Sermon Audio
March 20, 2016 Palm Sunday
Holy Cross
Zechariah 9:9-12, Psalm 24, Philippians 2:5-11, St. Matthew 27:1-54
Many centuries ago, Portuguese settlers on the south coast of China erected a grand cathedral on a high hill overlooking the harbor of Macao. At the front, a massive bronze cross soared high into the sky. The builders believed their masterwork would endure through the ages.
It remained only a few years. A massive typhoon dashed it down as though constructed of Tinker Toys, driving it down the hill and into the ocean. All that survived was the front wall with that huge cross protruding heavenward.
Centuries later, a battered ship tore apart out to sea a little ways from the harbor. Some died, a few lived. One man, dazed and frightened, clung to wreckage as the ocean swells heaved him up and then dropped him down. He had no idea in which direction lay the land.
Then a swell raised him up again and he spied a cross. From his vantage point, it was a tiny thing, but it loomed as large as heaven in his vision. When he made it safely to shore, Sir John Bowring wrote those words we have just sung:
In the cross of Christ I glory,
Towering o’er the wrecks of time;
All the light of sacred story
Gathers round its head sublime.
Time toys with perspective. When St. Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians from prison, probably in Rome, in the first century, no one said of the cross, “Lo! It glows with peace and joy.”
In fact, people said quite the contrary. The Roman statesman Cicero summed up the feeling: “To bind a Roman citizen is a crime; to flog him is an abomination; to slay him is almost an act of murder; to crucify him is – what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed.”
Yet crucifixion was common . . . for foreigners, slaves, insurrectionists against Caesar . . . for anyone deemed to be of a sub-Roman species.
In Philippi, no cross adorned a lady’s bodice or dangled from her ears; no cross appeared embossed on the cover of a book, no cross topped a steeple, poking the sky in the city center or on a high hill outside of town.
We read in Matthew’s gospel: “From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you’” (16:21-22).
The author of Hebrews wrote of Jesus that He “endured the cross, despising the shame . . .” (12:2). Its very purpose was to ensure maximum humiliation, inflicting excruciating pain and making a public spectacle of the victim. Passers-by hurled insults as they trundled down the roadway past the tormented figures whose life was seeping out of them.
So, which is it, shame or glory? Paul leaves us in no doubt: In our Lord’s shame His glory resides.
The apostle has seized on a hymn that was current in his time for our epistle lesson for today. He wants his readers, then and now, to find in Christ the pattern for their dealings with one another. Paul reaches a crescendo of Christology here, his most glorious paean to his Lord and ours.
Many scholars believe he took liberties with the hymn. They reason that in the original the poetic meter works just as we should expect – except for one phrase. We read: “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”
That final phrase, “even the death of the cross,” doesn’t fit the poetic scheme. If this view is incorrect, the apostle quoted words found elsewhere that expressed exactly what he wished to say. If this view is correct, he amended the text to emphasize the Lord’s humbling of Himself in the manner of His death – even the death of the cross.
In the church in Philippi, as elsewhere, the memory of Jesus’ way of living and dying is slipping away into the past. False teachers are introducing strange doctrine. Could this Jesus truly have been the Christ? King of kings and Lord or lords?
A king arrayed himself in purple and gold and reigned supreme. He crushed his enemies; he did not submit meekly to them. If Jesus was Lord of all, was He not Lord of Caesar, too? Yet one of Caesar’s minor provincial functionaries had hung Him on a cross.
Paul’s answer: Do not conceal the cross; rejoice in it. For it is on the cross that Jesus Christ vanquished sin and death for you and for me.
One week from today we will celebrate Easter with gladness in our hearts. And so we should, for our Lord’s resurrection proclaimed His power over sin and death. When He arose from His tomb on that bright morning outside Jerusalem His very Person embodied and announced the most basic Christian creed: Jesus Christ is Lord.
The empty tomb proclaimed His power.
But let us not rush headlong into Easter, failing to pause and ponder long and well before the cross, for the cross stands at the heart of our faith. As you gaze upon that cross – without which there is no atonement for sin – hear these words from the fifth century, uttered by Pope Leo the Great:
“Foreshadowings of the future resurrection should appear in the holy city, the Church of God: What is to happen to our bodies should now take place in our hearts . . . The sacred blood of Christ has quenched the flaming sword that barred access to the tree of life. The age-old night of sin has given place to the true light . . .
“The body that lay lifeless in the tomb is ours. The body that rose again on the third day is ours. The body that ascended above all the heights of heaven to the right hand of the Father’s glory is ours. If then we walk in the way of His commandments, and are not ashamed to acknowledge the price He paid for our salvation in a lowly body, we too are to rise to share His glory.
“The promise He made will be fulfilled in the sight of all: Whoever acknowledges Me before men, I too will acknowledge him before My Father who is in heaven.”
He did not enter history as kurios, “Lord.” Except among His disciples, only at His vindication – after He arose from the grave and ascended into heaven – did He acquire that lofty title. He came as doulos, here rendered “bondservant” and elsewhere “slave.”
The second Adam had no desire to be equal with God. The first Adam had sought God’s knowledge so that he might elevate himself to God’s level. Jesus Christ, who is God, took the form of a man, and a lowly servant at that, and in His obedience humbled Himself to the point of death – even the death of the cross.
For the cross was always His destination. The artist Holman Hunt has portrayed Jesus as an infant running, arms outstretched, to His mother. His form projects a shadow in the shape of the cross.
In another work, Joseph and the boy Jesus are at work in the carpenter’s shop with Mary looking on. As Jesus stops and stretches, the sun throws a cross-shaped shadow onto the wall.
He “made Himself of no reputation.” In other translations, He “made Himself nothing” or He “emptied Himself.” In the form of man, He humbled Himself; in the form of God, He emptied Himself.
He is the Suffering Servant of whom Isaiah prophesied: “He poured out His soul unto death” (53:12).
And all the while, He is God, the purest expression of the Father the world has ever known or can ever know.
When they mocked Him, they mocked God. When they spat on Him, they spat on God. When they struck Him, they struck God. When they placed a crown of thorns upon His head, they jeered at God. When they crucified Him, they crucified God.
At the cross, all things meet. It is our framework for interpreting and knowing God. It defines human existence. Some will protest: We must look for meaning not in a bloody symbol of a horrific execution but in the joy, hope, peace and love we can find in this world.
A certain Preacher addressed that attitude in a book called Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” The things of this world, whatever pleasure we might find in them, are passing away.
If the cross is not at the center of our faith, we are indeed without hope. Absent the atonement, there is only the void. As we saw last week in our lesson from Hebrews, the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away our sins.
Only the blood of Christ can cleanse us.
On the cross, God exchanged His pure white robe for our filthy garments, taking our sins like a black cloak upon Himself and clothing us in His righteousness.
On the cross, God gave us the exemplar of Christian obedience.
On the cross, God provides for us the enormous blessing of the Eucharist.
On the cross, God nullified justice and bestowed upon us the fullness of His mercy and grace.
On the cross, God offered at ultimate cost to Himself the most profound outpouring of His perfect justice and love.
Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.’
“Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
“For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1Corinthians 1:18-25).
“Christ crucified” is really the only story we have to tell. A well-known preacher told of receiving a visit from a young man considering whether to study for the ministry. This fellow had been exposed in his youth to preaching on the faith once delivered to the saints and, in college, to that flowing from a more contemporary and user-friendly gospel.
He needed to get his bearings and was seeking advice. “Why is it,” he asked the older man, “that modernism and liberalism, if false and anti-Christian, are so popular and appeal to so many?”
The preacher quoted Paul from Galatians 5:11: “And I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why do I still suffer persecution? Then the offense of the cross has ceased.”
If we preach and teach anything other than Christ crucified, we abandon the offense of the cross. Nothing but the cross shows us the utter blackness of our sin, a subject not much in vogue in Paul’s day or in ours.
The preacher added, “Modernism and liberalism, however much they talk about the cross – and that now is very little indeed – leave out its offense.”
We see all around us the consequences of leaving out its offense. The Western church of the 21st century has begun with a faith grounded in the greatest sacrifice in history and emptied it of all sacrifice.
What’s left? Must we wonder that the young and idealistic, the poor and despairing, hark to the imam’s call of self-emptying and self-giving, of the glorious death of the martyr? Do we truly marvel that they shun a religion that promises them that pursuing it will cost them absolutely nothing?
There’s a story about a monk who prayed without ceasing that he might have the marks of our Lord upon his hands and feet. In a vision, he was given sight of a mark on the Lord’s body the world had forgotten.
It was the deep bruise on His shoulders. The monk learned he could have the marks on his hands and feet only if he first bore the mark upon his shoulder.
Well, we can cluck-cluck and tsk-tsk over the failures of others for only so long. At last, we must look to ourselves. And so, beloved in the Lord, “Let this mind be in your which was also in Christ Jesus.”
Are you mindful each and every day that all you have is from Him: “All things come of thee, O Lord. And of thine own have we given thee.”
Are you contributing of your time, talent and treasure? Are you giving from your essence or from your excess? Is the mark of the Lord upon your shoulder? Amen.
Holy Cross
Zechariah 9:9-12, Psalm 24, Philippians 2:5-11, St. Matthew 27:1-54
Many centuries ago, Portuguese settlers on the south coast of China erected a grand cathedral on a high hill overlooking the harbor of Macao. At the front, a massive bronze cross soared high into the sky. The builders believed their masterwork would endure through the ages.
It remained only a few years. A massive typhoon dashed it down as though constructed of Tinker Toys, driving it down the hill and into the ocean. All that survived was the front wall with that huge cross protruding heavenward.
Centuries later, a battered ship tore apart out to sea a little ways from the harbor. Some died, a few lived. One man, dazed and frightened, clung to wreckage as the ocean swells heaved him up and then dropped him down. He had no idea in which direction lay the land.
Then a swell raised him up again and he spied a cross. From his vantage point, it was a tiny thing, but it loomed as large as heaven in his vision. When he made it safely to shore, Sir John Bowring wrote those words we have just sung:
In the cross of Christ I glory,
Towering o’er the wrecks of time;
All the light of sacred story
Gathers round its head sublime.
Time toys with perspective. When St. Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians from prison, probably in Rome, in the first century, no one said of the cross, “Lo! It glows with peace and joy.”
In fact, people said quite the contrary. The Roman statesman Cicero summed up the feeling: “To bind a Roman citizen is a crime; to flog him is an abomination; to slay him is almost an act of murder; to crucify him is – what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed.”
Yet crucifixion was common . . . for foreigners, slaves, insurrectionists against Caesar . . . for anyone deemed to be of a sub-Roman species.
In Philippi, no cross adorned a lady’s bodice or dangled from her ears; no cross appeared embossed on the cover of a book, no cross topped a steeple, poking the sky in the city center or on a high hill outside of town.
We read in Matthew’s gospel: “From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you’” (16:21-22).
The author of Hebrews wrote of Jesus that He “endured the cross, despising the shame . . .” (12:2). Its very purpose was to ensure maximum humiliation, inflicting excruciating pain and making a public spectacle of the victim. Passers-by hurled insults as they trundled down the roadway past the tormented figures whose life was seeping out of them.
So, which is it, shame or glory? Paul leaves us in no doubt: In our Lord’s shame His glory resides.
The apostle has seized on a hymn that was current in his time for our epistle lesson for today. He wants his readers, then and now, to find in Christ the pattern for their dealings with one another. Paul reaches a crescendo of Christology here, his most glorious paean to his Lord and ours.
Many scholars believe he took liberties with the hymn. They reason that in the original the poetic meter works just as we should expect – except for one phrase. We read: “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”
That final phrase, “even the death of the cross,” doesn’t fit the poetic scheme. If this view is incorrect, the apostle quoted words found elsewhere that expressed exactly what he wished to say. If this view is correct, he amended the text to emphasize the Lord’s humbling of Himself in the manner of His death – even the death of the cross.
In the church in Philippi, as elsewhere, the memory of Jesus’ way of living and dying is slipping away into the past. False teachers are introducing strange doctrine. Could this Jesus truly have been the Christ? King of kings and Lord or lords?
A king arrayed himself in purple and gold and reigned supreme. He crushed his enemies; he did not submit meekly to them. If Jesus was Lord of all, was He not Lord of Caesar, too? Yet one of Caesar’s minor provincial functionaries had hung Him on a cross.
Paul’s answer: Do not conceal the cross; rejoice in it. For it is on the cross that Jesus Christ vanquished sin and death for you and for me.
One week from today we will celebrate Easter with gladness in our hearts. And so we should, for our Lord’s resurrection proclaimed His power over sin and death. When He arose from His tomb on that bright morning outside Jerusalem His very Person embodied and announced the most basic Christian creed: Jesus Christ is Lord.
The empty tomb proclaimed His power.
But let us not rush headlong into Easter, failing to pause and ponder long and well before the cross, for the cross stands at the heart of our faith. As you gaze upon that cross – without which there is no atonement for sin – hear these words from the fifth century, uttered by Pope Leo the Great:
“Foreshadowings of the future resurrection should appear in the holy city, the Church of God: What is to happen to our bodies should now take place in our hearts . . . The sacred blood of Christ has quenched the flaming sword that barred access to the tree of life. The age-old night of sin has given place to the true light . . .
“The body that lay lifeless in the tomb is ours. The body that rose again on the third day is ours. The body that ascended above all the heights of heaven to the right hand of the Father’s glory is ours. If then we walk in the way of His commandments, and are not ashamed to acknowledge the price He paid for our salvation in a lowly body, we too are to rise to share His glory.
“The promise He made will be fulfilled in the sight of all: Whoever acknowledges Me before men, I too will acknowledge him before My Father who is in heaven.”
He did not enter history as kurios, “Lord.” Except among His disciples, only at His vindication – after He arose from the grave and ascended into heaven – did He acquire that lofty title. He came as doulos, here rendered “bondservant” and elsewhere “slave.”
The second Adam had no desire to be equal with God. The first Adam had sought God’s knowledge so that he might elevate himself to God’s level. Jesus Christ, who is God, took the form of a man, and a lowly servant at that, and in His obedience humbled Himself to the point of death – even the death of the cross.
For the cross was always His destination. The artist Holman Hunt has portrayed Jesus as an infant running, arms outstretched, to His mother. His form projects a shadow in the shape of the cross.
In another work, Joseph and the boy Jesus are at work in the carpenter’s shop with Mary looking on. As Jesus stops and stretches, the sun throws a cross-shaped shadow onto the wall.
He “made Himself of no reputation.” In other translations, He “made Himself nothing” or He “emptied Himself.” In the form of man, He humbled Himself; in the form of God, He emptied Himself.
He is the Suffering Servant of whom Isaiah prophesied: “He poured out His soul unto death” (53:12).
And all the while, He is God, the purest expression of the Father the world has ever known or can ever know.
When they mocked Him, they mocked God. When they spat on Him, they spat on God. When they struck Him, they struck God. When they placed a crown of thorns upon His head, they jeered at God. When they crucified Him, they crucified God.
At the cross, all things meet. It is our framework for interpreting and knowing God. It defines human existence. Some will protest: We must look for meaning not in a bloody symbol of a horrific execution but in the joy, hope, peace and love we can find in this world.
A certain Preacher addressed that attitude in a book called Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” The things of this world, whatever pleasure we might find in them, are passing away.
If the cross is not at the center of our faith, we are indeed without hope. Absent the atonement, there is only the void. As we saw last week in our lesson from Hebrews, the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away our sins.
Only the blood of Christ can cleanse us.
On the cross, God exchanged His pure white robe for our filthy garments, taking our sins like a black cloak upon Himself and clothing us in His righteousness.
On the cross, God gave us the exemplar of Christian obedience.
On the cross, God provides for us the enormous blessing of the Eucharist.
On the cross, God nullified justice and bestowed upon us the fullness of His mercy and grace.
On the cross, God offered at ultimate cost to Himself the most profound outpouring of His perfect justice and love.
Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.’
“Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
“For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1Corinthians 1:18-25).
“Christ crucified” is really the only story we have to tell. A well-known preacher told of receiving a visit from a young man considering whether to study for the ministry. This fellow had been exposed in his youth to preaching on the faith once delivered to the saints and, in college, to that flowing from a more contemporary and user-friendly gospel.
He needed to get his bearings and was seeking advice. “Why is it,” he asked the older man, “that modernism and liberalism, if false and anti-Christian, are so popular and appeal to so many?”
The preacher quoted Paul from Galatians 5:11: “And I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision, why do I still suffer persecution? Then the offense of the cross has ceased.”
If we preach and teach anything other than Christ crucified, we abandon the offense of the cross. Nothing but the cross shows us the utter blackness of our sin, a subject not much in vogue in Paul’s day or in ours.
The preacher added, “Modernism and liberalism, however much they talk about the cross – and that now is very little indeed – leave out its offense.”
We see all around us the consequences of leaving out its offense. The Western church of the 21st century has begun with a faith grounded in the greatest sacrifice in history and emptied it of all sacrifice.
What’s left? Must we wonder that the young and idealistic, the poor and despairing, hark to the imam’s call of self-emptying and self-giving, of the glorious death of the martyr? Do we truly marvel that they shun a religion that promises them that pursuing it will cost them absolutely nothing?
There’s a story about a monk who prayed without ceasing that he might have the marks of our Lord upon his hands and feet. In a vision, he was given sight of a mark on the Lord’s body the world had forgotten.
It was the deep bruise on His shoulders. The monk learned he could have the marks on his hands and feet only if he first bore the mark upon his shoulder.
Well, we can cluck-cluck and tsk-tsk over the failures of others for only so long. At last, we must look to ourselves. And so, beloved in the Lord, “Let this mind be in your which was also in Christ Jesus.”
Are you mindful each and every day that all you have is from Him: “All things come of thee, O Lord. And of thine own have we given thee.”
Are you contributing of your time, talent and treasure? Are you giving from your essence or from your excess? Is the mark of the Lord upon your shoulder? Amen.