April 14, 2017
Heb. 4: 14-16; 5: 7-9
Is 52: 13—53: 1-12
Holy Cross, Champaign, Ill.
“In the days when Christ
was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and
tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because
of his reverence” (Heb 5: 7).
As familiar as we are with
the story of the Lord’s passion, we know about his “prayers and supplications
with loud cries and tears.” We remember
his pleading 3 times in the Garden of Olives with “the one who was able to save
him from death”: “Father, take this cup
away from me” (Matt 26:39, etc.). We
remember his anguished cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you
abandoned me?” (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34).
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| 30 pieces of silver (source unknown) |
How, then, can we say, “He
was heard because of his reverence”? How
can we say that God heard his prayers and supplications and saved him from
death?
It sounds, rather, like
the one who “bore our infirmities” and “endured our sufferings,” who was “pierced
for our offenses, crushed for our sins” (Is 53:4-5). To use a cliché that’s apt, he was “hung out
to dry,” literally hanged on the cross in the blistering Palestinian sun,
enduring 3 to 6 hours of agony. (St. Mark
says Jesus was crucified about 9 a.m. (15:25), and Matthew and Luke tho not
explicit are consistent with that; only John gives noon as the hour of his
condemnation (19:14). All agree it was
about 3 p.m. when he died.) Those hours
of agony included pain shooting from his nailed wrists and feet, breath coming
in desperate, painful gasps, throat parched, and onlookers throwing insults at
him.
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Christ Crowned with Thorns
Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent, Belgium (crypt church)
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The reading from the
Letter to the Hebrews also says, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to
sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every
way, yet without sin” (4:15).
Aren’t millions of people
mistreated as badly and unjustly as Jesus was?
Don’t millions of people suffer awful agonies and painful deaths they
don’t deserve from sickness or disaster?
Don’t all these people cry to God and shed tears, begging to be
saved? Don’t we pray often for the
persecuted, the exiled, the victims of war and disaster, and our sick loved
ones?
“In the days when Christ
was in the flesh,” he learned from his own awful experience “to sympathize with
our weaknesses” and was “similarly tested in every way” as any human being has
ever been tested. Sympathize means “to suffer with.”
Jesus has identified himself with our human sufferings, weaknesses, and
testing. Our “great high priest who has
passed thru the heavens” 1st passed thru 30-something years of life as a man,
suffering and rejoicing, fearing and hoping, enjoying family and friendship,
knowing rejection and betrayal, undergoing temptation but always resisting it,
always practicing faithful obedience (the “reverence” that Hebrews speaks of)—unlike
us, always “without sin.”
One magazine columnist
writes about how suffering connects us with our fellow men and women:
It is through suffering that we are broken down and made to
confront our own weakness and vulnerability.
This can be a transformative moment, in which we recognize at some
deeper level that we are not the center of the universe. It is a moment that either opens us up to a
journey in which we move beyond ourselves to see a profound connection between
our suffering and the suffering of others, or it marks the beginning of a
desperate attempt to reclaim our centrality in the universe.[1]
So in order to sympathize
with us, Jesus had to undergo what we undergo; had to establish “a profound
connection between our suffering” and his own.
If he was tempted to make himself the center of the universe, he
certainly passed that test, emptying himself completely, serving others
completely, giving his own life completely (one layer of the meaning when Jesus
utters, “It is finished” [John 19:30] and dies). This complete offering that he made of
himself to God and to all of humanity rendered him capable and deserving of
being “made perfect,” Hebrews says (5:9).
Renowned psychiatrist Viktor Frankl holds that we all seek meaning in
our lives, and “the more one forgets himself … the more human he is and the
more he actualizes himself,”[2]
i.e., becomes the person he (or she) was created to be. As God Jesus was already perfect in his
identity and every other sense, of course.
His moral perfection as a human being, lived in his complete
self-giving, meant that he could be made a perfect and complete human being: perfect in God’s image, like our 1st parents
when they came from God’s hand.
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The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ
by Vasili Golinsky
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So, no, his Father did not
save Jesus from death in his human flesh.
He had to offer himself completely—no miraculous delivery from the
cross. Even had Jesus stepped down from the
cross or been rescued by the angels (cf. Matt 26:53), wouldn’t he eventually
have had to face death as a mortal man, just as Lazarus and the daughter of
Jairus eventually had to die “for good,” with no one immediately to call them
back? Would a Jesus who “stayed a great
unknown like his father carving wood” in Nazareth, as Judas proposes in Jesus Christ Superstar, and then died
quietly in bed identify with us, sympathize with us, like Isaiah’s Suffering
Servant—one of the Old Testament prophecies about the One who would save
Israel,” take away the sins of many and win pardon for their offenses” (53:12)
by offering himself like the Passover lamb (53:7) thru whom Israel was
delivered from the angel of death; like the Atonement sacrifice upon which the
guilt of us all was laid (53:6)
Because he was obedient to
his Father in passing thru all this testing, in fact his Father did save him
from death—not in the way Jesus himself may have been praying for in Gethsemane,
and certainly not in the way we think someone would be saved from death. Instead, God raised the mortal flesh of Jesus
of Nazareth, the Virgin Mary’s son, to immortal life. He was made a perfect human being; for God
created men and women in his own image, intended for immortality. “Being made perfect, he became the source of
eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb 5:9). In the Collect at the beginning of this
liturgy, we begged God the Father that we might be so sanctified by divine
grace as to be ourselves transformed from “men of earth” into “images of the
Man of heaven,” viz., the perfect, risen Jesus.
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Jesus placed in the tomb (source unknown)
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