Christ has Died
Palm Sunday 2023
April 2, 2023
Fr. Tim Nunez
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Right after we arrived at Sewanee for seminary, they dedicated the brand-new Chapel of the Apostles. It had a beautiful cross at the front. Our New Testament professor, Chris Bryan, bought a beautiful, hand-carved wooden likeness of Jesus, imported from Italy. I happened to be working in the mailroom when it arrived and they opened it to make sure he was ok. It was very lifelike and a little disturbing to see in that pine box.
Professor Bryan wanted a crucifix for Lent. It immediately caused swirling debate. The Anglo-Catholics love a crucifix. The Protestant side of the Church prefers an open cross or Christus Rex as we have. They were furiously arguing in the halls. The Dean wrote a big essay on the history of the crucifix in the Anglican tradition. But that didn’t settle it. It was like we were re-living the Reformation on the spot!
This raged on for about a week until after Morning Prayer one day Chris Bryan stood up to address the seminary. He said, and he was a Brit so I hope I get this right, “I understand there’s been a bit of controversy about the crucifix. I believe that’s the point.” And that ended it.
He told me later, “If you can’t argue in seminary, where can you argue?”
People often struggle with the fact that Jesus died and the way he was treated those last 18 hours or so, and the way he died. It is truly horrible. The more realistically it is rendered in art or film, the harder it is. Whatever you are able to tolerate, we must not gloss over Christ’s death.
I am so thankful that our church remembers it every year. I’m thankful that our Lake Wales ministerial association observes the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday every year. I have friends who are pastors in other denominations who slip into Episcopal services during Holy Week.
But still, we struggle with it. It is much nicer to focus on the words and work of Jesus before he died and after he was raised. But all four Gospels give the Passion a great deal of focus because our central, radical claim is that he rose from the dead. One cannot rise from the dead unless one has died. And he died for the most important reason: God’s love for his people.
The reality of Jesus’ divinity is why we worship him. The reality of his humanity is in some ways harder to grasp. He really did hunger. He really did tire. He really did suffer. He really did die.
He didn’t almost die only to revive in the coolness of the tomb. People in his time saw death a lot more often than most of us ever have and they did not expect people to get up from it any more than we do. Dead is dead. That was part of his mission to save us. He had to be a true sacrifice.
And, Jesus didn’t die merely as a martyr to a cause. As he and his disciples repeatedly affirm, he died for us as atonement for our sin. There are lots of thoughts people have had over the centuries about HOW that atonement worked, but it’s enough to know that it did.
Justice is represented by scales because a wrong throws justice out of balance. Something has to be done to balance it out; apology, penance, restitution, etc. Pay your fine, serve your time. Humanity’s very natural tendency to go against God’s will created an imbalance of cosmic proportions and we cannot ever plunk enough to the good side to balance it out. We can’t do enough good works. For centuries people – including Israel – offered sacrifices of livestock and so on to try and balance those scales. We couldn’t do it.
Jesus did.
Oswald Chambers offers some guidance on this in My Utmost for His Highest, a daily devotional that remains one of the most popular in the world. His widow compiled it after he died in November, 1917 from his sermons to soldiers, over a century ago. This is from the entry for April 6th to be exact. Chambers wrote,
“The Cross was a superb triumph in which the foundations of hell were shaken. There is nothing more certain in Time or Eternity than what Jesus Christ did on the Cross: He switched the whole of the human race back into a right relationship with God. He made Redemption the basis of human life, that is, He made a way for every son of man to get into communion with God.
The Cross did not happen to Jesus: He came on purpose for it. He is "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." The whole meaning of the Incarnation is the Cross. Beware of separating God manifest in the flesh from the Son becoming sin. The Incarnation was for the purpose of Redemption. God became incarnate for the purpose of putting away sin; not for the purpose of Self-realization. The Cross is the centre of Time and of Eternity, the answer to the enigmas of both.”
And so the hardest thing about The Passion of Jesus Christ is the soul-wrenching conviction that he suffered for us. He died for all of us, but he also died for each of us. Each of us should take that very personally. Perhaps the next hardest thing is that we keep coming back to him again and again for forgiveness and restoration.
All of it was necessary because of our sin and the Lord’s unyielding insistence that we be reconciled to him. He who knew no sin became sin for us.
Our daughter Elizabeth was quite small when we were in Sewanee. The seminary would have a family Eucharist every Thursday evening, followed by a dinner. And I remember Elizabeth’s reaction to that crucifix one Lenten evening. I think she was about 2½. She was disturbed. She kept staring at it. I decided after the service to take her up close so she could see that it was a sculpture. We were nearly alone. It was very quiet. I took her up into the chancel, right next to the cross. She looked long and hard at his face, the crown of thorns on his head, the blood dripping from the thorns on his head and the wounds to his hands, his feet and in his side.
As she looked at him, I was watching her eyes carefully taking all of that in. Finally she said, “Jesus died on the cross.” “Yes,” I said, “he did.”
Thank you, Jesus.
And so we remember, by sharing the Gospel, the Good News of how God’s love was poured out in the blood of Jesus on the hard wood of that cross. People sometimes ask why God would do that. What sacrifices have you made for love? What wouldn’t you give, what wouldn’t you do for the people you love?
We live in Easter joy, but never forget the high cost of love.
AMEN