Muhammad Ali and the Peril of Religious Pluralism

June 12, 2016—The Third Sunday After Trinity

               America’s liberal faith was on proud display this week as we mourned the death of a man hailed almost universally as “the greatest.” If you did not know anything about American history but came to this country recently from another planet, you could be excused for believing that America had just lost its greatest citizen, greatest athlete and greatest man. I’m speaking, obviously, of the death of the boxer, Muhammad Ali, who called himself “the greatest” and was revered by many as being just that.

       Ali was named after his father Cassius Clay Sr., who was himself named after a civil war era Kentucky politician and plantation owner. The original Cassius Clay became a Republican and friend of Abraham Lincoln, who seriously considered putting him on the ticket as his running-mate in 1860. Like Lincoln, Clay was a man of courage who fought for the abolition of slavery. Clay published an abolitionist newspaper and was shot in the chest by Kentucky racists who opposed the abolitionist cause. Clay survived that shooting and many other physical assaults. He continued to fight for racial equality in an age when it was dangerous and violently unpopular to do so. He was no saint but he was on the right side of the abolitionist issue and he showed great courage to take the public stand he took.

       But young Cassius Clay Jr., when he grew up and became a man took a new name for himself and a new faith. He left behind the Baptist faith of his father to join the Nation of Islam, a radical anti-white, intensely anti-Jewish cult. And to further his repudiation of his Christian past he even exchanged the name his father had given him. Apparently unaware that he had been named for a courageous abolitionist; he called his name “a slave name”, and took instead the name Muhammad Ali in honor of the deeply anti-Christian leader of Islam, Mohammad. Ali was a great boxer with a big charismatic personality. His talents in the ring and before the television cameras were exceptional. He was fun and unpredictable to watch. We’ll miss him.

        But I will stop short of calling him “the greatest” or even “great” for one simple reason that should be as obvious as it is offensive to every faithful Christian. There is nothing great in a soul that renounces faith in Jesus Christ and adopts a different religion from the one that Jesus founded. There is nothing to be admired or envied in those who reject the cross of Christ and trade it in for a false symbol of salvation. Our liberal society today sees nothing wrong with doing this. So you outgrow the Christian faith; so you reject Jesus Christ as your savior and find in Mohammad a more inspirational leader; so you find the Islamic faith or Judaism or Buddhism or Bahai to be more true for you; so what of it? It’s a free country. One religion is a good as another. What difference does it make who or what or how you worship. Whoever worships God is doing good; it’s all the same.

       Religious pluralism may be the order of the day in liberal America, but it is not a teaching you will find affirmed anywhere in the Bible. Jesus came into a culture in the Roman Empire that was polytheistic. There were many religious cults worshipping many gods and goddesses. No one cared what cult you preferred. As long as you did not neglect to worship the emperor, it was socially acceptable to worship all the deities if you felt a need to. The only exception to this rule was found in the Jews who were so jealous of the Lord, their God, that they forbid the worship of other gods. The Romans were pragmatic rulers. They saw that short of committing genocide against them, the Jews were never going to change; so they left them alone, not requiring them to worship the emperor.

        Jesus, a Jew, came to Israel proclaiming the good news that in him the kingdom of God had at last come to Israel, that he was Israel’s promised redeemer- king. The Jews rejected him because he was a poor man from a poor neighborhood and his interpretation of the messianic prophecies was unorthodox. At the request of the Jewish priests, the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, crucified him, on the pretext that as a “king” he was a threat to Rome and, therefore, guilty of treason. That is where the story would have ended except that Jesus saved his greatest miracle for the end, raising himself from the dead and appearing to hundreds, winning over thousands of converts to a new faith that soon was called “Christianity.” A faith that though it had its origins in Judaism was very different from Judaism; but for one thing. The Christians were even more stubborn than were the Jews. When it came to paying respect to the deity of the emperor, they would have none of it. The Romans had made an exception to tolerate the Jews but they would not extend that exception to include the Christians. They began instead to persecute them violently trying to kill them off. The early church faced horrible trials. Many of the early bishops were murdered, young virgins were raped and and laymen were viciously brutalized for the crime of being Christian. But they bravely kept the faith knowing that Jesus had said it would be so. In the Sermon on the Mount he warned them of the consequences of following him. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” He said adding, “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account; rejoice and be glad for great is your reward in heaven.”(Mt.5.10-11). And again while preaching in the Temple he warned them that, “You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But those who endure to the end will be saved” (Mk.13.13). You would think that people would have run from Jesus. And yet the early Christians, not thinking of their own comfort embraced rejection and suffering when it was inflicted on them, following the example of Jesus who for the faith bore a cross.

        The conviction of the early Christians is expressed boldly in the letter to the Hebrews. The apostle writing this holy letter pulled no punches in telling the candidates for baptism what was expected of them. He warned these new converts to the faith that, “It is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the power of the age to come, if they then commit apostasy since they crucify the Son of God on their own account and hold him up to contempt” (Heb.6.4-6). In other words, he told them, that being a Christian is not like being a pagan. You cannot be for Jesus one day and not be for him the next. You cannot treat the Christian religion as though it were one religion among many. When you become a Christian, you put away all other religions, recognizing how false they are (Ps.96.5), and you entrust your salvation entirely to Jesus and to no one but Jesus because Jesus alone is the Son of God (Mt.3.17); Jesus alone is humanity’s Savior (Acts 4.12), being uniquely qualified to have died on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins (John 3.16). Those who turn their back on him after being baptized lose their salvation (2Pt.2.20-21).

       So the message of the Bible could not be more clear: to be a Christian means to a make a complete, lifetime commitment to Jesus Christ and to keep it. You would think that people in the ancient Roman world with its happy pluralistic paganism would have been turned off to Christianity, a religion strict in its demands, reviled by the rich and persecuted by the establishment. But that was not the case. Surprisingly, the more that Christians were violently attacked, the more people joined their ranks. There was something about Jesus that set people’s hearts on fire with love, a love that they would not compromise. The early Christians were relatively few in number, and the pagan majority looked upon them with great suspicion and hostility; but they insisted, despite the violent opposition that Jesus was the Son of God, that in Jesus of Nazareth God himself had walked this earth incarnate in a man and that he proved it by his resurrection from the dead (Acts 4.5-12). You know the rest of the story. In the year 312, after winning a battle which he believed he won with the help of the God of the Christians, the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the persecution of Christians ceased and Europe soon thereafter became a Christian continent.

       Skip ahead about 1700 years. We see that the world is now very different from what it was in Constantine’s day. Christianity has spread around the globe and everyone everywhere seems to have heard of Jesus. But also the faith of the people who call themselves Christians is not the faith of the first martyrs whose courage and uncompromising conviction won the hearts of ancient Rome. Many Christians today are very relaxed about their faith. You were raised Christian but you want to change and become a Jew or a Moslem, a Mormon or Buddhist, go ahead; what difference does it make as long as you practice charity and live in peace? The liberal attitude seems so wonderfully tolerant and open-minded but it is just the old paganism in disguise, a polytheistic faith that is determined to marginalize Jesus by treating him just like every other god or goddess. But that is the one thing that true Christians will never accept and cannot condone. Our faith is in Jesus Christ and in him alone who died on the cross for our sins (Gal.2.18-21). The way to greatness is not to renounce him but to follow him. It is so much easier to conform to the spirit of the age and be part of the liberal majority. But Jesus never said that to follow him would be easy. “Take up your cross and follow me” he said. Being faithful to Jesus means standing up for him even when everyone else is saying that he’s not really who he claims to be. Keep your faith and hold fast to the confession you made at your baptism (1Tim.6.12).  For as Jesus said,  “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mk.8.38).

        If you fall away and renounce your Christian faith, you will receive accolades and kudos from the liberal world; you will be a hero to many, you will be cool and people will say, “You’re the greatest!” But Jesus had a word for those who do that: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?”(Mk.8.36) he asked. That’s a question that anyone contemplating abandoning the Christian faith ought to ponder long and hard. Ask anyone who has ever jumped off a cliff; it’s a long way back after taking a drastic leap.

        Americans today are terribly confused about faith and religion. Most have a good heart, want to do right and be great in the sight of God, but few know how to achieve it. Saint Luke tells us that Jesus’ disciples were similarly confused. “An argument arose among the disciples as to which of them was the greatest. But when Jesus perceived the thought of their hearts, he took a child and put him by his side, and said to them,  “Whoever receives this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me; for he who is least among you all is the one who is great” (Lk.9.46-48). In other words, the greatest is the one who sees Jesus for who he is and humbly lives as a servant of the king.

        Keep your faith in Jesus Christ and in him alone, and do not be seduced by the liberal age that exalts the doctrine of religious pluralism. There is only one name under heaven by which we may be saved and that is the name of Jesus Christ (Phil.2.10-11). The rest are false pretenders. Jesus said without a hint of reservation, “ Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven; but who ever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Mt.10.32-33). I would humbly suggest that, in light of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, those are not words to be casually dismissed as hyperbole. 

Easter Sunday 2016

Article V:  “He descended into Hell, on the third day he rose again from the dead”

          We come now to the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ. Let me begin by making a preliminary observation to set a proper table, as it were, for the feast. It must be admitted that if God did not raise Jesus from the dead, if the resurrection of Christ were proven to be a hoax or were it shown to be simply a metaphor, a way of speaking about hope in the future, as opposed to something that really happened to Jesus’ body and soul, then Christianity would be exposed as nothing but a house of cards and the whole theology of redemption through the sacrifice of God’s incarnate Son would come tumbling down. Saint Paul knew this better than anyone. As he said to the Corinthian church: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God...If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1Cor.15.14-17). There is no compromise to be made on this issue: either God raised Jesus, body and soul, from the dead or the gospel is not true. If his corpse rotted in the grave, then the scripture is not true: “You will not let your holy one see the pit” (Ps.16.10) the Psalmist said of the Savior. If Christ was not raised “according to the scriptures” (1Cor.15.3), then his body corrupted in the dust of death and he does not deserve to be called “the Christ, the Holy One of God” (Mt.16.16; Mk.1.24). It’s that simple.

       Jesus said, “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again, this charge I have received from my Father.”(John10.17-18). “I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” Either Jesus laid down his life willingly on the cross in order to take it up again in his resurrection or he didn’t. If he did not do what he said he was going to do, then he was not who he said he was. But if he raised himself from the dead by the divine power he claimed to have and thereby revealed himself to have been God incarnate, (for who but God could manage such a feat as raising oneself from the dead?), then the gospel is true: the kingdom of God has come to us in a man, Jesus Christ, and he has redeemed us from sin and death by the sacrifice of himself on a cross in accordance with the scriptures.

       So you see, this is the whole ball game: either the resurrection of Christ is true, and we really have “been redeemed by his precious blood” shed for us on the cross (1Pt.1.19), or it is not. If it’s not, then we might as well recess to the undercroft, have a final farewell cup of coffee and go home in search of a new religion.

       The point I’m making is obvious but sometimes the more obvious something is the harder it is to see: the church preaches the resurrection of Christ because it’s the truth. God raised Jesus from the dead, completely vindicating him who died in disgrace (Is.50.5-9), and the church is one hundred percent certain of it (Acts 2.32). If we were not certain of the truth of this claim, the church couldn’t call its message the gospel, the good news. The gospel is the proclamation of an event, the coming of the kingdom of God in a man, Jesus Christ, God’s Son (Mk.1.15). If he died on the cross in disgrace under a curse (Gal3.13; Dt.21.23), then there is no good news in his death. But God raised him up, vindicating him against his accusers and thereby affirming the truth of his message: the kingdom of God has come to us in the man Jesus Christ. God has done this. This is actual news, very good news (Romans 10.15). The New Testament is not a cheap tabloid publishing rumor and gossip. The story that the New Testament writers tell about Jesus is the truth; and in particular, it’s the truth of his resurrection from the dead that makes his story not only news, but good news, great news for the whole world (Romans 10.9-13).

      Nevertheless the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ is disputed by many people. Many contend that the doctrine of Christ’s resurrection from the dead is a fiction for one simple reason: the dead don’t rise. The fact of death points away from any possibility of a resurrection being true. So how is it that the church can rationally claim that Jesus raised himself body and soul from the dead? Why should anyone believe this? The answer, as incredible as it seems is that anyone who looks at the evidence for and against Christ’s resurrection with an open mind will come to one reasonable conclusion: God raised Jesus from the dead. 

       Many will say, “Evidence; what evidence? I thought that belief in the resurrection was an act of blind faith, like faith in unicorns or the tooth fairy or the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end.” Many people think that Christian faith in the gospel of Christ’s resurrection is just blind faith, but they are mistaken. The case for the resurrection of Christ stands on three lines of solid historical evidence. First there is the empty tomb. Then there is the fact that hundreds of people, soon after his death reported seeing him, not as a ghost or a disembodied spirit, but seeing him fully alive, and showing them his wounds. They reported talking to him and eating with him. Then thirdly, and perhaps the most astonishing fact of all, is that his closest disciples, who fled when he was arrested, fearing that they too might be arrested for blasphemy and insurrection, began to boldly preach his resurrection from the dead, calling upon those same judges who condemned him just days before to repent of their sin and believe in him (Acts 2-4). They did this courageously with no regard for their own personal security or family welfare and they kept it up to the end of their lives, everyone of them, preaching the resurrection of Christ even as they were tortured and martyred for the faith. Bartholomew preached the resurrection even as his executioners flailed him alive, peeling off his skin with fish knives. The emperor Nero, scapegoating the nascent Christian church for a great fire that destroyed much of Rome in 65 A.D., ordered Peter to be crucified. Peter, whom Jesus called his “rock,” asked to be crucified upside down, claiming that he did not deserve to be crucified right side up as the Lord Jesus had been. Jesus’ apostles had absolute confidence that Jesus raised himself from the dead and revealed himself to them and that there was no reason whatsoever to doubt his gospel.

     Those are the facts. The facts leave three questions that must be answered.  Why wasn’t Jesus’ body in the tomb on the Sunday morning after his death? Who removed it from the tomb?  Where did they put it? Secondly, if the hundreds of people who said they saw Jesus risen from the dead did not see him risen from the dead but saw something else, what did they see and why did they say they saw Jesus?  And third: why were his apostles so convinced of his resurrection that they were willing to devote the rest of their lives to telling others about him and to die for their beliefs? They weren’t willing to die for their beliefs the night he was arrested. What changed them? These are the questions surrounding the resurrection of Christ.  Let’s look deeper at the facts because the facts point to the answers.

       Fact number one is that early on the Sunday morning after his death, some of the women, including Mary Magdalene, went to his tomb (Lk.24.10). The women knew where he had been laid to rest, because on Friday afternoon, after he had been taken down from the cross, they followed Joseph of Arimetha and Nicodmeus, the two saints who had Pilate’s permission to take Jesus’ dead body off the cross, to the tomb (Lk.23.50-56; Jn.19.38-42). They watched from a distance as the men put Jesus’ corpse in the tomb. The women knew where he was buried and they, in their grief, were anxious to visit his grave as soon as the Passover ended. They were going to anoint his corpse with spices according to Jewish burial custom. But when they arrived at the tomb, they found the tomb empty. Jesus’ body was missing (Mk.16.1-8). Where did it go? Who took it? One is tempted to say, “Your guess is as good as mine.” But there is no guess work about it. We know who took Jesus’ body from the tomb and why Jesus’ body went missing. God raised him up.

        If God did not raise Jesus up from the tomb, then there are only two possibilities. Either Jesus’ disciples stole his body, hid it and made it look like God had raised him up (Mt.28.11-15) or Jesus did not really die on the cross; he was laid to rest in the tomb still breathing and he later, having gained strength walked out of the tomb on his own accord and disappeared from history. That later theory, known as “the swoon theory,” was revived in the DaVinci Code. It’s a clever theory that provides a naturalistic explanation for the disappearance of Jesus’ corpse from the tomb, but it’s also utterly implausible. For Jesus not to have died on the cross, the Roman executioners would have failed to do their job. There is no chance that the Roman soldiers failed to do their duty. There is no chance that the Virgin Mary, weeping at the foot of the cross, mistakenly thought her son was dead when he wasn’t. That leaves only the possibility that Jesus’ disciples stole the body and then concocted a story about his resurrection from the dead. This is what the Jews claimed his lying disciples did. Let’s remember that a detail of temple guards sealed the stone and kept watch on Jesus’ tomb in order to prevent this kind of “fraud” from happening (Mt.27.62-66). Were the guards part of the conspiracy also? Do you really think it’s possible that Jesus’ disciples conspired to create this dramatic hoax?

       It is not possible for two obvious reasons. The first is that hundreds of people met Jesus fully alive after his death (1Cor.15.3-9). He appeared not only to his friends but to enemies as well. Saul of Tarsus, a Jew who was persecuting Christians, encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus and was so moved by the experience that he renounced his Jewish faith and became a Christian immediately (Acts 9). Saul is known to us today as Saint Paul, a man whose tireless missionary work and whose impassioned epistles spread the word of Jesus around the Roman Empire. And he appeared also to James (1Cor.15.7), his half-brother, who prior to meeting him resurrected from the dead, did not believe in him (John 7.5; Gal.1.19). James went on to become the bishop of the Jerusalem Church. It would be one thing if a small cabal of conspirators went around saying they had seen Jesus alive but for people like Cleopas and his friend who met him on the road to Emmaus(Lk.24.13-27) or for Thomas who had fled and came back a week later to have seen him (John.20.24-29), that’s something else entirely. Unless the conspiracy included hundreds of people, how do you account for all these extremely diverse appearances?

       The effect that the appearances had on those who experienced them was life–changing. I have met, so may have you, many people who have seen ghosts and spirits. Haunted houses are very well documented. Duke University has a department dedicated to researching poltergeists. No one is laughing at them. But seldom is anyone’s life dramatically changed by a vision of a spirit. The people who saw Jesus alive after his death were adamant that he was not a spirit. “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” he said to them (Lk.24.40). Those who met Jesus resurrected met a real person; a person who changed their lives forever. They fell so deeply in love with Jesus after meeting him resurrected from the dead, that they gave their hearts and minds to him totally. They dedicated their lives to spreading the word about Jesus around the world, something they would not have done had they not seen him risen from the dead. Their conviction testifies to the fact that they really believed the message they were preaching.

       Say what you will about Jesus’ disciples, they sincerely believed the gospel that they preached. People can be sincerely wrong. Sincerity by itself is no guarantee of integrity. But something caused them to believe that the man they saw crucified on Friday was alive the following Sunday and that he really was the Messiah after all. What healed their broken hearts and turned their minds around to believe in a crucified Messiah if not the resurrection? The gospels are clear that the disciples did not believe in a crucified Messiah before his resurrection revealed this truth to them. When Jesus told them that he would be killed, Peter tried to stop him (Mt.16.21-23). His faith in Jesus was so weak that on the night of the arrest, Peter denied even knowing him. With the exception of Saint John, all the disciples fled Gethsemane in fear when he was arrested. And yet soon thereafter, we see them bravely standing in the streets of Jerusalem preaching Christ crucified and baptizing coverts by the thousands (Acts 2). What changed them? They were by their own admission cowards before his death and confused about his mission. But after his resurrection they were courageous saints. And again add Saint Paul to that list. No one had more courage or conviction than he did (2Cor.11.21-33). Where did his faith and courage come from if not from an encounter with the risen Christ (Acts 9)? Funny, if this was a conspiracy and a hoax, how did he happen into it?

       By all rights, after Jesus died, his disciples should have gone back to doing whatever it was they did before Jesus recruited them for his mission. With his death, his mission should have ended. The messiah who was supposed to rule Israel forever died. It was effectively over when he failed to come down from the cross and save himself. But soon after his death, the mission of the church began. And the mission of the church was never just to tell people to be loving and kind as Jesus had been. The mission of church was to preach the forgiveness of sins thru faith in Jesus the crucified messiah who died for us and rose again according to the scriptures (Acts 10.34-43; John3.16).

         If you reject the gospel that God raised Jesus from the dead that leaves only one alternative explanation, that the gospel is a conspiracy based on lies and hallucinations; a cleverly manipulated hoax that took on a life of its own and just snowballed out of control. The conspiracy theory may answer the riddle of the empty tomb but it doesn’t explain his appearances to many or the faith of the church. The suggestion that his appearances were the result of hallucinations that the grieving apostles suffered may explain away the appearances but that doesn’t answer the question of where his body went or why the church believed he had been resurrected. Saying that many people in the ancient world were superstitious may explain something about them, but it doesn’t explain their courage to suffer death for their convictions, nor does it explain the empty tomb.

      So, here’s the bottom line: there is only explanation that fully satisfies all three questions surrounding Jesus’ mysterious disappearance from the grave. That God raised Jesus from the dead and that he appeared to many teaching them the meaning of his death and resurrection fully explains why the tomb was empty, why so many people claimed to have seen him alive after death and why the church went forward enthusiastically preaching Jesus Christ, the crucified savior risen from the dead. No other explanation answers all three questions.

       People are not stupid. We all know that the dead don’t rise again of their own volition. But what if God took on a human nature while remaining fully God? Such a man could do what no other could even dream of doing. Hundreds of people saw Jesus raise Lazarus from the tomb (John 11. 38-53). Is it such a stretch to believe that he had power also to raise himself from a tomb? We live in a world where the unimaginable happens every day. Some one somewhere everyday says to a friend, “Hey, you’re not going to believe this but...” The resurrection of Christ is one of those events that proves the dictum: “Truth is stranger than fiction”.

       It is tempting to dismiss the resurrection of Christ as a myth and think that we are being modern and smart for rejecting an ancient superstition. But the modern age is an agnostic age that suffers from the vanity of its own peculiar superstition, the superstition of naturalism, scientism and philosophical materialism: the dogmatic denial of the supernatural wedded to the atheistic prejudice that man is no more than the sum of his chemical parts. There can be no resurrection of the dead, the modern age admonishes us, because there are no miracles and we know there are no miracles because there is no supernatural. There is no age more singularly closed-minded and superstitious than ours. It’s a pity how anti-intellectual the post- Christian West has become. There are many superstitions in the world that obscure our ability to think clearly about reality but the resurrection of Christ is not one of them.

        There is a reason that we have more and better sources for the life of Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean peasant, than we do for Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. It is because those great men only conquered nations; Jesus Christ conquered death itself. Our ancestors wanted us to know to remember the one man among them who made the greatest difference. Why do you look for the living among the dead? “, the angel said to the women who came to the tomb on Easter morning looking for Jesus. “He is not here he is risen” (Luke 24.5; Mt.28.6). You wonder who Jesus really was. He is the man whom the tomb could not restrain. You will not find him buried in the past. He is the one who lives eternally in the present. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he said (John11.25). For any other man to make such a boast would be an absurd vanity. But Jesus Christ, by his resurrection from the dead has proven who he is. And He who has defeated death promises to share his risen life with all those who believe in him. Believe in him, trust him, love him and obey him. His word is true and his promise is this: “This is the will of my Father “Jesus said, “that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”(Jn.6.40)

Palm Sunday 2016

Article IV: “Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried”

       An irony of the story of Jesus Christ is that we would not today honor him with the title Jesus Christ, had he not died on a cross. One wonders: why did Jesus stay in the Garden of Gethsemane praying and literally sweating out the last agonizing hours before his arrest (Lk.22.44)? He was not unaware of the political forces gathering against him. He did not need divine omniscience to know that he was in great danger and that a tactical retreat might be in order. So why did he not, on that fateful night before the day we call Good Friday, trade in the donkey on which he had entered Jerusalem for a fast horse and use to his advantage to escape? Why not live to fight another day? This question is not a merely academic one. It goes to the essence of the taunt that the scribes put to Jesus as he hung on the cross. As Mark reported, “So also the chief priests mocked him to one another with the scribes saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe” (Mk.15:31-32). So why didn’t he save himself? Surely the man who raised Lazarus from the tomb after four days and who healed a man born blind could have pulled himself off of the cross and come down? Why didn’t he? Does not his failure to do this make the case for those who doubt his divinity? Would God, the Son of God, have let himself be mocked and tortured and killed in this brutal manner by sinners? Does not his apparent powerlessness to alter the situation in has favor demonstrate that his accusers were right; that he was a man, period; and not even a good man but a deceiver and false prophet who was getting the punishment he deserved? If he really was the Son of God, would not this have been the perfect opportunity to prove it by coming down from the cross and walking away, as he had done many times before? So, why did he hang there meekly and slowly die? Why did he do that?

       Maybe it was because he was a man of integrity who practiced what he preached. He said “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth”. He told his followers, “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” And he told his disciples that “the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected and killed.” Maybe it was because he said, “I have not come to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them.” And maybe he believed that by suffering and dying on a cross he was fulfilling the word of God. But how could that be? Why would God want his only son to suffer and die a criminal death? Where in the Bible does it say that the redeemer of Israel must suffer and die?

       Virtually all of the rabbis in Israel for hundreds of years and virtually all of them still today, expect the Redeemer to come and establish a perfect and everlasting kingdom on this earth. Judaism is very much a religion of this world. It strives for social justice. It expects the Redeemer when he comes to establish his justice on the earth, with peace and prosperity for all. But Jesus did not share that view. “The poor you will always have with you,” he said. “My kingdom is not this world.” Jesus alone understood the scriptures concerning Israel’s salvation correctly; he alone saw that the redeemer must suffer and be crucified. To say that his understanding of the role of the messiah was a minority view among the Jews is an understatement. In seeing the role of the messiah as one who would suffer and die, Jesus was a minority of one. Nevertheless, he clung to his view with passionate conviction. His unique understanding of the scriptures drove him to his death and restrained him from resisting arrest or coming down from the cross. Jesus believed that his death was necessary for our redemption and that he could only become our Redeemer if he allowed himself to be crucified (John3.14-15).

        Jesus found support for his faith in a suffering and crucified redeemer in essentially two scriptures: Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 (Lk.24.44-46; John5.39).These are the scriptures that Christians read both on Palm Sunday and on Good Friday, days when the church celebrates the passion and death of Christ.  Psalm 22 begins with the very cry of despair that Jesus would make while on the cross:

“My god, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? (Mt.27.46)

O my god. I cry by day, but thou dost not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”

“Yet thou art holy. Enthroned on the praises Israel. In thee our fathers trusted; they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. To thee they cried and were saved; in thee they trusted and were not disappointed.”

   In other words, as much as he is hurting, the suffering victim of Psalm 22 knows that everything happens for a reason. He does not see the reason for the pain he is in but he trust in God, knowing that God will use his suffering for some greater good. He then goes on to describe the suffering that he is being subjected to; suffering that directly matches the suffering Christ met on the cross.

“But I am a worm, and no man; scorned by men, and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me, they make mouths at me, they wag their heads; “he committed his cause to the Lord; let him deliver him, let him rescue him, for he delights in him!”

The very mockery and rejection that the scribes gave to Jesus (Mt.27.39-43) is prophesied in Psalm 22 centuries before the event!

“Ye thou are he who took me from the womb; thou didst keep me safe upon my mother’s breasts. Upon thee was I cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me thou hast been my God. Be not far from me, for trouble is near and there is none to help”

Again, the suffering victim affirms his faith in God whom he has known since his birth. Most people come to know God only as they mature, but this victim has known God from day one. He then continues to describe the physical and emotional agony that he is enduring at the hands of godless men.

 “Many bulls encompass me, strong bulls of Bashan surround me; they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and a roaring lion.”

 “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it is melted within my breasts, my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws, thou dost lay me in the dust of death.

“Yea dogs are round about me, a company of evil doers encircle me; they have pierced my hands and my feet-I can count all my bones-they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots.”

   This uncanny description of the events that would unfold at Jesus’ crucifixion, right down to the executioners casting lots for his clothing (Mt.27.35) was written centuries before there was a Roman empire, centuries before they taught the world about crucifixion.

       Psalm 22 describes the torture that Christ endured on the cross. Isaiah 52.13- 53.1-12 explains the reason for his suffering and death. In words of pathos and pity that Handle would set to music and immortalize in his inspired masterpiece The Messiah, Isaiah, centuries before the event, speaks of Christ’s suffering and of the reason for it.

     “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgression, he was bruised for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”

       “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Is.53.6). Add to that what is said in Isaiah 53.11: “The righteous one, my servant, (shall) make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities,” and you have God’s plan for our redemption from sin laid out in plain sight. God’s “righteous one” (Mk.1.24) would die as a scapegoat having had the sins of the whole world transferred onto him.  A world of sinners would thereby be made righteous in God’s eyes. The righteous one, the scapegoat would take the blame and punishment due them on himself, and thereby set sinners free. This redemption of sinners would happen because of the sacrifice of one man, God’s “righteous one”. What was foreshowed in the ritual of the Day of Atonement (Lev.16.20-22), a ritual repeated year after year, (Jews to his day call it Yom Kippur), became an eternal verity never to be repeated because of the perfect sacrifice of God’s Son, the scapegoat to end a need for further scapegoats.

       Jesus Christ did not come into this world to teach a philosophy. He did not come to teach us the secret to finding eternal life and inner peace. As Saint Paul said, “This is a true saying and worthy of all men to be received that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1Tim.1.15). And the way he would save sinners was to be the scapegoat of God, “the perfect offering for our sins” (1 John2.1-2). We search in vain to understand the teachings of Jesus until we accept that his sacrificial death on the cross is the summation of his doctrine. If the teaching of Christ is a wheel, the cross is the hub of that wheel. Take it out and you have only an empty circle. But as Saint Paul put it, “Christ crucified” is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1Cor.1.24). It was his willingness to die for us and take upon himself “the iniquity of us all” that makes him not just Jesus, a nice guy from Nazareth, but Jesus Christ, the “righteous one of God ” ; the one who has, by his suffering and death on the cross, atoned for the sins of the world and “made many righteous.”

        Saint Paul, writing to the Corinthian Church reminds them of the confession of faith they each made at their baptism. “ For I delivered to you as of first importance” he said, “ what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” (1Cor.15.3). This confession of faith was already in use when Paul went to Jerusalem to visit the apostles shortly after his conversion (Gal1.18), which means that the doctrine that Jesus died “according to the scriptures” dates back to the beginning of the church’s mission. It was not some kind of later addition to an original gospel that was concerned only with Jesus’ ethical teachings and knew nothing about his redemptive death. To the contrary, as the four Gospels and the several sermons found in the book of Acts evidence, (along with Paul’s’ letters), the gospel preached by the church from the beginning of the mission testifies to their absolute faith that Jesus went to his death as a willing victim, that it was his purpose in life to die in the manner he did and that by giving himself up to death willingly, he fulfilled the word of God (John10.17-18). As a hymn of the early church also dating back to the beginning of the church’s mission put it, “Being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil.2.8).

       Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea is remembered to history as the person who sentenced Jesus to death. Every Sunday following the sermon we stand to recite the Nicene Creed; which is to the Church as a flag is to our nation, the emblem of who we are, a symbol of what we believe. And in doing so, we will remember Pontius Pilate by name. Why does the Church remember him, a Roman bureaucrat of no account? We remember him because he is the one who looked Jesus in the eyes and sentenced Jesus to death (John 19.1-16). Pilate reminds us that when we speak of Jesus Christ we are speaking of a Jew, living in first century Israel, who died in the year 33 ad. The dates of the gospel are fixed in actual human history. Thus the larger point, implicit in the facts of history, puts a chill down our spines: the story of the savior crucified for our sins is not a fiction. It really happened during the reign of Pontius Pilate, on a hill in Jerusalem, Jesus died for our sins, “ on him was laid the iniquity of us all”. God – really - did -this!