Message for Easter Sunday 17th April 2022
Today is a good day, a happy day, a blessed day, a day of rejoicing. But we started before that on Good Friday, which was spent at the cross. But what about the days leading up to it? Jesus’ time with His disciples whom He had asked to support Him and pray, while He went to commune with His Father to see if there was any other way than the cross that was before Him.
Scripture says that He begged His friends to stay awake because His soul was very sorrowful even unto death. He begged His Father, who was silent. Of course, there was simple human fear of pain. But I believe, that it was quite a different fear which laid hold of Christ here and lacerated His soul. It was the fear that He, the only begotten Son, who loved the Father as no one who had ever loved before, could be forsaken, rejected by the Father. His Father who could not look on our sin. Our sins, not His! Jesus was sinless!
Imagine His disappointment when He found them asleep. Would we have slept I wonder?
Then there was the questioning and the flogging with a whip with ends that cut into His flesh. Did the disciples see that? Would we have watched it? Then, having to carry the heavy cross He was to be nailed to through the streets, with the crowds jeering and spitting. What pain! What humiliation! But there was more to come, and He knew it. He must have seen those horrendous executions, so He would have no illusions about what was before Him. Imagine what must have, as a human man, been going through His mind. Then came the cross, the source of our redemption! The nails hammered into His hands, the blood running down His face. The pain! The agony!
In 2010 Stanley and I went to the Passion play in Oberammergau, a very real and moving experience. Watching someone being nailed to a cross, listening to the nails being knocked in. Then the cross was lifted upright - what that does to the person’s body. It really hit home what Jesus did that day.
For three hours He hung there, apparently in silence, locked in agony and waiting for death. And then He died, but not before asking His Father to forgive them. Can you imagine standing there? Those women did!
We shall never be able to get used to the fact that at the very centre of the Christian faith, we hear this cry of the god forsaken Christ for God. What Christ was afraid of, what He wrestled with in Gethsemane, what He implored the Father to save Him from, was not spared Him. The Father forsook the Son and ‘God is silent!’ The Son was forsaken by the Father, rejected and cursed. He bore the judgement in which everyone is alone and in which no one can stand. Is there any answer why God forsook Him? Is there an answer to the agonising question of disappointment and death? ‘My God, why? Why?’ This is answered in the resurrection, when God is saying, ‘For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you’.
The resurrection is the beginning of true hope, because it is the beginning of life which has death behind it and for which hell is no longer to be feared. At the point where we lose hope, where we become powerless and can do nothing more, the lonely and forsaken Christ waits for us and gives us a hope and a future.
The passionately loving Christ, the persecuted Christ, the lonely Christ, the Christ despairing over God’s silence, the Christ who in dying was so totally forsaken, for us and our sakes, is like the friend to whom we can confide everything, because He knows everything and has suffered everything that can happen to us, and more. Our disappointments, our loneliness and our defeats do not separate us from Him. This is what faith really is; believing, not with the head or the lips, out of habit, but believing with one’s ‘whole life’. It means seeking community with the human Christ in every situation in life, and in every situation experiencing His own history. Good Friday is the most comprehensive, and most profound expression of Christ’s fellowship with every human being. In Him, the despair that oppresses us becomes free to hope.
Beneath the cross of Christ, hope is born again out of the depth. The person who has once sensed this is never afraid of any depths again. Their hope becomes firm and unconquerable: Lord, I am a prisoner – a prisoner of hope.
Without the cross and the resurrection there was no hope.
Hebrews 9 tells us Christ died as a sacrifice to take away the sins of many people. He will come again, but not to deal with our sins again. This time He will bring salvation to all those who are eagerly witing for Him.