"Where Is God Now?"
Sermon Presented April 9, 2006
Palm Sunday
Mark 15:1-39
You just heard Sara read the story of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and until a few years ago, this was the story I heard preached every year on the Sunday before Easter. It's a welcome story of joy in an otherwise dark Lenten period. But recently, the palms have taken a back seat to the approaching death of Jesus. Why don't we just celebrate the palms and then move into the high point of the church year - Easter - without the gloom of disappointment and death?
One reason we will walk through the passion today is because not everyone attends worship services on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, and this journey is necessary for our Easter preparation. Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians do a much better job than Baptists at making Holy Week meaningful, so this morning may be your only opportunity to walk this segment of the journey. As Jesus moves toward his cross and the incredible suffering that awaits him there, you are invited to face your own crosses - your own suffering - and then assess God's place in that suffering. Let's look at our text, Mark 15:1-39, and see what happens after the parade. (Read text.)
Today marks the beginning of the holiest week of the Christian year. When we hear the story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, we step into a great tragedy. During this final week of his life, Jesus suffers rejection, betrayal, accusations, beatings, humiliation - while being stripped naked and spit upon, and finally the physical, emotional and spiritual agony of crucifixion. It was a week of emotional and physical suffering.
Suffering is a particularly painful subject for all people -believers and nonbelievers alike. People ask: "Why did this happen to me?" But believers ask that question of God. "Why, God?" "Why does my 50-year-old wife have Alzheimer's disease?" "Why did this precious young person die in a car crash?" "Why didn't you protect this child from abuse?" "Why is my marriage hopelessly broken?" "Why did I lose my dream job?" "Why, God, why?" And when we get no answers, we look for explanations, none of which satisfies! On the cross, Jesus cries out: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And God is silent!
Mark's gospel isn't a Mel Gibson type "Passion of the Christ" where the agony and suffering of Jesus are the focus. For Mark, the pain isn't the point. His message doesn't focus on how Jesus defeats death but how he refuses to avoid it. We see here that Jesus refuses to fight pain by inflicting pain. He refuses to overcome injustice with an easy remedy. He refuses to fight against the shame heaped upon him by using a flashy display of power. Instead he dies on a cross - without a fight. He lives and dies the way of peace!
Our text highlights God's abandonment of Jesus. Mark shows us that the responsibility for Jesus' death lies at the feet of those who practice deceit and power politics - politics that permit the casual sacrifice of innocent people through wars and corruption. Mark shows us leaders whose jealousy, lack of commitment to justice, and penchant for violence bring Jesus to his death. And times haven't changed in the last 2000 years. Today the world has a plethora of corrupt religious and political leaders.
The mocking cynicism of the Roman soldiers shows how actions to depersonalize a victim increase the violence. How they dressed Jesus, mocked him and spit on him precipitated greater abuse. The beating of Frank Jude and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Graib are contemporary examples of depersonalization gone awry. Sometimes evil is victorious and those practicing evil go unpunished.
Living an authentic life and following Jesus in discipleship isn't easy because our world is mad with cravings for possessions, power and prestige. Living a life of service and peace as Jesus did, doesn't sell! So what can we learn from Jesus' last week to better deal with the suffering that comes to us? How do we overcome evil with good?
In the book we are studying on Wednesday nights: Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting, the author Holly Whitcomb relates a story about the poet Lucy Grealy, who describes her childhood cancer and lifelong disfigurement. While still a child, Grealy went through 2½ years of chemotherapy, during which time she spent many hours walking between the doctor's office and the clinic's restroom. Scratched on the door of one stall were the words "God is near." In the second stall, the same person had scratched, "Be here now." During those years of chemo, Grealy pondered these two messages, both of which she felt might offer some important truth. She wrote in her memoir:
Be Here Now. I didn't want to be here now. My wanting was inconsequential. I was here now, whether I liked it or not. But something about this saying attracted me, either despite or because of its seeming simplicity, and two out of three times I went for door number two.
In the last week of his life, Jesus shows us how to be present in the now. And like Jesus, when we are alert in our waiting and our suffering, we can deal with the present. Jill Carroll, who was recently released after 3 months of captivity in Iraq, had to be diligent to the present in her tenuous circumstances.
Like Jesus, we sometime cry out to God in a loud voice. We don't want to be enlightened! We don't want an education. Learning something new about ourselves is NOT what we're looking for. We want God to dismiss the school of hard knocks and give us relief from the mental and/or physical pain that we are experiencing. We want God to fix it - NOW!
All too frequently we hear - or even say "If you are good, God, why don't you act?" A philosopher once wrote: "Either God is good, but ineffective and unconcerned, in which case he is not good for us, or, considering the unrelieved, unjustified pain in this world, God is evil." When we experience unrelieved, unaddressed pain, these thoughts can come unannounced.
Another rationalization we hear is that God is very good, but also inactive. God created the world and left things unfinished. God isn't our personal errand boy. Stuff happens. The trouble is that this picture of God looks almost nothing like the God we meet in the Scriptures. The God of the Bible tends to enjoy talking, disrupting, intruding, reaching, saving, punishing the powerful and uplifting the poor. This God is always telling people what they have spent their whole lives trying not to hear, calling unlikely people to do something God wants done, surprising, startling, doing something about us and the world.
When we render God into a sympathetic but disengaged therapist, we take God off the hook. Belief in this sort of docile God is easier for us. It rescues us from the dilemma of having to make excuses for God's lack of engagement with us and our suffering. God doesn't heal, save, rescue, or reach in, not because God is unconcerned, which God being love is concerned, but rather because God is uninvolved.
When we remove God from active involvement in our world and in our lives, we can run things the way we want. Sometimes after removing God from active involvement, people use God's name to wage war, commit acts of injustice and gain political and religious power.
However, despite ourselves, God comes to us. Somebody we know receives a miracle. Someone comes away healed. A life is uplifted or changed, a future is rearranged, and we realize that God is not as inactive and disengaged as the modern world wants us to believe. Then we realize that maybe our great challenge with God is not that God doesn't care, doesn't heal, doesn't intervene, but rather that God doesn't care, heal, or intervene when we want. Jesus came and acted, but in a way that he remained sovereign, free to come and free to go, free to speak and free to be silent. Jesus comes and acts in sovereign ways.
Today marks the beginning of the Passion. We wanted Jesus to come into town on a warhorse, but he rode a donkey. We wanted him to go to Washington D. C. or Madison or city hall and fix the political problems, but he went to the temple to pray. We wanted him to mobilize his forces and set things right, but he gathered with his friends in an upper room, washing feet, breaking bread and drinking wine. We wanted him to go head-to-head with the political and religious powers, but he just hung there on Friday from nine o'clock until three with hardly a word.
It wasn't that Jesus didn't do anything, it was that he didn't do the things that we wanted most and he still doesn't do those things. It wasn't that Jesus didn't intervene; it was that he rode a donkey.
The cross of Jesus demonstrates divine power identified with the weak. Those who expect God to come and physically throw out the enemy will be disappointed. Violence, suffering, cruelty, wars and their cost in human lives are reality. Disciples of Jesus learn to find God at work in the suffering of the present, and in the present, we will continue to cry out to God.
The question today is: Will you worship such a God? Will you place your life before this one who acts, but often in ways that are free, sovereign, and unencumbered by our need? Will you follow him down the narrow path that God walks this week? As always, you have a choice.
Resource: Pulpit Resources Year Vol. 34, No. 2 by William Wilimon (pp. 9-12.)
