On the Way to the Cross 4/10/49
Scripture: Matthew 21: 1-11.
In last week’s sermon we discussed Jesus on his way to Jerusalem, and our own spiritual journey to Jerusalem. We were reminded that any such important decision as Jesus then made, and as we must ourselves make, should be undertaken in the right way, for the right purpose, at the right time, and with acceptance of those risks that are involved.
Today, on Palm Sunday, we think of Jesus much farther along the way, entering the city of Jerusalem; on the way, as it proved, to the cross. For one frenzied, triumphant day, Jesus was to hear the shouts of acclaim as people lined the roadway, put their garments down for him to pass over, and sang their “hosannas.” For once, Jesus seems to have invited peoples’ acclaim. He deliberately “set a stage” for his entrance in the manner of an Old Testament prophecy -- something that the people would recognize and by which their imaginations would be fired. But the vivid lesson Jesus was to teach was only begun then. For triumph on earth is often short-lived. His was to be surprisingly brief. For the lesson was, within five days, to be continued in tragedy. He was actually, then, on the way to the cross.
The crucifixion of Jesus is a remarkably well attested event. Yet its significance is one of the most perplexing and baffling aspects of modern theology. People understand the teachings of Jesus, and at times actually put them into practice. But for the most part, modern Christians stand before this central symbol of their faith, the cross, in amazement and wonder, but with little enough understanding of its meaning.
A great many hymns have been written about the cross and they are sung with the affection of loving familiarity. Probably they are too much like “just words” to the average worshipper: “In the cross of Christ I glory, towering o’er the wrecks of time. All the light of sacred story gathers round its head sublime.” “When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.” Such hymns as these are beautiful and deeply spiritual. They stir precious memories in our minds; sometimes moving emotion in our souls. But we are left to search for the meaning of the cross they exalt.
It is nothing new that we should be immature in our thinking about the cross toward which Jesus rode on Palm Sunday. In 1629 the English poet, John Milton, wrote “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Having done such a lovely Christmas work, he attempted, a year later, an Easter season theme on “The Passion.” After eight toilsome verses, he gave it up. Later he wrote these words about the unfinished poem: “This subject the author, finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished.”
Today, we have little enough ability to understand it. but we cannot leave the matter unfinished as did Milton. We must deal with it as best we can. I think it will add meaning to the cross for our day if we see it under three major ideas.
1) First, let us see the cross as an historic fact in the experience of mankind. It actually happened that Jesus went to a violent death on the cross. Here is the supreme tragedy. Jesus was motivated by the highest of ideals. His life was pure, splendid, wholesome. He gave us truer insight into what a God-like life may be than anyone else the world has ever known. But --- men crucified him on the crude, cruel, hated instrument of Roman execution.
The factors which combined to bring about Jesus’ death were common ones. They are still common today. And they still lead to inevitable human tragedy. Here are some of them: a corrupt, crafty, unscrupulous priesthood which had forsaken spiritual leadership for vested interest, which was frantically anxious to hush a voice that made them uncomfortable, that might deprive them of the “economy of graft” by which they obtained outrageous sums of money from people under the guise of piety; a combination of the sins of religious intolerance, covetousness, and commercial privilege; a superstitious and cunning politician who was caught between Roman requirements and a howling mob and who finally sold his honor for his office; a callous and disappointed mob that had on Sunday acclaimed Jesus a conqueror and then turned on him when they saw no political revolution; the sins of apathy and of direct revenge. All of these factors were present in the tragedy toward which Jesus rode on the first day of the week before the Passover.
Death by a cross was not only hideously painful, but was the most ignominious that had been devised. Roman citizens were usually exempt from it. This death was reserved for murderers, slaves, commonest criminals. And yet it is a fact in history that the innocent Jesus was sentenced to die by it. And during the mockery of his trial he was tauntingly crowned with thorns by jeering soldiers; he was scourged with a whip such as those made of several strips of leather with sharp pieces of bone fastened at each end. Nailed through hands and feet to the rough timbers of the cross, he was put up to die in slow agony while the curious, the jeering, the callous and the despairing looked on.
In the year 500, Clovis I, king of the Frankish empire, was converted to Christianity. Upon hearing the story of Jesus’ crucifixion for the first time, King Clovis was so moved that he sprang to his feet, unsheathed his sword, and shouted, “If I and my Franks had been there, they would never have done that to him.” Something like that should be our reaction. It was a diabolical crime, a complete tragedy, ignominious, malign, stupid!
However, one of the living forces in Christian experience is the ability to find triumph in defeat; to be uncrushed by tragedy. One element helps to redeem Jesus’ cross. That element is this: Jesus rode toward it by his own choice. In facing it, he was acting in an upper realm of the spirit, in an area of what we might call “unenforceable obligations.” He could have made his quick attack on greed in the temple, escaped through the garden of Gethsemane and been safely back in Nazareth a couple of days later, leaving the priests to stew in their own anger and the mob to rationalize its own disappointment. This would have solved most of the angles except his own. But what of the message he had come to preach? What about the “abundant life,” if you have to run after every thrust? Jesus knew all about this. He himself had taught: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains simply grain. But if it so dies, it bears rich fruit. He who loves his life shall lose it, and he who cares not for his life in this world shall preserve it for eternity.” [John 12: 24-25]. By his decision, Jesus chose this death. But remember it as a historical fact.
2) Remember it also as a spiritual symbol of redemptive and creative conflict. William Stidger writes these verses:
I am the Cross of Christ.
I bore his body there on Calvary’s hill.
Till then I was a humble tree that grew beside a rill;
I think, till then, I was a thing despised of men.
I am the cross of Christ,
They say I tower “o’er the wrecks of time.”
I only know, that once a humble tree,
This was not so. But this
I know - since then
I have become a symbol for the hopes of men.
In this symbol, we see the Almighty’s method of overcoming evil, of transforming tragedy into triumph. Hegel says: “We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.” Arnold Toynbee advocates the same thesis, saying “Nothing worthwhile in the world is won without a struggle.” Life is no easy road. It is actually a continuous process of resolving the discord into the harmonious, of re-creating the tragedy into the triumph. Jesus’ triumph on entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was a failure, as nothing beside the triumph that sore and aching souls finally found after the tragedy of the cross! With the shadow of the cross across his path, Jesus laid hold of it in Gethsemane, wrestled with it, transformed it, redeemed it, made it a part of Christian mankind.
If we are to understand the meaning of the cross toward which Jesus rode, we must see it as historic fact, and as a spiritual symbol of transforming power. We must further see it as (3) a great incentive. The cross stands not only in rough cruelty, burdened with a suffering body, in the darkness of the hill of Golgotha. It stands empty, radiant, shining on a thousand hills of hope every Easter day. “Jesus they slew - but Christ they could not kill.” Through the cross a great man became a living Lord! Jesus who walked and talked and preached and prayed and died became the Christ who walks and talks and preaches and prays and lives continuously in our hearts! The empty and shining cross becomes a seal of the word received at the river Jordan, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” [Matthew 3: 17].
One morning after breakfast, Elizabeth Barrett Browning left her husband and went upstairs while a servant cleared the table where he expected to work. “After the servant had left, soft footsteps sounded behind him and his wife’s hand on his shoulder kept him from turning so he could see her face. She slipped a manuscript into his pocket saying, ‘Please read this, and if you do not like it, tear it up.’ Then she fled back upstairs while Robert Browning sat down to read the noblest love sequence ever written by a woman to the man of her choice.” Hidden in one of these “Sonnets From the Portuguese” runs this line: “The face of all the world is changed, I think, since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul.”
Now those are just words of a woman - not much of a woman either, by some standards, for she was so sickly of body that her output at some factory would have been negligible. But how rich, how immeasurable rich, is the concept of love between a husband and wife for all lovers because of the souls of Robert and Elizabeth Browning!
The cross toward which Jesus rode was a gruesome, rough, degrading reality. But how rich, how triumphant, how immeasurably filled with hope for all mankind is the use our Lord, by his matchless courage and understanding, made of it. From the worst of all tragedies, he changed it into the greatest of all triumphs.
When life’s necessities drive us toward some cross prepared for us on the hill of human suffering, may we have his divine grace to make of it, for ourselves and all others, a thing of lasting triumph.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, April 10, 1949.