For the past 4 weeks we have been looking at the ‘A, B, C’s’ of lent. We have looked at Attitudes and Behaviours, with the idea of getting naked, or discarding certain attitudes and behaviours that get in between God and us. Then putting on or dressing up with attitudes and behaviours that God calls every one of us to have, to lead a truly good and holy life. Now we get to the last two weeks, the big C of lent. Remembering we are leading up Easter can anyone guess what the big C is?
The Cross or to be more specific “Christ Crucified”, so its probably really two C’s. This phrase comes straight from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. 1 Cor 1:23 “Christ crucified”.
Christ crucified is the crux of Christianity, its the big crucial moment of all four gospels, in fact there is about as much written in the gospels about the events of Jesus death then there is about his life. The word ‘Crux’ is from the the latin word for cross. So when we say the crux of the mater is blah-de-blah. We’re actually saying “Just as the cross is central to Christianity, so is blah-de-blah central to this project!”.
So we’re starting to get the idea that this ‘C’ of lent (Christ crucified) is pretty big and important. In fact I could say that in the ABC of lent, CC is VVIP, OK?
When we think of Jesus Christ, what image do we have? Do we think of the Jesus that Thomas met in that locked house? The resurrected Jesus who still bears the scars of his crucifiction, the nail marks in his hands, the deep gash in his side? Or do we think of another sort of Jesus? What about when we pray? Which Jesus do we like to pray to?
[Talladega Knights]
Tonight this sermon is about stripping away our nice sanitary image’s of Christ and focussing on Christ crucified,
The Christ who died and rose again but still bears the marks of his crucifiction today. This is the Christ written about by Paul, and the Christ we meet at the end of the gospels.
So why is Christ crucified so important to us?
Well, we could each do a PhD on the subject and not finish answering the question, but ask anyone who’s just finished the Nicki Gumble Alpha course and the answer is that ‘Christ died to save us from our sins’, or as the KIDMO memory verse goes from John 3:16 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”.
Even though this message is well known, as Jono told me during the week, today most of us find this message offensive.
Even though this is a message of the power of God, life for all, a message of ultimate love from God for us, a message of release from darkness into light!
(As it says in the bible reading) In the wisdom of the world it is a message of foolishness, extreme offense.
Christ crucified, the Jesus we find at Easter is to be glossed over and wrapped up in pretty, coloured foil, delivered to us by the easter bunny, consumed and forgotten about, along with delicious frozen hot cross buns, within a week.
Why is it that we want to gloss over or even completely ignore Christ crucified?
You see the message that “Christ was crucified and died to save us from our sins” implies that we are all sinners, we have all done wrong things, some scholars would say we have all done things that bring evil into the world. Phil once defined sin as acts of ‘un-love’. This is the offence, how dare someone accuse me of doing wrong!
I don’t know about you but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing really wrong with me, apart from a bit bad luck and bad timing, ‘I’m doing ok thank you very much. Sure I may have made a few mistakes but deep down I’m good person’. In fact don’t we think this of most people?
To call someone or even our own self a sinner who needs saving seems just a tad too offensive.
Mistake. Its a funny word. Why do think we use that term ‘mistake’ when we’re really talking about sin?
To call something a mistake, is to treat as something we didn’t really mean to do, just one of those things, not really anything to do with me. We use mistake in place of choice. I think its symptomatic of a much bigger problem in the world. Which I’m going to explore now. The ‘Not My Fault’ problem.
The culture of blame where in Australian society, responsibility has been replaced with a new much more clever attitude to life: “When in doubt, blame someone else and sue for compensation.”
overlawyered.com has a swag of terribly depressing stories of this type of attitude gone stupid!
Here you find stories not just about Americans but Aussies too:
eg. see other notes
This ‘Ill sue you” culture is just one example of avoiding responsibility.
People use to get upset with the idea of God being a pupperter and were the puppets, but amazingly people these days are are quite happy to admit they are "made" to do things:
by their genes,
by their parents,
by their drugs (I did not sleep with that girl, "unless of course I was drunk at the time"),
by some superior being and,
by TV,
and by other people.
Everyone, it seems, has an excuse for bad behaviour - even serial adulterers, who can exchange their guilt for pity via "sex addiction".
Why do we do it? Why are we like this?
Why do we have culture of blame?
I think there’s two things:
1) Consequence of sin
Sin doesn’t just go away, if we ignore it or try and blame someone else! Just like our rubbish, it never disappears, but can clog up other parts of the world and create dumping grounds of extreme ugliness that can be seen by satellite. There are consequences, and it will catch up with us eventually.
My high school friends (Milan and Melanie). Seriousness of sin, there are consequences, for these friends of mine it has killed their life.
Cause and Effect
When it comes to sin or if I put it ‘injustice’ everyone would have this feeling that someone ought to pay. There needs to some consequence. If someone has stolen my new iPod, someone needs to pay. It’s Newtons law of motion: cause and effect. The trouble with current culture is that most people aren’t willing to accept that consequence, hence they try and shift the blame until someone pays. Ideally that someone is big, successful, influential and rich.
The herion addict who stole the iPod, blames his parents, his parents blame the school he went to, his school blames the pub and pokies down the road for supplying kids alcohol, illegally which lead to other drug-addictions,the pub blames the government for not providing enough protection for young people, the government hires clever lawyers to pass the blame again but secretly blame America for bringing their hip-hop culture to our shores etc etc..
Trouble is this isn’t really dealing with the real issue, it just ends up spreading more lies, more deceit and creating more rubbish for the world. It’s a vicious cycle: we sin, there are consequences of that sin, we don’t want these consequences so we try and pass them onto others, using blame and compensation, this just spreads and increases the original sin. Sin begets more sin.
Eventually, By not wanting to deal with the consequences we end up becoming slaves to our sin, captives to our ever growing rubbish pile.
The bible is pretty clear on what the consequences of sin are for us. Isaiah 59:2 Sins separate us from God, Read the story of Adam and Eve somtime and see the blame that goes on their, lauhgable, and the consequences.
[Genesis: Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, God said: eat from any tree but the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat it you will surely die.
As soon as they ate, they try and cover their nakedness, Gen 3:7-13, they try and hide, then they blame others. And then God in his love and justice, doesn’t do what a weak parent would have done ‘Ohh look okay it was a bit of mistake, and it was really the serpent, so lets just pretend it didn’t happen and count that as warning 1. Okay?’. God can’t ‘pretend’ it didn’t happen when it did. The fruit was eaten and things had changed.]
Sin in the bible always changes something. [For Adam and Eve the consequence of that was banishment from the garden, and death].
2) The world doesn’t know how to handle accepting blame.
Just like the world is struggling to handle its own mountains of rubbish. We don’t know how to handle accepting something as my fault, yes it was me, I did wrong, that is my sin, I am sorry. That is offensive!
We can’t stand the idea that it is ‘my fault’. Instead of standing tall, being honest with our sins, we run away and when cornered we blame. We are too scared of what the consequences of admitting guilt might lead too.
It seems like the world has forgotten the reason for the cross. We have forgotten that Christ died for our sins so that we finally have way of dealing with the consequences and we no longer need to blame. We can finally stop running and be honest!
We have remembered the baby Jesus but by glossing over Christ crucified, we have forgotten the only way we can actually deal with the horrible feelings inside that say ‘actually, yes, that wasn’t a mistake, I chose to do that, that was me’.
Lets go back to the text in 1 Corinthians:
It talks about the Greeks looking for wisdom and the Jews demanding miracles. They were both looking for the wrong thing. They were saying:
Greeks, look Jesus you’re really clever and we’re pretty clever too, soooo lets get together and work out how we can turn our pretty good life into a really cool life!
The Jew’s were saying look we’re in a spot of bother at the moment, as these Romans have kinda come in and taken over our city and dropped poo all over our once happy way of life, what say you do a little shebang-bang higgerty piggerty and get rid of them all for us? You know Moses parting of the red sea type stuff?
Trouble is they both forgot they were talking to Christ crucified. Jesus wasn’t interested in worldly wisdom or saving the Jews from the Romans, he was concerned in saving the people from themselves, in bringing them back to God, not away from the Romans.
This passage says that both Jews and Greeks and struggled with the same things we do now. They saw themselves as essentially good people, not in need of much change. They didn’t look to Jesus for salvation from their sins, they had hardly done any, and if they had it was someone else’s fault (eg. the Romans). They were in the age of wise men and philosphers, the age of intellegence. They’d didn’t need Christ for saving their sins but for his miracles and wisdom.
It’s no different from today. We seem to think we need Jesus more for his clever ethical teaching and his miracles then we do for saying sorry to about our sins.
Part of the foolishness of the cross is it provokes us all to say “Yes, it was my fault”.
Here’s the good news!
Christians don’t have to play the game with the rest of the world.
We have a way of dealing with our big mess-ups which are our own fault. AND it doesn’t involve spreading the mess further or escaping from the truth or even a lawyer.
Christ died like a common criminal for our ‘mistakes’. Christ finally, once and for all stuck his hand up in the midst of our hypocrosy and said ‘I will’, I will take responsibility for the actions of my beloved brothers and sisters. Even as we hurled insults and whips and stones at him he said, ‘Forgive them Father for they do not know they do”.
What we now are called to do is to face up to this Jesus Christ, the Christ that was crucified, and say “Yes Lord, that was me. I did it.” We say it honestly, with humility and remorse and with full knowledge of the proper consequences of our actions.
These consequences can be seen in the marks and wounds of Jesus, just as Thomas discovered himself. Someone has to take responsibility for the rubbish. And praise God, that through the wonderful love of God, Christ in pain and suffering releases us from the weight of that responsibility.
Take seriously and honestly our sin. Talk to Christ crucified in prayer and say “I’m sorry for this big mess up” Do as the tax collector did in Luke 18 v 13. that Jesus once spoke of who stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven but beat his breast and said. “God have mercy on me a sinner”.
Then because of God’s great love for us, we are forgiven through Christ crucfied. The consequences are dealt with, our burdens are taken away and we are finally free to live the life God created us for.
But let’s remember the consequences of our sin are dealt with by Christ crucified not the baby Jesus, or the Ninja Jesus, or even the good moral yoda Jesus. Its the Jesus that died and rose again. So if we ignore this Jesus, then we’re also saying ‘Yes’ to carrying around more and more rubbish, we’re saying ‘yes’ to being trapped in the blame game and we’re saying ‘yes’ to the consequences of our own injustices. But start talking to Christ crucified and we’re saying ‘yes’ to God’s love, yes to dealing with our rubbish, and yes to bringing light and life to our world.
