Sermon Audio
The Twenty-first Sunday After Trinity
St. John 17:1-26
“They Crucified Him”
“They crucified Him.”
The passion narratives do go on, but the evangelists spare the paint when providing the picture of the act of execution itself. They tell us virtually nothing of the attaching, if you will, of Christ to the cross: “They crucified Him.”
As we arrive at Jesus’ high-priestly prayer in John 17 we must fill in the blank. The prayer begins and ends with glory, and we will not grasp the glory of the Lord unless we first get the shame of the cross.
(Read text.)
The Romans did not invent the hideous practice of crucifixion. The Persians had used it, as had the Macedonian Alexander the Great and others. No one, however, pursued it with more proficiency and enthusiasm than the Romans.
The first-century Jewish historian Josephus relates that during the siege of Jerusalem the Romans scourged and tortured hundreds of Jewish prisoners and then crucified them opposite the city walls. The commander Titus, trying to leverage this ghastly scene to bring about a surrender of the city, allowed his troops to turn the executions into a sport
.
Josephus writes, “The soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different positions . . .”
In truth, as in the gospels, we find little about the mechanics of crucifixion in non-biblical sources. It appears the cultured elite who wrote history didn’t care to dirty their hands with accounts of so revolting a practice.
We do know that the Romans subjected their own citizens to crucifixion only rarely, reserving it for a few heinous crimes including high treason and a relative few persons from the lowest classes. Most who hung from a cross were rebellious slaves, common criminals and mutinous soldiers.
And so the first wave of shame came in being selected to die in this way in the first place. If you were crucified, you must have been beneath contempt.
The executioners compounded the humiliation in every imaginable way. One commentator has applied the rather clinical term “status degradation ritual.”
They chose heavily traveled highways to make the display as public as possible. Passers-by lavished rivers of ridicule on the one affixed to a stake, tree or cross. The executioners usually stripped the offender naked. They pierced no vital organs and caused no inordinate bleeding, ensuring the slowest and most painful death. The pinioning of hands and feet signified loss of power, and not solely in symbolic terms.
The greatest artists have not captured the horror of the cross in all its grotesqueness. The crucifixion ground was a place of blood . . . screams . . . sweat . . . vomit . . . and excrement. Bodies were left on their crosses to rot or to provide food for scavenging birds. This was the way of the cross.
The Jews never practiced crucifixion. Stacked on top of the horror of it for other subject peoples was for them a deeply theological concern arising from Deuteronomy 21(:22-23) regarding the execution of one who is hanged on a tree, specifically that “he who is hanged is accursed of God.”
He who violated God’s law lived as though God did not exist or did not matter. In effect, he cursed God. His body, then, did not incur God’s curse because it hung on a tree; it hung on a tree because the man had brought God’s curse down upon him.
For the Jew, excommunication from the covenant people was the ultimate penalty, and death by hanging on a tree under God’s curse was the ultimate form of excommunication. There was no return.
For the first-century Jew, in consequence, the cross could not be a symbol of resistance against the oppressor, a token of martyrdom. It spoke of nothing but shame.
And it became the springboard our Lord chose for His ascent to glory.
"I have glorified You on the earth. I have finished the work which You have given Me to do. And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”
Again, we need some background. In the ancient world glory, the opposite of shame, was little short of an obsession. The Greek word is “doxa,” from which we get “doxology,” which is formed by linking “doxa” with “logos,” word. The doxology is the word of glory we offer our Father as we present our alms and oblations to Him.
The original meaning of “doxa” was “opinion,” a good reputation or renown. It was tied closely to the word for honor, referring to a distinguished quality apparent in a man.
In the Greek translation of the Old Testament doxa takes on a technical definition, either the honor the worshipper accorded God or the “majesty and eminence which radiated from God’s own being” (Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels 269).
The Israelites could not see God but they could apprehend His glory as fire or light. This glory took up residence in the tabernacle and then in Solomon’s temple, Israel’s special privilege.
To enjoy God’s presence was to enjoy His glory . . . but it could and would depart, as when Eli’s sons lost the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines.
The Hebrew word is “kabod.” Eli’s grandson was named Ichabod, “no glory.” God’s glory had departed.
But it would not remain absent from the creation. The prophet Ezekiel (39:21) foretold that in the last days the glory of Yahweh would appear on earth – this time visibly and tangibly – and convert the gentiles.
So it was that old Simeon rejoiced in the temple at the Incarnation: "Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, According to Your word; for my eyes have seen Your salvation which You have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of Your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32).
The glory of God had appeared in Israel once more . . . in Jesus Christ.
This glory comes blazing through in St. John’s account more vividly than anywhere else in the gospels. He uses the word “doxa” and its cognate verb more times than the three synoptic evangelists combined.
The Old Testament sense of it continues but the focus shifts to the glory of Christ, as in this prayer, in which Jesus petitions the Father to restore Him to the glory He enjoyed on high before the world began.
In the synoptics Christ’s glory remains veiled but in John it is revealed. He trumpets in his first chapter: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth (v. 14).”
The Christ makes manifest this glory in His life and in His work, but He does not stop there, for His work continues upon the cross, that shaft of shame. As the realization settles in among the New Testament authors that this Jesus Christ was truly the Son of God, they bind up His glory with His divinity.
Among the four evangelists, it is up to John, who wrote last, to review the life of Christ and weave the gleaming strand of glory into it. Jesus made God’s glory manifest in the world as He revealed the Father through His work . . . in His miracles, yes, but also by His death, that most epic revelation of His glory.
In the fourth gospel, crucifixion is glorification – a means of transport to the realm of glory as in the synoptics, true, but more than that in itself a blinding manifestation of the glory of God.
“They crucified Him.”
And, unwittingly, they glorified Him.
We can be more specific about the how of it. To the Jews crushed under the Roman heel by crucifixion before and after Him, no honor attached. But as the church lurched toward the staggering truth that this carpenter’s son was indeed God, the sacrificial character of His death came into focus and Jesus became not only a martyr but the Martyr par excellence.
Martyrdom exalts. Anyone who believes Mr. Lincoln attracted universal love and affection during his presidency can disabuse himself of that flawed notion by visiting his presidential library and museum in Springfield, Ill. Even in many quarters in the North, men reviled him.
But as soon as the assassin’s shot slammed home, as soon as the president breathed his last, a man emerged from the death chamber and said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s war secretary, had done little to conceal his distaste for a man he found uncouth and even crude, but when he looked down at the lanky corpse tears welled up and he said, “There lies the greatest ruler of men the world has ever seen.” Martyrdom exalts.
Glory attached to the completion of the Lord’s work. God, the evangelist tells us, “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
St. John could not have made that claim had Jesus stopped short of the cross. The love of God would have been inadequate to the salvation of men. Jesus did not stop short.
He won glory by perfecting His obedience in His death. His first reason for living was in His dying. Submission to the Father’s will had been far from easy to this point, but nothing He had done until now compared to this ultimate pouring out of Himself.
He would gain great glory in His resurrection and ascension, neither of which would have been possible absent the crucifixion. And, yes, the cross was His catapult to that greatest glory, the restoration of His place at His Father’s side.
The cross a place of shame? Indeed, for you or me . . . but for our sinless Lord it became the altar on which He consecrated His death. To consecrate is to set apart for a holy purpose, and what purpose could be more holy than to do what man could not do for himself, erase the stain of sin from the creation, and from each soul?
And in this act He consecrated His disciples, then and now, for a life of unity and mission.
This prayer is an interlude in John’s passion narrative. We have examined the betrayal of Lazarus, the Last Supper and the farewell discourse. We will come next to our Lord’s arrest, trial and execution.
But first we must pause to listen to this prayer. He addresses it to His Father but His disciples are invited to sit in. He is drawing nigh to taking His leave of those He loves. He has already promised them His Holy Spirit as Comforter and Guide but He has another word to say to these startled rabbits before He departs.
They have been numbingly slow to gasp the things of the Spirit and altogether too fixated on securing places of pride and privilege for themselves in the kingdom to come. Lord knows, they will tremble when persecution crashes down on them and even betray their Lord.
What does He wish for them in the times of trial to come? Strength? Courage? Steadfastness? All these qualities will be required, we know, but the primary marker of Christ’s followers must be . . . unity. God’s church must be one.
John opened his gospel, “In the beginning . . .” This beginning is older than that of Genesis, hidden away in the mists of eternity past. This Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow has come to restore the overarching innocence of that time.
In His eternal kingdom His people are defined by relationship: Love God, love your neighbor. In Jesus Christ, eternity has erupted into the present. You will be one in a way never before conceived in the cramped imagination of man because by the power of the Holy Spirit you will begin to live out the reality of the world to come in the world that is.
Even in the first century, the world needed another religion like it needed a global plague. Every nation, people, tongue and tribe had a religion, and everyone in the empire worshipped Caesar along with the local godling – or else.
Every new religion divides, peeling away a subset of adherents to this teaching and isolating them as followers of that teaching. In the first instance, to be sure, Christianity caused this very thing to happen. Jews became Christians. Then gentiles forsook paganism and became Christians.
Christ had come to claim those God had already fingered as set apart for His sacred purpose. But there ends its similitude with other religions, for these would be the firstfruits of a universal nation that would in the end merge a myriad of voices in worship of the one true God.
Not Dagon nor Molech nor Baal could make this claim. Caesar could not offer everlasting life. Only the true God could hold out a oneness so pure it glistens because it is rooted in the Holy Trinity. The Son is pre-eminently God precisely because He serves as the perfect representation of the Father
Their glory is intermingled yet neither is less glorious for the sharing of it.
In a Christian marriage, the two become one while remaining two. A man cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh. They complete one another and, in their unity, become stronger individually. Christ bestows glory on His church, yet His glory is not diminished.
In God’s world, oneness cleaves to glory and glory to oneness. Because this is so, we must see ourselves as united to all of our fellow believers, no less in time than in space. Christ launched His church not in the 16th century but in the first.
And that’s why there’s such a melancholy irony in the way many use the high priestly prayer today. When they want to stress relationship and cooperation between churches and denominations they most often pluck out this verse:
". . . that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.”
Who are “they”? Here’s the preceding verse: "I do not pray for these alone” – speaking of His disciples – “but also for those who will believe in Me through their word . . .”
Our Lord is not asking for His Father to make the Baptists and the Presbyterians smoke the peace pipe; He is seeking God’s blessing on Christians down through the ages and praying for their unity.
If the church of today ever gets a grasp of our oneness with our brothers and sisters of centuries past she will fall on her knees and beg Almighty God to show us how to resolve our differences and join hands for His glory in the here and now.
We may take some solace, you and I, in that we reside in the church of the apostles. We have not abandoned our heritage and we will not. We rally round the cross with our fellow believers from around the world and through the corridor of time.
Let me conclude with a clarification. I said there is no shame in the cross for our Lord as there would be for you and me. That’s true in one sense. If we were crucified we would not wear the glory of sinlessness as He did.
But I must add that when we look at His cross we find no shame there. In fact, we find sweetness. If we see it not as an empty statement of architecture or jewelry, divorced from its true meaning, we find the sweetness of God’s love in all its glory. And we rejoice. Amen.
St. John 17:1-26
“They Crucified Him”
“They crucified Him.”
The passion narratives do go on, but the evangelists spare the paint when providing the picture of the act of execution itself. They tell us virtually nothing of the attaching, if you will, of Christ to the cross: “They crucified Him.”
As we arrive at Jesus’ high-priestly prayer in John 17 we must fill in the blank. The prayer begins and ends with glory, and we will not grasp the glory of the Lord unless we first get the shame of the cross.
(Read text.)
The Romans did not invent the hideous practice of crucifixion. The Persians had used it, as had the Macedonian Alexander the Great and others. No one, however, pursued it with more proficiency and enthusiasm than the Romans.
The first-century Jewish historian Josephus relates that during the siege of Jerusalem the Romans scourged and tortured hundreds of Jewish prisoners and then crucified them opposite the city walls. The commander Titus, trying to leverage this ghastly scene to bring about a surrender of the city, allowed his troops to turn the executions into a sport
.
Josephus writes, “The soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different positions . . .”
In truth, as in the gospels, we find little about the mechanics of crucifixion in non-biblical sources. It appears the cultured elite who wrote history didn’t care to dirty their hands with accounts of so revolting a practice.
We do know that the Romans subjected their own citizens to crucifixion only rarely, reserving it for a few heinous crimes including high treason and a relative few persons from the lowest classes. Most who hung from a cross were rebellious slaves, common criminals and mutinous soldiers.
And so the first wave of shame came in being selected to die in this way in the first place. If you were crucified, you must have been beneath contempt.
The executioners compounded the humiliation in every imaginable way. One commentator has applied the rather clinical term “status degradation ritual.”
They chose heavily traveled highways to make the display as public as possible. Passers-by lavished rivers of ridicule on the one affixed to a stake, tree or cross. The executioners usually stripped the offender naked. They pierced no vital organs and caused no inordinate bleeding, ensuring the slowest and most painful death. The pinioning of hands and feet signified loss of power, and not solely in symbolic terms.
The greatest artists have not captured the horror of the cross in all its grotesqueness. The crucifixion ground was a place of blood . . . screams . . . sweat . . . vomit . . . and excrement. Bodies were left on their crosses to rot or to provide food for scavenging birds. This was the way of the cross.
The Jews never practiced crucifixion. Stacked on top of the horror of it for other subject peoples was for them a deeply theological concern arising from Deuteronomy 21(:22-23) regarding the execution of one who is hanged on a tree, specifically that “he who is hanged is accursed of God.”
He who violated God’s law lived as though God did not exist or did not matter. In effect, he cursed God. His body, then, did not incur God’s curse because it hung on a tree; it hung on a tree because the man had brought God’s curse down upon him.
For the Jew, excommunication from the covenant people was the ultimate penalty, and death by hanging on a tree under God’s curse was the ultimate form of excommunication. There was no return.
For the first-century Jew, in consequence, the cross could not be a symbol of resistance against the oppressor, a token of martyrdom. It spoke of nothing but shame.
And it became the springboard our Lord chose for His ascent to glory.
"I have glorified You on the earth. I have finished the work which You have given Me to do. And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”
Again, we need some background. In the ancient world glory, the opposite of shame, was little short of an obsession. The Greek word is “doxa,” from which we get “doxology,” which is formed by linking “doxa” with “logos,” word. The doxology is the word of glory we offer our Father as we present our alms and oblations to Him.
The original meaning of “doxa” was “opinion,” a good reputation or renown. It was tied closely to the word for honor, referring to a distinguished quality apparent in a man.
In the Greek translation of the Old Testament doxa takes on a technical definition, either the honor the worshipper accorded God or the “majesty and eminence which radiated from God’s own being” (Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels 269).
The Israelites could not see God but they could apprehend His glory as fire or light. This glory took up residence in the tabernacle and then in Solomon’s temple, Israel’s special privilege.
To enjoy God’s presence was to enjoy His glory . . . but it could and would depart, as when Eli’s sons lost the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines.
The Hebrew word is “kabod.” Eli’s grandson was named Ichabod, “no glory.” God’s glory had departed.
But it would not remain absent from the creation. The prophet Ezekiel (39:21) foretold that in the last days the glory of Yahweh would appear on earth – this time visibly and tangibly – and convert the gentiles.
So it was that old Simeon rejoiced in the temple at the Incarnation: "Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace, According to Your word; for my eyes have seen Your salvation which You have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of Your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32).
The glory of God had appeared in Israel once more . . . in Jesus Christ.
This glory comes blazing through in St. John’s account more vividly than anywhere else in the gospels. He uses the word “doxa” and its cognate verb more times than the three synoptic evangelists combined.
The Old Testament sense of it continues but the focus shifts to the glory of Christ, as in this prayer, in which Jesus petitions the Father to restore Him to the glory He enjoyed on high before the world began.
In the synoptics Christ’s glory remains veiled but in John it is revealed. He trumpets in his first chapter: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth (v. 14).”
The Christ makes manifest this glory in His life and in His work, but He does not stop there, for His work continues upon the cross, that shaft of shame. As the realization settles in among the New Testament authors that this Jesus Christ was truly the Son of God, they bind up His glory with His divinity.
Among the four evangelists, it is up to John, who wrote last, to review the life of Christ and weave the gleaming strand of glory into it. Jesus made God’s glory manifest in the world as He revealed the Father through His work . . . in His miracles, yes, but also by His death, that most epic revelation of His glory.
In the fourth gospel, crucifixion is glorification – a means of transport to the realm of glory as in the synoptics, true, but more than that in itself a blinding manifestation of the glory of God.
“They crucified Him.”
And, unwittingly, they glorified Him.
We can be more specific about the how of it. To the Jews crushed under the Roman heel by crucifixion before and after Him, no honor attached. But as the church lurched toward the staggering truth that this carpenter’s son was indeed God, the sacrificial character of His death came into focus and Jesus became not only a martyr but the Martyr par excellence.
Martyrdom exalts. Anyone who believes Mr. Lincoln attracted universal love and affection during his presidency can disabuse himself of that flawed notion by visiting his presidential library and museum in Springfield, Ill. Even in many quarters in the North, men reviled him.
But as soon as the assassin’s shot slammed home, as soon as the president breathed his last, a man emerged from the death chamber and said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s war secretary, had done little to conceal his distaste for a man he found uncouth and even crude, but when he looked down at the lanky corpse tears welled up and he said, “There lies the greatest ruler of men the world has ever seen.” Martyrdom exalts.
Glory attached to the completion of the Lord’s work. God, the evangelist tells us, “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
St. John could not have made that claim had Jesus stopped short of the cross. The love of God would have been inadequate to the salvation of men. Jesus did not stop short.
He won glory by perfecting His obedience in His death. His first reason for living was in His dying. Submission to the Father’s will had been far from easy to this point, but nothing He had done until now compared to this ultimate pouring out of Himself.
He would gain great glory in His resurrection and ascension, neither of which would have been possible absent the crucifixion. And, yes, the cross was His catapult to that greatest glory, the restoration of His place at His Father’s side.
The cross a place of shame? Indeed, for you or me . . . but for our sinless Lord it became the altar on which He consecrated His death. To consecrate is to set apart for a holy purpose, and what purpose could be more holy than to do what man could not do for himself, erase the stain of sin from the creation, and from each soul?
And in this act He consecrated His disciples, then and now, for a life of unity and mission.
This prayer is an interlude in John’s passion narrative. We have examined the betrayal of Lazarus, the Last Supper and the farewell discourse. We will come next to our Lord’s arrest, trial and execution.
But first we must pause to listen to this prayer. He addresses it to His Father but His disciples are invited to sit in. He is drawing nigh to taking His leave of those He loves. He has already promised them His Holy Spirit as Comforter and Guide but He has another word to say to these startled rabbits before He departs.
They have been numbingly slow to gasp the things of the Spirit and altogether too fixated on securing places of pride and privilege for themselves in the kingdom to come. Lord knows, they will tremble when persecution crashes down on them and even betray their Lord.
What does He wish for them in the times of trial to come? Strength? Courage? Steadfastness? All these qualities will be required, we know, but the primary marker of Christ’s followers must be . . . unity. God’s church must be one.
John opened his gospel, “In the beginning . . .” This beginning is older than that of Genesis, hidden away in the mists of eternity past. This Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow has come to restore the overarching innocence of that time.
In His eternal kingdom His people are defined by relationship: Love God, love your neighbor. In Jesus Christ, eternity has erupted into the present. You will be one in a way never before conceived in the cramped imagination of man because by the power of the Holy Spirit you will begin to live out the reality of the world to come in the world that is.
Even in the first century, the world needed another religion like it needed a global plague. Every nation, people, tongue and tribe had a religion, and everyone in the empire worshipped Caesar along with the local godling – or else.
Every new religion divides, peeling away a subset of adherents to this teaching and isolating them as followers of that teaching. In the first instance, to be sure, Christianity caused this very thing to happen. Jews became Christians. Then gentiles forsook paganism and became Christians.
Christ had come to claim those God had already fingered as set apart for His sacred purpose. But there ends its similitude with other religions, for these would be the firstfruits of a universal nation that would in the end merge a myriad of voices in worship of the one true God.
Not Dagon nor Molech nor Baal could make this claim. Caesar could not offer everlasting life. Only the true God could hold out a oneness so pure it glistens because it is rooted in the Holy Trinity. The Son is pre-eminently God precisely because He serves as the perfect representation of the Father
Their glory is intermingled yet neither is less glorious for the sharing of it.
In a Christian marriage, the two become one while remaining two. A man cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh. They complete one another and, in their unity, become stronger individually. Christ bestows glory on His church, yet His glory is not diminished.
In God’s world, oneness cleaves to glory and glory to oneness. Because this is so, we must see ourselves as united to all of our fellow believers, no less in time than in space. Christ launched His church not in the 16th century but in the first.
And that’s why there’s such a melancholy irony in the way many use the high priestly prayer today. When they want to stress relationship and cooperation between churches and denominations they most often pluck out this verse:
". . . that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.”
Who are “they”? Here’s the preceding verse: "I do not pray for these alone” – speaking of His disciples – “but also for those who will believe in Me through their word . . .”
Our Lord is not asking for His Father to make the Baptists and the Presbyterians smoke the peace pipe; He is seeking God’s blessing on Christians down through the ages and praying for their unity.
If the church of today ever gets a grasp of our oneness with our brothers and sisters of centuries past she will fall on her knees and beg Almighty God to show us how to resolve our differences and join hands for His glory in the here and now.
We may take some solace, you and I, in that we reside in the church of the apostles. We have not abandoned our heritage and we will not. We rally round the cross with our fellow believers from around the world and through the corridor of time.
Let me conclude with a clarification. I said there is no shame in the cross for our Lord as there would be for you and me. That’s true in one sense. If we were crucified we would not wear the glory of sinlessness as He did.
But I must add that when we look at His cross we find no shame there. In fact, we find sweetness. If we see it not as an empty statement of architecture or jewelry, divorced from its true meaning, we find the sweetness of God’s love in all its glory. And we rejoice. Amen.