Jesus, Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the
world, have mercy upon us. Amen.
It
doesn’t always work out this way, but this year our celebration of Good Friday
falls on the Jewish Passover. Tonight, Jews around the world will gather with
family and friends for a Seder dinner to remember the saving events of God that
occurred at the Passover. You’ll recall that when the people were slaves in
Egypt, God sent a series of plagues to get Pharaoh to let the people go free. The
most severe of these plagues was the killing of all firstborn children in the
land. However, to protect the Jewish firstborn, God instructs the people to get
a lamb, eat it, and use its blood as a marking on the door post. When the
plague of Death sweeps through the land, it will pass over the homes marked
with the blood of the lamb. It was this event that led Pharaoh to tell the
Hebrews to leave Egypt, and at the Red Sea, God ushered his people into
freedom. Since then, Jews have gathered each year to remember the Passover.
In
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have the narrative of the Last Supper, connecting
that final meal that Jesus shared with his disciples to the Passover. But not
John, his chronology is a bit different. And, please, don’t get lost in trying to
sort out which Gospel got it “right.” These stories were not written to give us
an exact play-by-play narrative of what happened, rather they are stories that
show us the Good News of what happened. And for John, that Good News is best
understood when Good Friday falls on Passover, as it does for us this year.
At
the very beginning of John’s Gospel, John the Baptist proclaims, “Behold, here
is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” In John, Jesus did not
eat a final Passover meal with his disciples because, as John wants us to
understand it, Jesus himself is the Passover meal. Since the earliest days of
the Church, we have understood this as well. At each Eucharist, we say, “Christ
our Passover has been sacrificed for us.” Good Friday is about the sacrifice of
Jesus.
For
us moderns, crucifixion seems pretty bad. But the cross is always at a distance
from our experience. Most people have never seen a dead body, certainly not one
that has been mangled by a violent death. I’d venture to guess that none of us
here have ever witnessed an execution. And there’s something of Christ’s
sacrifice as the Lamb of God that we miss out on because we don’t have a frame
of reference to understand what crucifixion was all about.
In
Isaiah, we heard “so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, so
shall he startle many nations” and “It was the will of the Lord to crush him
with pain.” If you ever want evidence of just how depraved humanity is, just
consider crucifixion. It is the most repugnant and despicable form of punishment
imaginable. First, the one to be crucified would be beaten with whips and scourged.
I have no firsthand knowledge of this, but from what I’ve read – just this
aspect would break most of us. Then there is the long walk towards the place
where the crucifixion would take place. Not only does this cause physical
exhaustion, but the mental anguish of being made to carry the instrument of
your own death adds insult to injury.
The
criminal would then be tied to the cross, or in cases when the soldiers felt
particularly sadistic, they were nailed to the cross, as in Jesus’ case. Now, I’m
not at all suggesting that lethal injections, hangings, beheadings, or the
electric chair aren’t terrible, they are; but they are at least quick.
Crucifixion is not – the torment lasts for hours. The human body experiences the
pains of cramps and thirst. And even more cruelly, what leads to death is when
you no longer have the strength to breathe – as the weight of your body
eventually causes the diaphragm to suffocate you. The pain is horrendous, no
wonder “crucifixion” is where we get the word “excruciating.”
For
most of us, that’s enough. We can’t imagine anything worse. But people who
wrote during Jesus’ time tell us that it wasn’t the pain that was so feared
about crucifixion, it was the shame. More than causing pain, crucifixion was
all about degradation. The reason why you had to carry your cross to the place
of crucifixion is that it happened outside the walls of the city. For one, this
made it clear that you do not have a place in the community. But also, the
other thing that was taken out of the city was garbage. The one being crucified
was regarded as trash, as something less than human. Furthermore, whenever you
see a depiction of Jesus on the cross, he’s wearing a loincloth, but that’s for
our modesty and not historical accuracy. Crucifixion happened naked, only
adding to the shame. Crucifixion was also a spectacle. Crowds would show up to
watch while insulting and ridiculing those on the cross. And lest we think them
barbarians and us enlightened, I’d suggest you just spend a few minutes on the
internet or cable television to see that we’re just as barbaric.
In
our culture, humility is seen as a virtue. It was Christians, following the
example of their Lord, who first recognized humility as a virtue; before that,
it had always been seen as a weakness. The sense of public shaming in
crucifixion is something that makes insults and public-shaming on Twitter look
like mere child’s play. Victims of the Cross were treated worse than animals,
because that is how they were seen – as a sub-human species.
On
top of the pain and shame was the religious rejection in Jesus’ Crucifixion. The
events of Good Friday were all public, completely sanctioned by the religious
leaders and carried out by the government. As we heard in Isaiah, “He was
wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the
punishment that made us whole.” The psalm we read offers a glimpse of what it
might have been like to, as the sacrificial lamb, take on the sins of the world
– “For innumerable troubles have crowded upon me; my sins have overtaken me,
and I cannot see; they are more in number than the hairs of my head, and my
heart fails me.” When Jesus was crucified, it was not merely that he was an
enemy of Rome, he was rejected under the Law of Moses as a blasphemer. And by
being crucified, he was doubly rejected as in Deuteronomy we read, “cursed is
anyone who hangs on a tree.”
This
is dark, I know. But with this understanding of the pain, shame, and
Godforsakenness of the Cross, we can start to see how it is that Jesus is the Lamb
of God. Like an animal for sacrifice, he was treated like an animal, he was slaughtered,
and he was scapegoated. It’s not that when Christians looked back upon the
events of Good Friday that they said “It seems like a lamb is a decent metaphor
for what happened to Jesus,” it’s that Jesus was actually treated like a
sacrifice.
In
Jesus’ own religious tradition, the sacrifice of animals, such as lambs, was
common. And it’s not as if the animals were sacrificed just for the sake of
sacrificing, but the meat of the animal was eaten by the priests and given to
those in need. In many ways, it was a much healthier way of consuming food than
going to the grocery store and getting already butchered meat wrapped in styrofoam.
And these sacrifices were made for atonement, forgiveness, and purification. To
us, it may seem like an odd way of being faithful, but we do odd things, too.
We send money to people whom we’ve never met in the name of charity, and that
often makes us feel better for some of our shortcomings. So let’s not judge the
practice as much as trying to understand it as the backdrop for Jesus’
sacrificial death.
And with this sacrifice
in our minds, we can start to understand why John wants us to see Jesus not
just as a sacrifice in general, but as the Passover sacrifice. Certainly, we
can understand Jesus’ death to be the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. But it’s
bigger than that. Just as the blood of the lambs in Egypt stood between the people
and Death, so too does the blood of Jesus save us from eternal Death.
Another way in which John’s
Passion is unique is that Jesus’ last words from the Cross are “It is finished.”
The Greek word that is used there means so much more than “it is over,” but
rather “all has been accomplished.” Throughout John’s Gospel, the story of
Jesus is seen as much more than a story set in a particular time and place, it’s
a story about the entire cosmos. John began by writing, “In the beginning was
the Word.” John begins the story before time began. So when Jesus says “It is
finished,” it’s not only “my life is over,” it’s “The loving purposes of God
which have been in place before the foundation of the world have been brought
to fulfillment.”
From the beginning, God
has desired to be in union with humanity. But because of our selfishness, our
self-reliance, we have cut ourselves off from God. We so often choose
expediency, fame, and fortune instead of trusting in God. We have made ourselves
slaves to Sin and Death. This isn’t a problem that we could solve for
ourselves. And so out of God’s great love for us, God took on flesh in Jesus
and became the Lamb of God.
As
only God could do, Jesus took on the Sin of the world and allowed that Sin to
die on a Cross. Throughout Scripture, God is seen as being the one who upholds the
covenantal relationship with Israel. Constantly, we turn our backs on God, we
are not faithful to God, we do not love our neighbors as ourselves. The relationship
was broken. But all of those things that strained our relationship Jesus takes into
his very being and nails them to the Cross. Any imbalance in the relationship
has been wiped away; all has been forgiven. The disciples of Jesus would have
understood this, Jesus’ death was like that of a sacrificial lamb. The
sacrifice for our sins has been finished.
In
the same way, the Lamb of God died so that when Death comes for us, it will
only knock us down, but we will not remain in death, we will never be separated
from the love of God. The blood of the Lamb of God now marks the doorway of
Death. It’s not time to fully celebrate that aspect of Jesus’ death, but, for
sure, we’ll get there by Easter. But the spilling of his blood as the Lamb of
God is what allows Jesus to proclaim that Death is finished.
During
Jesus’ trial, after he had been flogged, given a crown of thorns, and mocked
with a purple robe, Pilate presented him to the crowd says “Here is the man!” Throughout
John, the phrase “come and see” is used as an invitation to discipleship. And
here, in the center of the Passion, John shows us what we are to come and see.
We are presented with our scourged and mocked Messiah, who is none other than
the Lamb of God, or borrowing from Isaiah’s imagery, “a lamb that is led to the
slaughter.”
On
Good Friday, our work is to merely look at this man and see the Lamb of God,
the King of the Universe, the Savior of the world. There’s a story in the book of
Numbers about a brood of poisonous serpents that are biting and killing the
people. God tells Moses to cast a bronze serpent, put it on a pole, and when the
people look at it, they will be saved. On Good Friday we do the same. That serpent
is Sin and the poison is none other than Death. When we gaze upon that tortured
body on the Cross, we are looking at our salvation, at the Lamb of God who
takes away the Sin of the world and delivers us from Death.
We’ll
soon sing a hymn that is 1,500 years old. As we do so, between stanzas, gaze
upon the crucifix, or let the choir do the singing and fix your eyes on Jesus. Whether
or not you have a grasp on what the Cross means to you, whether or not you have
a lot of faith or a little, look upon the one whom they have pierced and know
of God’s deep and eternal love for you. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the
Sin of the world.
