Palm Sunday 1st April 2012

Why did Jesus die?

The Creed answers he was crucified for us.

It does so after it names Jesus God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

The link between Jesus in April 33AD and us in April 2012AD is in the AD – anno Domino.

Because of who Jesus is as Lord what he suffered on Good Friday carries forward to all times in a way only God can achieve.

When these lowly hands take bread and wine in a moment what Jesus did then will become a living reality for us now.

This is the Church’s faith, that the death of Jesus impacts us today, but where is this impact on my life?

How you see Jesus is inseparable from how you see his death and what difference it makes for you.

There’s a plaque in Aldersgate near the Museum of London commemorating an event in the life of Methodist pioneer John Wesley. Wesley, an Anglican priest, had always said the Creed we say. To him though Jesus as God from God, light from light, true God from true God was more head than heart knowledge.

That evening of 24 May 1738 he reluctantly attended a Christian meeting at Aldersgate. There he felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ and received an assurance that the death of Jesus all those years ago was a gift of forgiveness and assurance for him personally. From that day he set off on an itinerant preaching ministry covering 20,000 miles a year which touched thousands of lives with the reality of Jesus Christ now alive in him.

'Faith is the amen of the intelligence and the will to divine revelation.'

When we say the Creed or hear the annual account of Christ’s passion our ‘Amen’ is often more notional than passionate.

As educationalists say in their motto: We hear and forget, we see and remember, we do and we understand.

Hearing about the Cross, seeing the Cross is nothing compared to acting upon it and the love that lies behind it.

For what Jesus has done for us in Holy Week to come real to us we need to put our lives on the line, to act as if he were alongside us still – then we understand.

You see we can hear about Jesus, we can even believe notionally - in our heads - that he is God incarnate - but it may make no difference to our lives.

I believe Mongolia is in-between Russian and China but that belief makes very little difference to my life. I have prayed once or twice for Mongolia but I have never been there and have no friends from there.

Yet I believe also in the resurrection of the dead. I have not experienced that either, but it has come real to me through One whom I trust, who has himself experienced resurrection and who has promised me a share as well when I die!

It is the Jesus we are talking of who has promised me this!

'Christ is as great as your faith makes him' said the evangelist D.L.Moody.

Why did Jesus die?

He died for us, say the Bible and the Creed.

When you approach the crucifixion with faith in Christ’s divinity you see it as an action demonstrating this truth, that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. John 3.16

It is an awesome act of substitution in which Jesus dies in our place so as to live in our place. All that suffering just recounted in the passion account was borne by Jesus on your account and mine.

The holiness of God, affronted by sin, demands a penalty which he himself provided.

It is like the pauper woman in court charged with theft faced with a judge who sentences her to fine or imprisonment. She has no money for the fine so the judge sentences her to imprisonment. When the court finished the judge goes and gives her the fine she can’t afford satisfying both mercy and justice.

To believe in the crucifixion of Jesus is to commit to a God who loves us and who is holy, who reaches out to us in love even though we are sinners.

In his holiness he cannot be reconciled to sin, but through the sacrifice of Jesus upon the Cross the horror of sin is overcome and we are credited with God’s own love and holiness.

The power of evil over humankind is overcome by the Cross. Only when we see that power being overcome in our own lives through it does the Cross make sense. When we find ourselves living more by faith in God than self-sufficiency, living more by submission to God than by self-will.

Through coming to the Cross we see benevolence flowing where there was self-seeking before and humility where there was cold self-righteousness.

Only when we see those sinful tendencies and find the merciful therapy of God in Jesus Christ can we know how wonderful a thing the Cross is, what awesome yet living and practical truth it contains.

We know deep down how flawed our lives are but we hide that truth from others and even from ourselves.

Just like when you’re preparing a meal like scrambled eggs, and a bad egg slips in to make the meal unacceptable for human consumption, the sin in our lives makes us unacceptable to a God who, in the words of the prophet Habakkuk, is too holy to behold evil.

Yet Jesus died. By God’s Son going to his death and through death to resurrection we can call upon him in April 2012 to make our 'stinking' lives fragrant and acceptable to God.

As St Paul writes in the first chapter of Ephesians God has made us acceptable in the beloved. By the death of his beloved Son God has made all who abide in Christ acceptable to himself.

May that joy of seeing the barriers set up between ourselves and God lowered be ours this Holy Week.

God seeks intimacy with us. To achieve this, in an awesome mechanism far beyond human understanding, Jesus was crucified for us.

This is good news to all who will face both the truth of it and the truth about themselves as sinners in need of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.