disappeared, the forest sounds returned, and the bear began to move again. He sat back on his haunches, put his paws together, and intoned, “Lord, in the name of Jesus Christ, bless the food I am about to receive from Thy bounty. Amen.”
God doesn’t act like that. God never acts like that. Some of us think He intervenes in the world, but if so, it cannot be irrefutably authenticated. God’s providence is active in the world at all times, but providence does not connote divine intervention. Providence means that God uses human decisions and choices for His own purposes. Even terrible choices can turn out well providentially. Walking alone in Yellowstone with no means of fending off wild creatures is unwise, and may end in disaster. God is always there in such situations, but He doesn’t miraculously intercede to set things aright. Whether Ursus horribilis would do what grizzlies normally do or walk away from a very appealing dinner I leave for you to decide for yourselves.
This is not to deny that there are mysterious occurrences for which there is no earthly explanation. For example a very fine lady I have known for a number of years recently died. He daughter told me that on the day she died, a nurse came into her room in the nursing home to check on her. There was no one in the room, but she was talking to someone. “To whom were you talking?” the nurse asked her. “I was talking to Jesus.” The nurse’s face lit up, and she hugged the elderly lady. The lady smiled, closed her eyes --- and died. Her son told the daughter that he had a photograph of their mother hanging on a wall in the upper hallway of his home. One morning he noticed that her face was somehow illuminated in the photograph, although the sun did not and could not shine on the picture, nor was there a light on in the hallway. The son was mystified by this, and had no explanation. The next day their mother died.
To my way of thinking, there can be no rational account for either of those episodes. I am certain that neither the nurse nor the woman’s son fabricated the stories; why would they? How could they? These things happened, and we alone can decide whether they illustrate divine intervention. They may, or they may not, but there is no proof either way.
Did Jesus choose to believe that his crucifixion was foreordained by God? In the main, the Gospels clearly suggest that he did, and certainly Paul believed that he did. I am agnostic about that, which means I don’t know whether Jesus believed his death on a cross had always been divinely decided. Nevertheless, I personally do not believe, nor can I believe, that in fact God did make such an incomprehensible decision, or at least it is incomprehensible to me. Jesus was not born specifically so that he would die on a cross. He did not name twelve disciples to go out preaching that he was bound to die, nor did Jesus attack the wrong-headed theology of his theological enemies, knowing that it would send them into a such a religious frenzy they would see that he was crucified. You are not obligated to choose to believe what I believe, but I feel obligated to tell you what I choose to believe, knowing that it is at odds with the mainstream of Christian theology from about the year 300 on. God did not determine the crucifixion; history and events and the Romans and the theological enemies of Jesus determined his death.
The cross does not save us. God saves us. God alone can save us. However, many and perhaps most Christians choose to believe that somehow, in some ultimately inexplicable fashion, Jesus is God. A belief that God foreordained the crucifixion would therefore seem to validate that belief.
Here is how I understand the death of Jesus on a cross. In the providence of God, God used an act of unjust cruelty against an innocent man to turn the hearts of billions of people over the next two thousand years to come to Him, to God. That, after all, is what Jesus preached with such zeal. Through a willingness not to try to avoid the cross, Jesus chose to proclaim that the cross demonstrates God’s love for us: not Jesus’ love for us (although the cross does that as well), but God’s love. God will go to any end to convince us of His love, and the life and especially death of Jesus of Nazareth is the verification of that truth, for those who choose to believe it. Jesus overarching concern was about God, not about himself.
If Jesus lived as forcefully and as faithfully as the Gospels tell us he did, there was almost no way he could have averted being killed for his unorthodox and, to the thinking of many of his critics, unpalatable convictions. The cross was inevitable, not because God willed it, but because Jesus’ courageous challenge to the world order of the 1st century or the 21st century rendered his execution a virtual certainty. There are always some people who are so opposed to charismatic reformers that they will see to it they are silenced. If you need verification, think about Thomas a’ Becket or Joan of Arc or Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X. Often it is extremist religious or political people who orchestrate such killings.
To be a Christian requires the affirmation of the exceedingly awkward reality that Jesus was a radical reformer --- not a meek and mild, gentle reformer, but a radical one. Meek and mild reformers never get killed. It happens only to truly revolutionary reformers, but fortunately, not even to the vast majority of them.
Christians are really Jesus Jews in Christian rather than Jewish religious trappings. Probably Jesus would be unhappy that we are considered Christians. He meant to make Gentiles Jews, and to turn 1st century Jews into radically reformed Jews, but it didn’t turn out that way.
Ironically, it is fitting that the congregation of The Chapel Without Walls should be holding its services in Congregation Beth Yam, because both congregations are Jews, although Jews of very different sorts. However, neither the Beth Yam folks nor most of us would likely agree with that assessment. Nevertheless, as I have said previously, Christians are Gentile Jews.
If there is any truth to this collection of thoughts at all, they may be a major factor for explaining the death of Jesus. It is a terrible calumny to declare that “the Jews crucified Jesus.” “The Jews” no more killed Jesus than did “the Hindus” kill Gandhi or “the Christians” kill King or “the Muslims” kill Malcolm X. Furthermore, no Jews in the 1st century had the political power or authority to send Jesus to the cross. Only the Romans could do that. And the group of Jews who supported Jesus’ execution were a very small and extreme percentage of the total population of Judea. Saying Jews killed Jesus back then is like saying that “Christians” oppose same-sex marriage and abortion under all circumstances. Some Christians do take that position, but most of them would not commit murder to uphold their position. Furthermore, to imply that everyone in any religion all share the same thoughts is deliberately to vilify the entire religion.
But why did Jesus create such animosity among a small but powerful percentage of the contemporary Jews of his time? That we will explore next Sunday. It explains why such dedicated believers were so enraged by a man who, at the same time, was radically committed to both non-violence and to a fierce challenge of the religious and social status quo.
Was Jesus’ crucifixion foreordained by God? Many Christians choose to believe it was, but others do not accept that explanation. In any case, the crucifixion was an historical reality, and the historical currents which resulted in it shall forever be debated by people of faith who have differing views on both the theology and the history of the cross. Whatever individually we conclude, all of us shall forever stand beneath the cross of Jesus.