March 22

March 22, 2009

The Cross of Christ: Reconciliation
a sermon on Colossians 1.21-23
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

Why did Jesus have to die? Why can’t God just forgive sins? I can help you understand one reason with a little thought experiment. It is based loosely on the experience of Corrie Ten Boom. Imagine you are a holocaust survivor. Your family lived in occupied Europe. They hid Jews from the Nazis. They got caught, and all of you were sent to concentration camps. All your worldly belongings were taken away and looted. You were separated from most of your family. You endured hunger, degradation, torture, forced labor, and other atrocities. You were abused and treated in a way no human should ever treat an animal, much less another person. By the time your camp was liberated, the rest of your family was dead. You alone survived. A year or so after your ordeal you have a vision. In it you see one of the guards from the camp. You remember him as a particularly cruel bully. You recall with shivers his laugh and the whip he carried at his side. In your vision he walks into a church, kneels, looks up to heaven, and prays, “God, I have sinned. I know what I did was wrong. Please forgive me.” You hear God say, “OK, no problem. You’re forgiven.”

You are shocked. Horrified! How can God be so glib, so insensitive to your pain and the suffering of so many others? It doesn’t make sense. This man deserves judgment, condemnation. He ought to rot in hell for what he did. And God would just wave his hand and say, “Sure”?!

Then things get worse. In your dream, God addresses you directly: “I have shown you this so that you will know I have forgiven this man, and now you must forgive him too.” What?! Forgive him? You’ve got to be kidding, Lord. How can you expect me to just forgive him and act as if nothing happened? How can you just wave away his guilt and expect me to go along with it? …

Think about it. If that happened to you, how would you feel about God? Would you feel like praising him for his justice … or his goodness … or his love? …

But …what if God did not simply forgive the guard? What if God instead went to the cross? The guard repents. God forgives. You object. God answers, “Yes, you are right. He does deserve to suffer. He ought to die. He ought to be condemned. I cannot and will not let his sin pass. But I will take it on myself. Whatever anger you have, turn it toward me. Your pain, your hatred—direct them at me. I will bear it all. I will take his guilt and your righteous anger, and I will nail them to the cross. I will bear the punishment that should be his, so let your hostility roll over me. I will go to the cross, and then, let there be peace.

What difference would that make? We often think of our sins nailed to the cross. It works the other way too. The sins that have hurt us are also dealt with on the cross. And you see how that sets us free. We can be free from bitterness and on-going pain. We can actually be free to forgive.

Welcome to the fourth sermon in my five sermon series on the cross. I can’t think of anything more appropriate to preach about during Lent than this. I am answering the question: Why did Jesus die? How does his death save us? (That sounds like two questions, but it’s two different ways to ask the same one.) As you also know by now, scripture offers at least five answers to this question. Why five answers? I suspect because the truth is deep, complicated, mysterious, and probably only God can fully understand it. With God things tend to have a lot of layers and connections, and it only makes sense that they should. Think about it: You have a lot more personality than an ant. Well, the difference between God and you is much greater than the difference between you and an ant. God is God, and we struggle to understand him. But, he wants us to know him. He wants us to trust him and have a relationship with him. He wants us to appreciate his love and understand, so far as we are able, what he did for us through Jesus Christ. So he explains it to us in ways we can grasp. Maybe we can’t comprehend the whole thing fully, but we can comprehend enough. By giving us these different ways to think about the cross, God both helps us understand it and reminds us that there are depths we cannot yet fathom.

What are the five answers? Jesus set an example for us to follow. He gave his life as a ransom for many. Jesus was our substitute, taking the punishment that should have been ours, so the cross meets our need to deal with guilt. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, so the cross meets our need to be loved. And, on the cross Jesus triumphed over sin, death, and evil; so the cross meets our need to be free from fear. This sermon is about the cross as God’s way of reconciling the world to himself.

We all know what reconciliation means. Some of us know it from experience. At some point an important relationship in your life was broken—with a parent, a child, a spouse, or a neighbor—but later you were able to work through the problems and overcome the estrangement, so that now the relationship is good. Or, even if it is not everything it should be, at least it functions. Reconciliation means the healing of relationship. Two parties were at odds. They were enemies. Reconciliation restores peace. In this way of looking at the cross, the death of Jesus brings peace—first of all between God and humankind, and second, among human beings. The cross has this double effect, and you cannot separate the two consequences. As you are reconciled to God, you are reconciled to your brothers and sisters. Being forgiven means learning to forgive. This is basic. Jesus made that point over and over, even in the Lord’s Prayer. He came to bring peace and make all of our relationships exactly what God dreamed they would be when he created us.

Let me walk you through the plot of this answer: God created us, and he loves us. In fact, he created us in his own image so that he could love us and we in turn could love him. He also intended that we love one another. Hence the two great commandments that Jesus says contain the Law and the Prophets: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself. That is God’s will. That is his dream.

That is not, however, the reality we live. Why not? If God made us for love and that’s what he wants, why is reality so different? Why do we struggle in our relationships? Why is it so hard to love the people closest to us? Why do so many marriages fall apart? Why are so many of the rest unhappy? Why is having family over for the holidays so stressful? Why do people have so much trouble getting along in the workplace? There are always those little currents of animosity just under the surface. Church is no exception. God has brought us together to worship him and to help one another live the Christian life. We believe that. Yet every church has cliques, personality conflicts, and the like. I could go on. You get the point. Why are relationships so hard?

Christianity says it’s because we’re broken. That’s the bad news. The good news is, things aren’t supposed to be this way. If we are broken, we can be fixed. And that’s where Jesus comes in.

We are broken because we turned our back on God, our most important relationship. Genesis explains this with the story of Adam and Eve, but all of us could look at our own experience. We have all been selfish. We have all asserted our own authority over God’s and done what we know is wrong. (We could blame Adam the way he blamed Eve and she blamed the serpent; but we do better to own up to our responsibility.) Consequently, our most vital relationship, the one that makes us who we are and gives us our ability to keep all our other relationships whole, is cut off. We are made in God’s image, but we are estranged from him.

God, however, does not stop loving us. He does not give up on us. In spite of our sin (that’s the word the Bible uses to label actions and attitudes that destroy relationships), God will not walk away from us. Instead, he set out to restore the broken relationship. He set in motion a plan that began with Abraham and Sarah. The decisive moment came with the death and resurrection of Jesus. In Jesus of Nazareth, God himself showed up in the flesh. Then he went willingly to the cross. He willingly suffered the abuse, injustice, humiliation, and pain. Why? Because on the cross, he took all of our hostility and enmity upon himself. He took all the brokenness and everything that stood in the way of peace, and he nailed it to the cross.

On the cross, God demonstrated his love for us. “For God so loved the world …” That’s right. After the cross, we can never doubt that. Thus, the cross meets our deepest need, the need to be loved.

Two teenagers were lying on the roof of a porch looking up at the night sky. On a clear night without much artificial light around, the stars shone brightly. The sky had depth to it, as if you could fall up into the heavens and never stop falling. One teen, contemplating the vastness of the universe felt uneasy. He felt small, insignificant, and alone. “You ever feel like a speck of dust?” he asked his friend. “No,” came the answer. “Why?” You see, when he looked up at those tiny lights, knowing that some of the light he was seeing had been traveling through space at unimaginable speed for thousands of years, he did not feel small and alone. He felt secure and loved. The stars spoke to him of the power, wisdom, and glory of God. As a child he had learned the hymn, “This Is My Father’s World,” and that was the attitude with which he gazed upon the heavens. He realized he was small, and in the cosmic scheme his span of life was but a fleeting moment. But he also knew small does not mean insignificant. If the One who created all this died for him … well, he experienced the same night sky very differently from his friend.

Our brokenness makes relationships hard. It also isolates us. People often feel alone, alienated, or that life has no meaning. The universal human need to feel loved manifests itself in this distinctly modern way: “No one understands me, and I don’t understand life.” So the cross has special relevance to our times, for in it God proves his love for us. Billy Joel has a great line in his song The Piano Man, “They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it’s better than drinking alone.” That’s the modern world. But when we look at the cross, we know that our hunger for meaning and our hunger for love can be satisfied.

Whenever you read in scripture or sing in a hymn about reconciliation, peace, or the love of God, you know this is the view of the cross it has in mind. Whenever Jesus is called “mediator,” you know this is what it is talking about.

Jesus is our mediator. A mediator works between two parties to reach an agreement. Jesus is fully divine and fully human, so he is the perfect mediator. He brings together God and humanity, and he restores peace and love.

So what practical difference does this answer make in our everyday lives. Three very important ones:

1. Come to God through Jesus Christ. If you have never turned to God in repentance and faith to accept his grace and have your relationship to him healed, you need to do so. You need Jesus. There is no other way to God except him. Why? Doesn’t that seem a bit narrow and exclusive? In a way, but it also makes sense. Jesus is the way to God because Jesus is God. If there were many ways to restore our relationship with God, why would he add one more that cost him the cross? That makes no sense. Forgiveness is costly, and Jesus paid the cost. Reconciliation is possibly, therefore, through him; for in him God took that crucial first step to make peace.

2. You must forgive as you have been forgiven. Christ died to make peace, not only between God and humanity but also among people. This includes peace among nations, racial reconciliation, and personal relationships. The cross touches our community and our family life. Writing about the effect the cross has on people of different races and cultures, Paul says, “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” [Eph 2.14].

Whatever walls divide you from others, the cross breaks them down. I believe the power of the cross is so great that no wall of hostility can stand against it. This means, in theory, that all hostility can be healed. Think about that. The cross has the potential to bring peace to any situation—even the Middle East. That’s hard to imagine, but I’m sure it is what Jesus had in mind.

On a personal level, this means you have an incredible power to heal broken relationships. With this power comes the obligation to forgive. Jesus told a story about this: A servant who owed millions of dollars came crawling to his master, “I can’t pay! I don’t have the money! Please, have mercy!” In those days, you didn’t declare bankruptcy; you went to debtor’s prison until your family paid your debt. This guy was staring down a life sentence. The master forgave the debt. Later, however, this same servant ran into a fellow servant who owed him just $10. When his debtor pleaded for mercy, he showed none and had him throw into jail. When the master heard about this, he was furious. He had the unforgiving servant thrown into jail until he could pay the millions he owed. The moral of the story: If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven.

The cross heals relationships between people because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t acknowledge the power of Jesus’ sacrifice to wash away your sins but say it isn’t good enough to wash away your brother’s sins or your mother’s or your neighbor’s or the person in the pew next to you. You can’t say it is strong enough to reconcile you to God but not strong enough to reconcile you to another human being.

Jesus took our sins, our hostility, everything that cuts off relationship; and he nailed it to the cross. He broke down every wall that divides. Now let there be peace.

3. Evangelism. … I’ll bet you didn’t see that coming! Paul, again, wrote: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, [there’s our theme!] not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. [Oh, my!] So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us” [2 Cor 5.19-20].

An ambassador represents someone else, usually a nation or a sovereign. In this case, we represent God. Peace has been declared. He wants everyone to know it. He wants them to know those walls have been torn down. So he appoints us as his ambassadors. We are his peace delegation.

So what are we supposed to do? We are supposed to tell people about the power of the cross to reconcile. That’s evangelism. We spread the Good News. To people who are lonely and confused, we proclaim God’s love. To people who are at odds, we proclaim peace. To all we proclaim the possibility of peace with God through Jesus.

We also do something else, though—something that gives our message teeth. We make peace. In our own relationships we demonstrate the reconciling power of the cross. When we find ourselves in situations filled with tension and hostility, we make peace. A Christian can make a big difference, for example, in the workplace. Every workplace had the potential for conflict. Jealousy and rivalry can poison a work environment. In your workplace, you can make things worse … or better. You can be a peacemaker. Not just at work but in your family, neighborhood, your clubs and social groups, and at church. That’s one way to live the meaning of the cross.

The cross is about peace. It is about restored relationships. It is about reconciliation. Amen.

rev_mauldin@yahoo.com back to sermons