Luke 19:28-40; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 23:1-49
Just in case you were wondering, you’re
not the only one who thinks our worship this morning feels like spiritual whiplash. I know we’ve just walked through it,
literally; but I’d like to take a moment to think about the crazy path Scripture
has given us in these past 20 minutes.
We started in the Jewell Room, hearing the
story of Palm Sunday, Jesus’ “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem. He asks the disciples to go find him a colt
and bring it to the Mount of Olives. Now,
that may not sound provocative, but we have to realize, what Jesus is doing
would have been like a leader today asking his supporters to get a bulletproof limo
with a security detail, and bring it to him at the Capitol in Washington, and drive
him down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. This was not an accidental parade. Palm Sunday was a provocation, because everything
Jesus did was to remind people of a bigger story his actions were telling – a story
about power and authority that reaches beyond secular government.
In ancient days, the kings of Israel came riding
on a donkey or a colt (1 Kings 1:33-35), with people spreading their cloaks on
the path along the king’s way (2 Kings 9:13).
And the people of Jesus’ time were desperately seeking a new king to
save them from their Roman oppressors. And
here’s the coup de gras, maybe even
the coup d’etat: At the last day, the Day of the Lord, when
God would come to be “king over all the earth” and set the world to rights, that
final reckoning was expected to begin when the Lord came and stood on the Mount
of Olives, just outside Jerusalem (Zechariah 14:4-9).
So, when Jesus begins his procession down the
road from the Mount of Olives, the people begin shouting, “Blessed is the king
who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace
in heaven and glory in the highest!” (Luke 19:38). That’s because the people knew what all this
symbolism meant – that this was nothing less than the King. His servant humility
notwithstanding, Jesus was making it clear that he was the divine monarch, and that the rival of the day, Caesar
Augustus, was just a pretender to the throne.
But Jesus wasn’t claiming any earthly throne, which is the only thing the
authorities could understand. He was asserting his authority as the cosmic
King, a king whose reign even the rocks and stones themselves would shout about.
In our New Testament reading this morning,
St. Paul recognizes the same truth that Jesus was claiming there on the Mount
of Olives. Even though Jesus was God, in
human form, he didn’t regard equality with God as something for him to exploit. Instead, he set his cosmic kingship aside, at
least for a time, exchanging his divinity and his royal prerogatives for death
on a cross. Now, we say that – “death on
a cross” – like we can understand it, but we can’t even come close. This isn’t an execution; it’s a lynching. This is death that sucks life from its victim
with the torture of slow drowning as your lungs fill with fluid – to say nothing
of the pain from the nails in your feet and your wrists. Yet still, Paul says, that dying man was the
one they were waiting for after all – the one to whom every knee shall bend and
whom everyone shall confess as the true Caesar, the true Lord.
But why
did Jesus do it? Why did he need to do it? This isn’t something a sane person would
choose. In fact, on Maundy Thursday
night, Jesus sweat blood asking God to open some other way for him instead. But in the end, the Lord of the universe chose this. Why?
Here’s the short answer: atonement.
That’s one of those theological words people throw around as if everyone
knows what it means. It’s a complicated
idea, but the word itself is beautifully simple. It means exactly what the pieces of the word
say: at-one-ment. Atonement is at-one-ment. Our story this morning goes the way it does,
with the Lord choosing the worst death ever, in order that you and I might be
made at one with God.
OK.
But what how does that work?
Well, you can answer that question several
ways. You might go toward what the theologians
call substitutionary atonement, the idea that God had to subject God’s own child,
a part of God’s own self, to the suffering that all humanity deserved for the ungracious
ways we turn against God. According to
this line of thinking, we humans could never make amends adequately for the
offense of sin, of choosing against God’s direction, so God has to take the punishment
for us, sending the Son to the cross. It’s
a medieval idea, actually, coming from the model of courtly justice in medieval
Europe. If a powerless servant were to
insult the lord of the manor, the lord of the manor would have to demand satisfaction
for the servant’s insult. But even the
servant’s life wouldn’t be enough to provide satisfaction because of the
difference in their stations in life. Maybe
multiple servants would have to die for justice to be achieved. And how could justice ever come if all the servants insulted the lord? So, medieval theologians looked at this logic
and saw God the Father atoning for the insult of human sin not by demanding the
lives of countless humans but by giving one life, the life of the divine
Son. They saw it as the only loving way God
could balance the scales so thrown off by human sin. That model does a nice job of accounting for
the scandal of grace, the fact that God loves us despite the fact that we can
never make up for sin on our own. But it
also raises at least as many questions as it answers about a divine parent who
sends a child to die.
Here’s another way to think about how atonement
works: that Jesus was the ultimate example
of a God-shaped life. The way this thinking
goes, Jesus the exemplar came to show us what a life lived for others truly
looks like. He bore punishment he didn’t
deserve. He emptied himself of power and
glory in order to take our nature and go through everything we go through. He showed us how to deal with the ugliness life
can dish out – not with retribution or exclusion, but with a heart that bore
unbearable pain so others wouldn’t have to.
According to this line of thinking, Jesus dies on the cross to lead us there
ourselves – to take up our own crosses; to live for others; to value love at
all costs, even at the ultimate cost. There’s
truth in that, definitely. But if Jesus
is just a righteous example, why does this sacrifice have to come from the Son
of God? We know many stories of selfless
sacrifice, of people emptying themselves and dying so others might live. There must be more to the story if the one
doing the sacrificing is also God in the flesh.
So, here’s a third way to think about how
atonement works. It highlights Jesus’ powerful
divinity just as much as his suffering humanity by telling a cosmic story with
a surprise ending. The way this thinking
goes, Jesus, the Son of God, came to vanquish the power of sin and death and
open the gate to eternal life for all who trust in him. He emptied himself of divine power,
submitting himself to death in order to trick the power of sin and evil into complacency. Now, for this to make sense, you have to see sin
and evil not as the temporary failure of good human hearts but as a power unto
itself. So, if you can accept that, then
Jesus comes as the unlikely conqueror of that enemy, the one who brings God’s
power directly into human life, fighting the cosmic struggle of God versus evil
on the battlefield of human existence – and apparently losing. But what evil doesn’t know was what C.S. Lewis
calls the “deep magic,” the truth that the power of the Creator cannot be
contained by the creation any more than the clay can tell the potter what to make. And so, this thinking goes, God in Christ
lets evil win – at least long enough to prove God’s ultimate power, crushing
evil by reversing its victory, which is death itself, and giving the same power
over death to all of us who trust in him.
To me, at least, that model of Christ as the victor holds a lot of truth.
I have seen enough of the power of sin and
evil to know it’s real. And I have seen enough of the power of
Christ’s resurrection to know death doesn’t get the last word.
At the end of the day, especially at the
end of this Palm Sunday, the point isn’t knowing the right model of the atonement. The point is the truth of at-one-ment between
God and us. For as we heard in that Passion
Gospel reading from Luke, death is not
the end for those who trust in God’s power, even if the evidence says God’s power is absent. Jesus’ promise to the thief on the cross is
the promise to each and every one of us who fails along life’s journey. Eternal life is not a function of scoring the
most points or getting the answers right. Eternal life comes from turning to Jesus as he
hangs there on the cross with us, and
trusting him when he makes that most unlikely of all promises: that you – no matter who you are, and no
matter how slim the odds may seem – if you turn to me, even “you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke
23:43).
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