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The Forgiveness That Begets Love Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 28, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Matthew 26
When it comes to human nature, the Bible is short on motives and long on action. Why the crowds gathered on that first Palm Sunday to shout “Hosanna!” and spread garments on his way, we cannot know for sure. Why Judas sought out the chief priests in order to hand over his friend to certain death, the scriptures do not really say. Why the disciples’ collective countenance dropped around the table at Jesus’ mention of their betrayal, we may only imagine. Then there is the kiss in the garden, the sword drawn, the soldiers seizing him and the disciples, to a person, forsaking him for the safety of the Galilean hillside. We are given to know what happened over the course of these fateful days, but seldom does the story of our salvation address the why, address the twisted logic or the self-justifying motives for our God-forsaking lives. I think this is so in part because, according to Scripture, there is only one motive sufficient to account for our sin and our sickness unto death. “You will not die,” said the serpent to the woman, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Because, from the beginning, we decided to know good and evil rather than God, we are driven to justify the moral universe as we have construed it, from our own godly perspective, and often with deathly consequences for those who fall outside of it. How conveniently “good” our motives have been judged to be since that mythic day when we originally refused the love for which we were made. How blameless we stand in relation to the fault we so readily find in another, the “other”, the scapegoat. Having no reason to be forgiven, we have no clue what it is to love and be loved. Therefore the Biblical witness makes no mention of our high-minded motives, especially as this week turns from pomp and pageantry to pathos and passion. Rather Matthew invites us, through the actions of now familiar characters, to open our eyes and see from below our own part in what amounts to a lynching. But more. He invites us to view the events of the week also from above through the words of the prophets and the psalmists, provoking us to see—even in Jesus’ death--the purposes of the God who chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. To wit, the triumphal entry is encompassed by the ominous foreboding of death and yet interpreted as the fulfillment of the promise spoken by Isaiah and Zechariah, “saying, ‘Tell the daughter of Zion, Behold your King is coming to you, humble and mounted on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass.’” When the crowd settles down, Jesus tells the parable of the wicked tenants, foreshadowing his death at human hands while also seeing in his rejection the hand of God. “Have you never read in the scriptures,” he asks, citing the psalmist, ‘The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner; this was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.’” Even the disciples’ forsaking of Jesus on the Mount of Olives is seen by Matthew as the means used of God to salvage the relationship we originally refused: “You will all fall away because of me this night,” says Jesus. “For it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’” In each instance, Matthew looks back from the perspective of God’s redeeming purpose revealed in Jesus’ death and resurrection and reads into the awful events of this week the same steady purpose of the God who wills to be with us and not without us. But I think Matthew intends still more. I think in this narrative he means to relieve us of any notion that we know good and evil or are God-like in our goodness or have bought eternity with our morality lest we refuse the forgiveness that alone begets in us the love for which we were made. Therefore and in the first place, Matthew portrays us as those who necessarily forsake Jesus and flee every day of our lives because, were it otherwise, we would be those who placed our faith in our own goodness and not in God’s mercy and forgiveness toward us. Consider what our minds would conclude if the story before us had Judas espousing Jesus’ cause all the way to the cross…if Peter had not denied him but died with him bravely and by his side…if the crowds that night on the Mount of Olives had mounted significant opposition to the soldiers and overthrown their rule in favor of Jesus’ reign. That, of course, is how Judas and the disciples and the crowd thought the story would unfold. They thought Jesus was born to establish a kingdom to their liking and with their help here and now on earth. Hence the motives we read into these ancient characters’ actions are as relevant as the morning’s headlines: the desire for our cause to win the day…the zeal for our values to be firmly established in the social fabric of the common life…the need to place our faith in a hero whose agenda strangely mirrors our own…the belief that we alone possess the truth. Need I mention how quickly these apparently high-minded motives turn dark and dangerous, how insidious human righteousness always is, how violent and hateful the human heart becomes when things do not go the way we believe is the only way because it is our way? As those whose interpretive screen is Scripture, do you not see that day by day, more and more this nation is poised for a lynching. And make no mistake: like the crowds in Matthew’s gospel, our acquiescence to hatred and racism is tantamount to shouting, “Crucify!” The blood will be on our hands, though after Golgotha, no longer can we lynch the other in God’s name. This is why Matthew insists that we see ourselves in the characters that forsake him lest we mistake the seed of our sin--our desire to know good and evil--for the cause of our salvation. If the story of this week were not riddled with our betrayal…if Holy Week had been told from the perspective of the elder brother as most of us believe we are, then the forgiveness that begets love would be irrelevant to the moral lives we have managed to live without him. Thank God, for our poor sakes, Matthew’s passion is riddled with prodigal sons and daughters instead! Therefore on this Thursday next, whether you feel the light within you go out early on as the chief priests plot against him or the angry disciples question his anointing or Judas puts the silver in his pocket or as the twelve question themselves at table or Peter and the sons of Zebedee sleep through his grief or in the moment they all forsake him and flee…or even if you hold out until Peter hears the cock crow in the courtyard, find yourself as a prodigal in need of an enormous forgiveness lest you go to your grave having loved little. Then in the second place, Matthew gives us eyes to see him whom we have despised and rejected as the one who alone loves. Of all the aspects of our human nature borne by Christ for the sake of our salvation, surely that which most grieves God’s heart is our choosing to reject him, to live without him, day by day. “He was despised and rejected…, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” Why would that be so? How could it be that we would not love him who has come from heaven’s heights to assume our sin and embrace the likes of us? The “how” is for Matthew is quite obvious. From the standpoint of our knowing good and evil instead of God, loving him would mean leaving all the things we love more, and we cannot bring ourselves to let go. But in Jesus God loved us in such a way that God assumed not only every grief and sorrow we will know between birth and death--as every mother or father longs to assume a child’s sadness and sorrow and pain—but in Jesus God assumes the many guises our God-forsaking takes. He bears the arrogance of our knowledge of good and evil as this week he bears with the rejection of the religious experts of the day; he bears the emptiness of our secular existence as he weeps even now over the impossibility of Jerusalem's peace; he bears the anguish of our infirmities and infidelities as he tends and takes to his heart those wounded by our righteous judgments; he bears the terror of the death we must die as in Gethsemane praying alone he wills the will of God and turns his face toward Golgotha. But underneath all of these griefs and sorrows he bears…or rather at their heart…is the one great godly sorrow. For the Creator of the heavens and the earth, who made us to live in loving relation to him in Jesus Christ, must bear, at the last, our compete rejection. From the guard’s mocking, to the way of the cross through Jerusalem’s narrow streets, to a crown of thorns, a sip of vinegar, a throw of the dice, a side pierced by the sword, Christ endures his death without us, and in so doing, he bears the deepest grief and sorrow we know: our God forsaking and God forsaken human existence. Short of his cry of dereliction on the cross we truly would be without Him. But because of his forsakenness, he takes our side even as we forsake Him, revealing the love which bears the bloody reality of our rejection to the end that nothing in life or in death can separate us from that love. Though finally God’s love is love precisely because we are free to turn our backs on it. Matthew, in the third place, would have us see the events of this week from the anticipated and so-called freedom of those who live in a world rid of the God who would rival their place in it. Put another way, Matthew writes this story in such a way that the freedom necessary for love to be love triumphs. Like children struggling to find our true selves apart from a parent, we only may truly love Him as we are free to leave Him. This week is riddled with evidence of our fleeing because, if we could not take off for a far country, if we were prevented from going the distance it takes by grace to come to ourselves, we never would know the incomprehensible forgiveness and love of the rejected Father who awaits our return and, when he spies us down the road, comes running to receive us with open arms. In the face of our every tragic betrayal, the God we may know in Jesus Christ leaves room enough for us to love Him in return or--failing that--promises finally to seek us until at the last he finds us lost on a cliff and carries us home rejoicing. We are here, you and I, in the crowd on Palm Sunday, because beyond any humanly contrived threat of damnation if we were not, this simple Savior riding on a donkey captures our fickle hearts for a moment. Soon we will join another crowd, first in the garden observing at a distance…then in the mob crying crucify. It is as it must be. For until we inhabit the deep darkness and silence of the world without God, until we believe God has forsaken us for good reason who have forsaken God for good, we will miss the pathos and the passion of the God whose forgiveness begets love. “Sweet Eve,” says Davie Napier’s Adam, in that first garden before Gethsemane, “you say you thought you heard him laugh?” I heard him say, “How can I give you up? How can I hand you over?” Then a word about another silly little tree-- an antidotal tree, redemptive tree. And then--this must be when you thought he laughed-- I think I heard him sob. I think he wept. |