Was It Really Necessary John 18:1-12, 16b - 42
A woman was getting swamped with calls from strangers. The reason? A medical billing service had launched an 800 number that was identical to hers. When she called to complain, she was told to get a new number.
“I’ve had my number for twenty years,” she pleaded. “Couldn’t you change yours?” The company refused, so the woman said, “Fine. From now on, I’m going to tell everyone who calls that their bill is paid in full.”
The company got a new number the next day.
This is the day on the church calendar when we celebrate the good news that our bill is paid in full. Christ died for our sins. He paid it all. This is the day above all others when we commemorate Christ’s death on the cross of Calvary.
Writer Robert C. Shannon tells a fascinating and amusing story about a nineteenth century emperor of Abyssinia named Merielik II. Abyssinia roughly corresponds to modern day Ethiopia.
Merielik II wished to modernize his country. And in one very unusual move, he ordered three electric chairs from New York. When they arrived he realized that they would not work without electricity. In those days Abyssinia had no electricity. Not one to waste things, Merielik used one of the electric chairs as his throne.
An electric chair seems like an odd device to serve as a throne, but is it any odder than deploying a cross as a center of worship?
A cross was the means of executing criminals. It was the first century equivalent of a gallows, a gas chamber, or if you will, an electric chair.
When you realize that, you have to say,
what an odd device to put on a church steeple or in a sanctuary or on an altar table.
The cross was a cruel, barbaric way to die. Michael Card, in his book A Violent Grace, describes in gruesome detail how determined the Romans were in their desire to make an example of those who had offended the state. First of all the condemned man was scourged, or flogged with a whip, containing small balls of lead at the end of each leather thong. A man could die from that alone. The flogging was brutal. The flesh would hang from the condemned man’s back. Flogging was followed by crucifixion. While the flesh was still raw, the condemned man was nailed to the wood.
“Some scholars think that Jesus may have been flogged twice,” says Michael Card. “The accounts of both Luke and John hint at it. Medical doctors who have studied the accounts of the crucifixion have concluded that severe multiple beatings would account for the fact that Jesus died after only six hours on the cross, while others were known to have hung on crosses for as long as nine days before dying from exhaustion and loss of blood.”
There was the scourging and then the nails driven into his feet and hands. It was a cruel, inhumane way to die. Even today many are offended by the cross. As one theologian has said, “Any church or any preacher who keeps preaching on the cross is not going to grow, because in our culture what we are interested in is success, not sacrifice.”
Churches are being built today with no cross in sight. The blood, the broken body, the sacred sacrifice are offensive to modern sensibilities. And yet you and I still cling to this symbol of suffering and shame. That is why we are here today for this Good Friday service. We believe the cross still has saving power.
But was it really necessary?
Was there no other way for humanity to come to God than by the cross of Jesus Christ?
Theologians have pondered that question through the centuries with few satisfying answers. A few moments of calm reflection, however, will reveal that, indeed,
there was no other way.
For one thing, Jesus could not ask his disciples to pay a greater price than he was willing to pay. Think of Stephen as the stones ripped his flesh, and Peter as he died crucified upside down. Many of the disciples were burned as living torches in Nero’s gardens or were torn apart by wild animals in the gladiator’s arena.
Only a soft, sentimental unrealistic faith could conjure the supposition that there was any other way for Jesus but the way of the cross. This is a hard world. The affluence and security of our land shelter us from that truth. Many people through the ages have given their lives for their faith in Christ and they’re still doing so.
Just five years ago, the New York Times carried the story of a Russian army private, a Christian, who woke on his 19th birthday. It was his 100th day of captivity by Chechen rebels. He expected to spend the day in the small house that served as a POW dorm. The Chechen rebels surprised him when they took him out of his brick room to a glade. They invited him to convert to Islam. The young Russian soldier refused to forsake his faith. They ordered him to remove the silver crucifix that hung around his neck. He made it as a small boy and had proudly worn it ever since. He shook his head in defiance. His captors became enraged. The citizens of Moscow now recite a poem in his memory called “The Cross.” It goes like this:
Pure mountains in the distance,
slopes covered in blooms of blue
Refusing to renounce Christ,
the soldier of Russia fell.
And his head rolled,
blood flowed from the saber,
and the red grass whispered a quiet prayer in its wake.
This young Russian soldier held fast to his faith and suffered a martyr’s death.
We are so accustomed to comfort and convenience that it would be very difficult for many of us to pay the ultimate penalty for our faith. This may be the first reason that Jesus had to die. He could not ask his disciples to pay a greater price than he was willing to pay.
There is a second reason why the cross was necessary. Without the cross we could not see the destructiveness of sin. A totally innocent man hangs on that cross.
A young man. We are always touched by the tragic death of a young person whether
by disease or accident or murder. Jesus was only 33 when he died upon Calvary.
Falsely accused, bitterly reviled and yet guilty of no wrong.
A healer and helper, a lover of little children, and a liberator of people imprisoned by their own sin and guilt, a man who knew God intimately enough to address him as “Abba,” Daddy, and yet never lost his concern for the least and the lowest.
Yet there he hangs on the cross of Calvary,
and it was sin that put him there
your sin and my sin.
That’s the nature of sin. Anti-life, anti-health, anti-purpose.
Some of you will remember the ancient myth of Ulysses. Ulysses is on his ship, trying to make his way home. He knows he will pass by the Isle of the Sirens whose voices sing out across the sea in such enticing tones that many sailors are led to their deaths on the jagged, rocky shores, never to see home or their destination.
Ulysses commands that his men put wax in their ears so they will not hear those voices and be led to their destruction. But for himself, he is tied to the mast so that he can hear their singing. He commands that none of his orders while hearing the Sirens are to be obeyed.
The voices almost drive him mad until finally the ship passes by, the voices are stilled, and once more his ears are filled with the voices of his wife and son, with home, his true destination.
The reason these ancient myths still speak to us is that sooner or later all of us will hear the Sirens’ song, the song of temptation luring us to the rocks of destruction. For many of us sin is a meaningless term – it is merely bad form or a white lie. We do not perceive that there is an enemy within our gates, a betrayer in our hearts, a demon within our consciousness
that can bring inconceivable tragedy into our lives.
We chuckle when someone sings, “I was sinking deep in sin.’”
The cross shows us that sin is no casual matter.
Sin is the enemy of our bodies,
or our marriages,
Sin is the enemy of our relations with one another
And our relationship with God.
There was no other way for God to show us these facts except on Calvary.
But there is one more reason why there was no other way but the cross. There was no other way for God to show the depth and the width of His love except by the sacrifice of His Son. John puts it like this, “In this is love not that we loved God, but that he loved us and gave his Son to be the expiation for our sins.” There is something about the cross that speaks to us of God’s love.
Sen. John McCain discovered the power of this love as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Here is how he put it, “I was tied in torture ropes by my tormentors and left alone in an empty room to suffer through the night. Later in the evening, a guard I had never spoken to entered the room and silently loosed the ropes to relieve my suffering. Just before morning, the same guard came back and re‑tightened the ropes before his less humanitarian comrades returned. He never said a word to me. Some months later on Christmas morning, as I stood alone in the prison courtyard, the same guard walked up to me and stood next to me for a few moments.
Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in the dirt. We stood wordlessly there a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away.”
It was a small gesture, but McCain said it was the best Christmas present that he could have received in that prison camp.
There is something about the cross that speaks to us of God’s love. That is why it had to be. Jesus never asked his disciples to make a sacrifice he himself was not willing to make.
There was no other way to reveal the awfulness of man’s sin
and the awesomeness of God’s love.
The challenge to each of us is to respond in faith to that love, to cast off the sin that so easily besets us, and to give our lives to him as he gave his life for us.
