Our pastor friend and former resident, Jake Hall, had a strange encounter with a church member recently. Or was it an encounter with a strange church member? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, don’t you know!? (Present company excepted.) Well, Jake learned that a certain woman was afraid to come to church. That’s right, afraid to come to church.
Like most pastors would, Jake wanted to know why. Was it because of a personal snit with another member? Did someone look at her the wrong way? Did someone look at her the right way and she liked it? Did someone park in her space, sit in her pew, eat her food, insult her grandmother?
Then Jake wondered if she was afraid of him. Was it his leadership style? His preaching style? Or was it just his unique sense of style, which Jake himself might describe as “wrinkled casual”?
No, turns out it was none of these things. She is afraid to come to church because of the cross.
Jake wondered if she was afraid of every cross. No, he learned, she isn’t afraid of every cross. She’s afraid of one particular cross. He thought harder. It could be the cross on the front lawn of the church or the one whose shadow lies slant on their property from the neighboring Presbyterians. It could be the cross symbol cut into the communion wafers, or the cross hanging on the back wall of the sanctuary, or the many crosses people wear as jewelry.
No, it turns out to be the black-cloth-draped cross that stands on their chancel during Lent—one that looks a lot like this one [pointing to one on our chancel]. (Our residents often take these practices with them from Wilshire to their new churches.)
But why is this woman afraid of that cross? Apparently the loosely draped cloth on it seems ghastly and ghostly to her. It evokes her tears and fears. It spooks her. She can’t look at it, and she hasn’t been back to church since. She’ll be back for Easter, she says.
How very telling, Jake says, not just of this woman but also of a Christian culture that knows nothing of darkness. Yes, the cross is hideous and terrifying before it is beautiful and gracious. It’s hard to look at, if you are really looking, because it denies our denials. Maybe this is the first time she really saw it, and it scared the hell out of her. Actually, the cross is supposed to scare the Hell out of you—literally; but it can do that only if you embrace it and not avoid it.
Jake was planning to meet her this past week for tea at a place called Sugar Plums to discuss it. He figured that was safe. Ironically, he said, that ladies’ tearoom has a heavy clown theme that totally freaks him out. Go figure.
Well, the figure of the cross cuts right to our hearts. And on this Sunday that begins Holy Week, we begin to force ourselves to do what that fearful church woman could not bring herself to do. We look at the cross of Christ. We let it look at us. And we see if we mean what we have been saying all this Lenten season, “Yes, we will walk with Jesus.” We will follow him even to the cross, because we are learning that the way of the cross leads home.
Luke’s gospel takes us all the way to the cross today. We’ll get there again later this week when we hold a service here that combines a Maundy Thursday commemoration of the Last Supper with the crucifixion of Good Friday. We combine them because we know how hard it is to coax you out two weeknights in a row, and we want to make sure we get you to the cross somehow. But because most churches realize that most people don’t even give one more weeknight to this, we combine on one Sunday both Palm and Passion emphases. And we’ll see how appropriate that is in a moment as the whole story hinges on the meaning of Hosanna.
Holy Week began when the first Hosannas were called out with waving palm fronds and Jesus being called blessed while riding on a donkey into Jerusalem. Since then Jesus has been betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, and deserted by all his followers, who quit following him with their own lives the moment the cross really came into view. He’s been handed over to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and found innocent. But he finds himself caught in the crosshairs of a religious and political struggle that has left him the scapegoat. He’s been beaten and made to carry his own cross outside the city to a hanging hill that looks from a distance like the shape of a skull. There they have hammered nails through his wrists and feet, in order to fix him to the wooden crossbars, and then they have hoisted him up in shame as a common criminal. The Lord of all creation, through whom every one of us was made, has been made a victim of the harshest violence ever invented.
That’s what we ought to remember when we look at a cross. By its very nature it should be a thing of horror before a thing of beauty. In a way, that Georgia woman was right to be afraid, even though she was wrong to stay away from church on account of it. Like so many of us who show up at church on Palm Sunday for the Hosannas and then only again on Easter Sunday for the Hallelujahs, you’d think Jesus’ week between involved having someone hang a lovely cross around his neck instead of his being hanged on one himself. Sugar Plum Christianity.
But why was he crucified? And how does his crucifixion save us?
Two weeks ago about thirty Wilshire folk were on a mission trip in Mobile. We were painting the small sanctuary of the Hillcrest Baptist Church, but we finally called in some professionals to help. On the back wall of that room hangs a large wooden cross, a reminder to the preacher never to forget what the gospel is about. Anyway, some were concerned about how we would paint around the cross to not mess it up. One of the professional painters, a man named Lester who was a recovering alcoholic and lay Pentecostal preacher, chimed in. He said that we shouldn’t worry about the cross itself, because it’s only a symbol anyway. The main thing is what it symbolizes. It’s what Jesus did on that cross that ought to matter to us. It’s how he gave up his life for us to save us.
Exactly. Notice in Luke’s telling of the story, when Jesus is crucified with the criminals on his right and left, we are to see how the world looked at him as a guilty sinner, too—someone getting what he deserved. But if he weren’t—if he were really innocent, if he really were the Messiah after all—then it wasn’t too late for him to prove it. The religious leaders standing by scoffed at him and said: he saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God. Then the soldiers who crucified him also mocked him: If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself. And finally, one of the criminals joined in: Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!
This gets right to the heart of the cross. The word Hosanna means ?Save us.” It’s what the people cried out plaintively on Palm Sunday and what the leaders, the soldiers, and one criminal next to him on the cross cried out to Jesus contemptuously. The irony is that Jesus does exactly what they ask—he saves, but not in the way they expect.
God saves us because we cannot save ourselves. And Jesus carries out God’s saving work for us precisely by not saving himself.
From the moment we come out of the womb, we are all engaged in a great competition for survival. This is something Charles Darwin saw in nature and applied to human nature as well. This competition means that some will make it and others will not. Survival goes to the fittest. If you are strong enough or clever enough to adapt well enough to your environment, you will survive while others die.
This was how the Jews who cried Hosanna to Jesus thought of their struggle with the Romans. This is how the Roman soldiers thought of their struggle with the Jews. This is how the criminal thought of his struggle with life. There are winners and losers, and when it looks like you can’t help yourself, you turn to God to send you a helper—a messiah, if you will—to save you.
The Discovery channel has a new and glorious series narrated by Oprah Winfrey called Life. Cheetahs are the most endangered cats in Africa. They are fast but fragile. They can catch their prey, but they are easily injured in the hunt, and then become prey themselves. They normally hunt alone, but Life discovered an adaptation of three cheetahs that have learned to hunt together. They cooperate and sacrifice for each other, sharing their kill and looking out for each other as they do. They survive by working together.
This is just a nod in the direction of what we see on the cross in the deepest way. While cheetahs still kill and devour ostriches and the like in order to survive themselves, the eternal God comes among us refusing to sacrifice even one human life in order to save God’s own skin. Jesus saves us by giving his life for us, not by protecting his life from us. The God who by rights could have and should have kept clear of us sinners instead identifies with sinners so closely that God even willingly became victim to sinners.
And when Jesus dies, refusing to play the self-saving game the devil set it up all the way back to the Garden of Eden, the game’s folly was revealed, and its power over us was broken. We think life is only “us against them,” but the way of salvation is “us with them” because the way of the cross is “God with us.”
Years ago the late John Claypool, who was a Baptist preacher at the time before becoming an Episcopal priest, was sitting at the bedside of his preteen daughter, who was suffering from leukemia. The whole experience was so painful for him that he wanted to run from the room screaming. But he forced himself to stay, holding his little girl’s hand, trying to take her pain into himself in order to relieve it for her. It’s the first time he really began to understand Jesus’ words about denying yourself, taking up your cross, and following him.
It’s the same spirit that moved a woman who was suffering from breast cancer to say from her hospital bed that instead of being delivered from it herself, she wished she could take every cancer cell from every victim of it into her own body in order that others might be saved.
What none of us can do for another, God can do for us. Since all of creation was made in and through Christ, he could take of our sin into himself in order to relieve us of its consequences.
To follow Jesus means to walk the way of the cross. And that way saves us all because it binds us together when we are all falling apart. The essence of the cross is love. Love saves by facing the worst and giving the best in return. God dealt with our sin by becoming our sin in order that we might be saved from it.
No matter how sinful you feel yourself to be today, look to the cross and cry Hosanna. Then look for others to carry your cross as a sign of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ.
