Introduction.
On Palm Sunday we have two readings. One is the entry into the City – the liturgy of the palms they call it. Second is the liturgy of the passion – where we hear of Jesus suffering – betrayal, arrest, trials, crucifixion, death.
This morning we will listen to that liturgy. It is a long read – two chapters – around 15 mins.
After I finish I will share a few other reflections…
As we listen I want us to think how do these events help us in our suffering or help us to help those who suffer, for quite a few in this church have experienced suffering in this past 12 months…
And, if Jesus is the Word made Flesh, as we declare, God among us, Immanual, what do we learn about our suffering God, our crucified God, as we listen to our Lord’s Passion.
Read Luke 22 – 23v49.
Opening comments.
There is suffering at many levels and from many directions by our Lord.
It begins Satan provokes the final actions of those opposed to Jesus. He enters Judas and Judas provides a way he can be arrested and dealt with…
As he prepares to serve us all, you can imagine his grief, as around the table where he is eating the disciples argue about who is the greatest.
He points to bread and wine as a mean that we will always remember his suffering…
In the garden, the struggle, the commitment to the plan, ‘not my will but yours be done.’’
Then betrayal – by someone close to him for the past 3 years; denial by another; arrest, trial by those who should have recognised he was fulfilling the promises of God. Physical assault, then further trials by Pilate and Herod, before the Crowd who call for his death…
Carrying a cross until he could no longer. Crucified with all its pain.
People mocked and shouted.
Darkness came. His 12 followers bar John no where to be seen.
Death…
We know the end – Easter – all is fine.
But all this suffering, what did it mean for Christ?
These scars are shown to the disciples later and these scars remained on Jesus body when he ascended and when you and I see him, those scars he will still have.
How important is it to us that we have a crucified God?
We agree with the importance of what the suffering achieved for us – salvation – something Daniel will take us through tomorrow night…
But what of the fact that our God suffered?
We can see Jesus death – and see it as an example of love, faithfulness…
we can focus on what that death meant and achieved. Atonement and victory over death and new creation to come.
Yet do we consider, what did this death mean for God?
We have to ask ourselves who is on the cross.
God was fully present in Christ – that is the revelation to us.
Therefore God was on the cross, when Jesus was crucified, and thus he suffered – as Reformer Martin Luther described, the theology of the cross means we have a crucified God…
Bonhoeffer asked: the issue is not how God suffers.
But the issue is that God does indeed suffer…
What does that suffering look like?
This is more than the God of the OT who suffers WITH his people. Though that is highly important.
He is abounding in love as Exodus 34 declares, like a parent he loves his children and so suffers at their rejection of him.
John 3v16 – for God so loved the world – then God – who is love as John tells us in 1 John – then to have that pure love rejected– as we see happening throughout our chapters 22-23 – brings suffering.
As Jesus said earlier in Luke – he longed to gather them like a hen gathers the chicks…
But remember, Christ – this is not a brief appearance in the world.
There is an end to this appearance – a cross, a death, a tomb.
Is God on the cross?
Jurgen Moltmann, another great German theologian, said – to say that God did not suffer, is to evacuate, to remove God from the cross.
Years ago the C of E Doctrine Commission said – to say that God did not suffer is to mean his divine side had been anesthetised, while only his human side suffered.
Yet if we stand on scripture, if we believe the creeds we declare, if we agree with the centuries of church tradition, which all declares that Jesus was God incarnate, therefore by logic, he did suffer, die on the cross, and was raised. So our suffering God, is the crucified Christ – ie Christ died.
And yet if Christ died, are we thinking God died?
For that is where our thoughts go… How did God suffer?
For that a Trinitarian model is needed. Our God is Trinity – and this does shape our discussion of ‘’death of God.’’ The Trinity experiences suffering through the cross. Not just one part of the trinity experiences suffering, for they form the God head – three in one.
This is not about the death of God but death in God.
The Son suffers death; the Father suffers the death of the Son.
One dies, it does not mean all die – but, that the Father experiences loss through the death of his Son – whom he had sent. The Son experiences physical suffering and death, out of love.
Suffering is fully experienced by the Trinity, and through the cross – that suffering is overcome and someday will be removed. The suffering is overcome by atonement by Christ.
God suffers the pain of abandonment. ‘My God my God why have you forsaken me’.
Death came upon God.
Father suffers the death of the Son, due to his love for sinful humanity.
God the Father suffers, as does God the Son, and God the Spirit. Different modes.
The Father and the Son suffer, but in different ways.
The Father gives up the son and suffers loss of the son.
The Son experiences pain and the death of the cross.
Both involved in the cross and yet different.
If God is in Christ, and Christ suffered, then God did. ‘’To recognise God in the cross of Christ, conversely means to recognise the cross, terrible suffering, death and hopeless rejection in God.’’ Moltmann, Crucified God, p.277.
A Trinitarian model permits this – where suffering is truly experienced yet God does not die but rather, as Moltmann struggles with this mystery to give us language, the Trinity is shattered by the death of Christ… death in God.
So, the ‘’so what’’ question.
1.As we enter Holy Week, we need to be aware that we do not somehow separate in our minds God from man. That our focus becomes ‘Jesus the man’ in all his suffering and experiences. This is the Word made Flesh – who walked among us, who turned water into wine, who promised the Spirit, who eat meals, and who suffered and was crucified.
2.One application of this. Bonhoeffer put us – ‘‘Our God is a suffering God, and we are summoned to share in God’s suffering at the hands of a godless world.’’ We are in Christ and we are in a Christ who was crucified and therefore, suggesting challenge that the road of a disciple in faithful following will lead us into suffering as we follow the one who suffered. As Christ suffered and was rejected, the disciple of his, will in time experience suffering and rejection as we seek to go against the flow of our world… Note, this is not suffering from living in a fallen world; this is a Christian suffering, that comes through being a faithful disciple. There is the suffering that comes from following the suffering God from being IN Christ.
3.God takes the worlds sin upon himself. Jesus is separated from God the Father in his suffering; so that we in our suffering are not ever separated. God may be silent but he is never absent.
4.Empathy. Suffering is relative. No ones suffering is like another. Hence if we say ‘’ I know what you are going through’’ we never do. Yet we know that when we suffer, when we are among people who experience very similar experiences, the loss of a loved one, a battle against a serious illness, struggles with an addiction, or who grew up / lived through that same period of time, there is a deep level of connectedness. In a significant way they do understand so much more than others. The incarnation means God became fully human and experienced everything. This did not stop at suffering. He was no immunised against it. So the one whom we worship, to whom we pray, he not only knows, he understands.
5. This final point flows from the last one. The Trinity experiences deep loss. The Father. Who suffers. The deepest loss possible. The Trinity is relational and is one of pure love. Therefore that loss on the cross was felt most deeply. The Son. Who suffers – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and relational suffering. Rejection by God. And death is experienced. We have a Trinitarian God who has experienced deep loss.
And yet life comes in and from that deep loss…
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Nobel prize winning Russian novelist – was imprisoned by Stalin in a Siberian gulag. One day working away, he reached the end of his endurance. He dropped his shovel, he say on a bench and waited for a guard to beat him to death. He had seen it happen before and he waited for his death. Before this happen, a fellow prisoner, approached him silently, and that prisoner scratched the sign of the cross in the mud and then scurried away. Solzhenitsyn stared at those two lines scratched in the dirt, he message of the cross mixed with this sense of despair. He later wrote: ‘’in that moment I knew there was something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew the hope of all mankind was represented in that simple cross. And through the power of the cross, anything was possible.’’ He picked up his shovel and went back to work.
Pete Greig comments on that – Nothing but the message of God’s suffering could have inspired Solzhenitsyn to return to work that day. Only the presence of God at Golgotha could bring the gulag fresh possibilities. Most than just the comforting knowledge of divine empathy (great as that is), the cross rekindled in Solzhenitsyn the actual hope that everything was possible for God – even in a Siberian concentration camp, where all the evidence suggested otherwise.’’ (Grieg God on Mute. P71).
So invite you to consider this week, how does the suffering we hear of, help us or help us to help others in their suffering.
And what do we learn about our suffering God.
Shall we pray.
‘’O Christ Jesus
When all is darkness
And we feel our weakness and helplessness,
Give us the sense of your presence
Your love and your strength.
Help us to have perfect trust
In your protecting love
And strengthening power,
So that nothing may frighten or worry us,
For, living close to you,
We shall see your hand,
Your purpose, your will through all things. Amen. ‘’ (Ignatius of Antioch)