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GOD ON THE GALLOWS

Part 3 in the Series, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”  

1 Peter 2:21-25; 4:12-19  

March 7, 2010 – Second Sunday in Lent  

Pastor Bob Sanders

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1 Peter 2:21-25; 4:12-19 (TNIV)

21 To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.

    22 "He committed no sin,
       and no deceit was found in his mouth."

    23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 24 "He himself bore our sins" in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; "by his wounds you have been healed." 25 For "you were like sheep going astray," but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

  12 Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. 14 If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. 15 If you suffer, it should not be as a murderer or thief or any other kind of criminal, or even as a meddler. 16 However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name. 17 For it is time for judgment to begin with God's household; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God? 18 And,
       "If it is hard for the righteous to be saved,
       what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?"

    19 So then, those who suffer according to God's will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good.

Those Who Suffer

This is the third in a series of Lenten messages we’re calling When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.  During these weeks leading up to Easter we’re taking a long look at the cross of Christ and thinking about what this central symbol of our faith says to us.  Last week we saw how the cross reveals the very heart of God.  I know a number of you were away last weekend, but what we said here was so important that I want you to read it or (better) to listen to it this week.  Go to the church’s web page and download a podcast or a printed copy or you can buy a CD later today.  We talked about how at the cross we see God’s holiness revealed: how God takes sin so seriously that he sent his Son to die for it.  But also how at the cross we see God’s love revealed: how God loved us so much even when we were sinners that he was willing to die for us.  Only in the cross do we see it: God’s infinite holiness and God’s infinite love brought together – the holy love of God revealed.  And when you see it, when you see what happened at the cross, it melts your pride, heals your fears, relieves your guilt, and draws you to Jesus Christ like nothing else can.  Listen to last week’s message.

Today we take another look at the cross and consider what it has to say to those who suffer.  At one time or another, each of us has had or will have a personal run-in with the reality of serious pain.  It comes in so many unwelcome forms: illness of body or mind, loss of work, the death of a loved one, an unhappy marriage, an unwanted divorce, a troubled child, a fractured church family, addiction, abuse, depression.  The list of personal sufferings goes on and on.  And, as I remind you from time to time, wherever you’re sitting in the congregation this morning you’re no more than five seats away from someone who suffers, someone who’s in trouble, someone with a broken heart.  Maybe that someone is you.

How do you think about suffering – whether it’s your own or the suffering of millions throughout the world?  We’ve heard just from Marlene Minor about the suffering (and hope) in Haiti.  And we’re just beginning to get a handle on what’s happened in Chile.  This past week teams from our church have been in Senegal, West Africa and Honduras, Central America, and in days to come we’ll hear from them about people in these places who deal every day with hunger, disease, and poverty beyond what most of us have ever imagined.  Next week Rich Stearns of World Vision will be here to tell us more about what’s going on in the world and how we can be involved in making a difference. 

For today I’m going to keep it a personal level, but I promise we’ll get into the larger issues in the coming weeks.  What do we Christians say about suffering when it hits us and the people we love?  What do we point to when the hurting person cries out in anguish, “Where is God?”  Let me be honest and admit I do not have all the answers to the questions about human suffering (and I don’t anyone who does).  But I have wrestled with these questions a great deal both as a pastor and as a person, and I can tell you this.  There is one place where I go to find hope and courage in times of pain, and that place is the cross of Jesus Christ.  When I survey the wondrous cross I see I am not alone, that we are not alone, in our pain.  There at the cross I see Jesus the sufferer.  I see him as he suffers physically – the terrible pain of the whip and nails and crown of thorns.  I see him as he suffers emotionally – the agony of betrayal and rejection by those he loves, those he came to save.  And perhaps worst of all, I see him as he suffers spiritually – the unimaginable pain of separation from his heavenly Father as he takes on the sins of the world, a pain that causes him to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Thee False Assumptions

What do we learn from the cross that helps us in our sufferings?  Well, for starters, even a quick glimpse of the cross cancels out a number of false assumptions that get passed around in Christian circles where suffering is concerned.  I’ll mention just three.  One is the idea promoted by people like Joel Osteen – that God always wills health and wealth.  This is sometimes called the “Prosperity Gospel” – the idea that if you’re a faithful Christian God is contractually obligated to grant you personal success, increased income and freedom from disease and difficulty.  I’m not going to spend time on the Prosperity Gospel because I think most of you already know this is heresy.  It’s utterly false teaching – and that becomes crystal clear when you look hold this view up alongside the cross of Christ. 

Similar to this is another false assumption that says complete physical healing is what real Christians ought to expect from God.  Healing means the suffering is always taken away, removed, eliminated – provided you have enough faith.  Well, it’s not true, and it’s never been true.  We have people in this congregation who have lived with some kind of illness or impairment for decades, and it has not diminished their service or their joy.  Yes, sometimes God does grant instantaneous healing.  Sometimes God grants healing over a long period of time.  And sometimes the healing God grants is in learning to live with the limitation, the disease, the impairment – learning to say with Paul, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” 1

A third false assumption is that godly people are exempt from suffering – the idea that Christians get some kind of pass, some kind of immunity from pain.  Not true.  God suffers, and Jesus suffers, and Paul suffers.  Why should we be different?  Can any of you name a saint in Scripture who lived a smooth, easy life?  When we look at Jesus, we do not find a suffering-free life.  Just the opposite.  The cross is crunchingly real and he did not evade it (though he could have).  As our text says, he committed himself to suffering, knowing that his Father had called him to do this very thing.  He didn’t look for a way out.  He bore the pain.

And so Peter says we shouldn’t be surprised when suffering strikes.  As Christians we don’t expect an exemption from pain.  What we do expect is that we won’t go through it alone.  What we do expect is that we go through the pain, through the loss, through the struggle in the blest company of the One who hung on that cross and who comes alongside every sufferer – Jesus Christ the crucified. 

But this is precisely the problem for many of us.  Suffering isolates us.  Suffering leaves us feeling alone.  After a while, other people pull away.  Even God seems distant.  We go through the fiery ordeal (as Peter puts it) and at a feeling level it seems like we’re on our own.  And this is one of the hardest things about it.  In our pain we sometimes imagine God sitting comfortably up in heaven, untouched by the millions on earth facing pain and death and fear.  If you’ve been through any kind of depth suffering, any prolonged illness, any unstoppable pain, you’ve felt this at some point – this seeming absence of God, this withdrawal, this silence.  And you’re not alone.  Read A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, written in the months after his wife died of cancer.  Read the Lamentations of Jeremiah.  Read Job.  In our pain we begin to feel God has abandoned us.  That’s when we need to take a long look at the cross of Christ.  Listen to what it’s saying.  God reveals himself in Jesus the sufferer, nailed to a cross of pain and death.  There on the cross we see not a God who stands apart from his children in their pain, but a God who takes on the pain, a God who suffers with us, a God who bleeds and dies.  Because of that cross we can never say to God, “You don’t understand.”  The cross says God does understand.  The cross says to all who suffer, “You are not alone.”  The cross says this God is never nearer than when our hearts are broken, our bodies wracked in pain, our hopes and dreams shattered.  He is the God who suffers – so declares the cross of Christ.

Three Authors

I’m going to illustrate this by quoting from three authors.  Each of them wrote in the twentieth century, but they come from very different perspectives.  The first is Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.  Last week I wandered through Powell’s bookstore, and there on display at the end of one aisle was a used copy of his book Night – the account of his boyhood experiences in the death camps of Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald.  I gave away my copy a long time ago, so I picked this one up and wasn’t surprised when it flopped open to a heavily underlined section – the part where he says,

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night. . . . Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. . . . Never shall I forget those moments which murdered God and my soul, and turned my dreams to ashes. 2

I flipped ahead and the book fell open to another section, an account I’ve never been able to forget and from which I took the title of today’s message.  It was the time when the guards tortured and hanged a young boy, “a child with a refined and beautiful face… [a] sad-eyed angel.”  Just before the hanging, Elie heard someone behind him whisper, “Where is merciful God?  Where is he?”  All the prisoners were forced to watch the hanging (it took the boy a long time to finally die), and then to march past his body and look him full in the face.  Behind him, Elie heard the same voice asking, “Where is God?”  He writes, “And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where is he?  This is where – hanging here on this gallows…’” 3

Though he is not a Christian, though he suffered at the hands of those who wrongly claimed to be Christians, Wiesel’s words nonetheless point to the cross.  For there, in Jesus the crucified, we see God on the gallows.  We see the God who suffered then, the God who suffers with us still.  Where is God?  Here on the cross.  Tell yourself that.  Remind yourself of that.  Call that image to mind when you suffer and feel abandoned.  Where is God?  Right here, right in the worst of the pain.  You are not alone. 

The second author is the British preacher and theologian John Stott.  Near the end of his magnificent book The Cross of Christ he devotes a chapter to the question of suffering and what the cross has to say about it.  And at one point he talks about what it means to him personally:

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. . . . In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?  I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world.  But each time after a while I have had to turn away.  And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness.  That is the God for me!  He laid aside his immunity to pain.  He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death.  He suffered for us. 4

He suffered for us and with us.  And somehow, our sufferings become more bearable in light of his suffering.  Don’t get me wrong.  I still have lots of questions about injustice and oppression, about cancer and mental illness, about earthquakes and AIDS, about children who suffer and especially those who suffer at the hands of adults, and a host of other evils.  But I have to say, I look at those questions in a different way when I see them through the lens of the suffering God, when I survey the wondrous cross.  The cross tells me God has suffered – and at a depth, at an intensity I cannot begin to imagine.  The cross tells me God still suffers with this bleeding planet – in Haiti and Chile, in Honduras and Senegal and Zambia, and here, right here.  And to me, that makes a difference.

Let me share with you one final author.  His name is Peter De Vries, an American writer probably best known for his humorous novels in the 1950s and 60s.  In 1961 he wrote a not-so-funny book called The Blood of the Lamb.  It’s the story of a man named Don Wanderhope, a middle aged guy who rejected the strict Calvinist Christianity of his Dutch Reformed parents, but never found anything to take its place.  He drifts along in an uneasy agnosticism, and then the crisis hits.  His teenaged daughter develops leukemia.  As the months pass, he goes between hysteria and hope watching his daughter undergo all the painful treatments medicine has developed to stem this terrible disease.  For hours at a time he sits in her room looking at her emaciated body.  I’ll warn you: it’s a tough read because the suffering he describes seems so real.  It is real.  You see, in real life De Vries lost his own ten-year-old daughter to leukemia.

At the end of the book, there’s a burst of hope as his daughter goes into remission.  It’s her birthday and so her dad brings a big elaborately decorated cake to the hospital to celebrate.  But when he arrives, things have turned grim.  An infection has invaded her weakened body, and after a short time she dies.  He leaves the hospital in a blind rage, and passes by the church next door where he has often come and tried to pray.  He stands before the large statue of Christ on the cross just outside the church.  He takes the cake out of the box, balances it in the palm of his hand, and throws the cake with all his might into the face of Christ, and here’s what De Vries writes:

It was miracle enough that the pastry should reach its target at all. . . . The more that it should land squarely, just beneath the crown of thorns.  Then through scalded eyes I seemed to see the hands of the crucified Christ free themselves of the nails and move slowly toward the soiled face.  Very slowly, very deliberately, with infinite patience, the icing was wiped away from the eyes and flung away.  Then the cheeks were wiped down with the same sense of brave and gentle ritual, with all the sobriety of one whose voice could be heard saying, “Suffer the little children to come unto me…for such is the kingdom of heaven.” 5

Some of you here today understand that kind of rage.  Some of you know what that father was feeling because you’ve felt it too.  Some of you understand the desire to throw something at God.  Maybe that’s part of what the cross does for us when we suffer like this.  It’s the one place where we can be utterly honest with our pain and know it’s safe.  It’s the one place where we can dump our anger and our grief and our disappointment.  And there on the cross, Jesus is willing to bear it – from us, for us, with us.

Perhaps that’s where you are this morning.  Perhaps you’re suffering, or someone you love is suffering.  Perhaps you’re feeling alone, cut off from God, abandoned, angry.  The good news is you’re not alone.  Take a long look at the cross.  He knows.  He’s been there.  Jesus Christ went to cross and he was abandoned, he was cut off.  He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” so that you and I will never have to. 

Are you broken?  Are you angry?  He can handle it.  No matter what you throw at him, he’ll still be there for you.  He’ll strengthen you, help you, cause you to stand.  Over time, if you let him, he can redeem the pain – turn it into something precious and through it make you stronger, gentler, more compassionate.  He’ll use your brokenness to bring healing to others. 

But for right now all you need to do is come.  Come to the foot of the cross.  Come to this table and receive these reminders of his grace: bread that’s been broken, juice that’s poured out in love.  His body broken for you.  His blood shed for you.  Come.  Tell him what you’re going through.  And know this: He will never abandon you, never give up on you, never forsake you.  The cross is his promise, this day and always.

1. 2 Corinthians 12:10.
2. Elie Wiesel, Night (Hill & Wang, 1972), p.34.
3. Ibid, pp.64f.
4. John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (InterVarsity, 1986), pp.335f.
5. Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb (University of Chicago, 1961), p.237.