Sermons: Passion Sunday

March 9, 2008

Last week we meditated upon the freedom or liberation that comes to us in Lent through the life of Jesus Christ.

You will remember that our Gospel lection for the day presented the miracle of the five thousand. Five thousand men with their wives and children had been following Jesus, listening to his words and observing the miracles that he performed on many. In Jesus they saw some truly powerful force at work, and so were arrested by or consumed with the possible meaning of this strange presence. The people wondered and marveled. But also they sought out nourishment by way of hearing his words and trying to digest them in their souls. The people were hungry for spiritual food. Having received it, they were fed physically, for their bodies were tired and in need of sustenance.

The five-thousand plus people who followed Jesus showed us that true freedom or liberation comes when the soul seeks out spiritual and heavenly things first in life. True freedom is found when the soul seeks her good, her happiness and the meaning of existence or life. True liberation is found when the human being can be united to that which does not perish, fade away or die. St. Paul likened true freedom to the generation or birth of God’s promises in the world. True freedom is found when we are born anew, remade and regenerated in the spirit. After that, the body’s needs can be met. But only after that.

Lent is about freedom. Freedom is found when we walk with Jesus, follow him, hear his words and allow them to take up residence in our souls. But freedom, found with and in the presence of Jesus Christ, requires another dimension. To live in the freedom that Christ gives to us, we must be freed of the human tendency to put the flesh, the temporal world, the space of fleeting fancies first. To live in Christ’s freedom means to live under his Grace and to walk with him away from ourselves- our selfish, pride-ridden lives towards God. And the author of the Epistle of the Hebrews helps to set us on this path in this morning’s reading. Christ has come down from heaven as “the high priest of good things that have come.”

Christ brings into his human life the presence of good things or the nearness of God’s free nature. He presents to us a new tabernacle or rather he pitches his tent in our midst. His tent is God’s space or home for us. Under the protection of its covering we can walk with Jesus into our true freedom. But we must take refuge under the covering of his tent. We must give ourselves to his protection and to his power. It is of no use to rely upon ourselves any longer. It is futile for us to think that our earthly offerings---the blood of goats and calves in olden times, money and status in our own, can save us and help us. It is only the life of Christ that can save us. And we can begin to encounter and then embrace that life only when we welcome Christ’s offer to follow him up to Jerusalem under the covering of his tent. In his presence, protected by his love and power, we will walk into the freeing power of salvation.

But this walk that we make with Jesus is neither easy nor will it be always pleasant. To be sure, with the covering of Christ’s tent, we are under Grace. But there is more. We go up to the Jerusalem of suffering and death. We go up to witness the Passion of the Christ. Passion means to suffer, to endure, to take on, to embrace. We go up with Christ to receive the Grace of his life. We go up with Christ to experience his Passion. And his Passion is his taking on of our condition or suffering for us, that we might be made freed.

Under the tent of his Passion we will begin to experience the fact that somehow in Christ all of our false gods and our illusory pleasures will die a hard death. In Christ they will be put to death. They will try to put him to death, and in a bodily way they will. But he will put them to death in a spiritual and heavenly manner. He will even put us to death, not forcibly, but when we see what is happening before us. In us they must be put to death also.

Karl Barth says this about being in Christ and under the tent of his Grace:

In Christ you are under Grace. Comprehending Him, you are Comprehended in his death; with His human body you are made Dead.

All human possibilities, including the possibility of religion, have been offered and surrendered to God on Golgotha…Golgotha is the end of law and the frontier of religion…through the slain Body of Christ, we are what we are not.
Barth: Epistle to the Romans

We travel with Christ. Grace leads us into the freedom of truth. To obtain the truth and to experience it we must allow Christ to die for us. To arrive at that place, we then must see that we are with him, in him and under his care. To make it to that reality, we must know that we will die with him. Looking upon the life that will allow its own death, we too shall die. With our death all of our power becomes nothing. Our possibilities are known and experienced as nothing. Our religious posturing and visible behavior are vain and fruitless with death. The life of man without God is over. The frontier of new freedom is opened up before us in the death of our Saviour.

Sometime before the coming of Christ Jesus, God’s Word reached the ears of Solomon. What he heard was music, and he wrote it down in his Song of Songs. This book of the Bible is really a love poem, written from God to all human beings. It is the song of God’s coming, his presence and his desire that man should share his freedom and enjoy it forever. In chapter eight of the poem Solomon records what he hears from God his true love. God speaks. “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave. Love’s flashes are flashes of fire, a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly scorned.” Song of Songs 8:6.

The Grace of God found in Christ, within his tabernacle, under the protection of his tent, is love. Love is offered to us continually. Love is eternal and cannot be extinguished. “Before Abraham was, I am.” Before the creation of anything, God is, Christ is, the Spirit of love is. Love will endure all things in order to offer itself to us. Human power will try to put out its flame. Human power will try to buy it off for thirty pieces of silver. The floods of human jealousy, resentment, and envy will try to kill it off. And what will die is sin. What will rise is God’s love. And that love will be offered to us when we too die and long to have the freedom of God’s friendship more fully.