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The Holy Spirit is Moving us to the Cross

Reverend Michael Hesse

(Final in a series of six sermons on the Holy Spirit)

Lord, who was the guilty? Who brought this upon you? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee. Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee. I crucified thee. Amen.

Here we are drawing to a close the last week of Lent and I have some thoughts I would like to share with you. As a priest I have been through lots of Lents over the years. As a Christian I was in several Lents before that. I have not seen too many Lents that have been by and large as lackadaisical as this one. I know that some of you have been very disciplined in your Lenten study, Praise God, but I also know a number of you have not. So...some thoughts directed to you and me. One of the problems that we have in the church today is that we know the story. Been there, done that; been through all these Holy Weeks; been through all these Lenten disciplines; given up sweets; given up whatever; added on this, that or the other. Been to Maundy Thursdays; been to Good Fridays; done Vigils, so what's new? This means it has lost a lot of its personal nature for many of us. I got to thinking about that this week and I found myself in a kind of reverie going back and remembering my days in seminary when a rock opera was produced by the name of Jesus Christ Superstar.

I remember from that rock opera the scene where Jesus is making his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the crowds are there . They are waving their palm branches and their cloaks on the ground and they are singing, "Hosanna, hey, Sanna, hey J.C. would you smile for me? Hey, superstar." They looked for what they could get out of him and when they couldn't get anything out of him most of the members of this same crowd crucified him. We find a week later they are among those who pass by deriding him and mocking him.

If the Spirit is going to move us towards the Cross this Holy Week, I think it's not too late and perhaps there are some things we can think of this morning which will make the crucifixion much more personal.

Earlier this year, I was privileged to go to Uganda. I accompanied Forrest Mobley, Lonnie Hearne and Tommy Taylor. While we were there, Tommy and I had the privilege of making some parish visits with a priest from a town named Kaduma and in the midst of a congregation, interestingly enough, named St. Andrews. We had a particular mission on this little pastoral visit we made. We were taking some little thin foam mattresses to people who didn't have any bedding at all and slept on banana leaves or on the dirt floor. They had no sheets, obviously, and no clothes. So, we took them some used clothes and this little bed roll and fresh sheets.

One man in particular really made an impact. He had been an elder in that congregation for years and was one of the respected leaders of that parish family. Then some time back, he caught leprosy and over the years he and his wife had suffered miserably as a result. The poor people in that congregation had gone to help another one of their own members. They had built for this husband and wife a little mud hut. That was their home. I think it was probably 10 feet by 10 feet, or maybe 12 by 12. The leprosy had so disfigured this man that he could no longer walk, so every day he would drag himself out to a straw mat about 20 feet outside his doorway. That was the boundary of his entire world. His wife was deaf; he was blind. When we rode up and we gave him this pitiful little offering we had, he cried and he praised God and he clapped the nubs that were his hands together. And for a little time I was really caught up in that man's pain. I could feel it; I bore it; I interceded for him in the midst of that empathy. I probably will never forget that visit and I'll bet that Tommy doesn't either.

I've always understood that kind of empathy I felt for that man as being sort of a pale but realistic comparison with the kind of empathy that Jesus has had for us. When He was baptized, I was always taught that He came up out of the water and identified with the sinful human condition; that He walked through his ministry with that sort of empathy, knowing and understanding the feelings of other people in their joys and in their sorrows. And I have always taught that Jesus, by divine commission and his own willingness, took upon his own shoulders the sins of the whole world.

Let me tell you the story of another leper which I think will help make our theology of Lent and of Jesus a little better.

The year is 1873 and a young Belgian priest, 33 years old, who was a member of the Fathers of the Sacred Heart Order believes he has received a call from God to go and minister to the leper colony on the Hawaiian Island of Malacca. There had been and epidemic that had broken out in the Hawaiian Islands about 10 years before and in an attempt to keep the epidemic in some sort of containment, they picked this island called Molokai and they shipped everybody who had leprosy to the Island. Between 1866 and 1873, some 700 people had been shipped there. Over half by 1873 had already died because while they shipped the lepers there they didn't make any particular provisions for them. The ship captains would not go ashore so they just literally threw the lepers into the water and made them swim, which is pretty hard if you don't have legs that work.

So, the people on the Island had no hope and people without hope just live a while in profligate lifestyle and some of the Catholics who were lepers among them began to plead with the church, "Will you send us somebody. Somebody who will walk with us; somebody who will give us some hope." Father Damian received the call and the church blessed him and sent him there saying, "Stay as long as you can. We know it is going to be hard." In his memoirs he wrote that it was so difficult when he first arrived (because when he would go and visit somebody the stench was so overwhelming) that he took up pipe smoking just to cover it and that sometimes he would just have to stand outside and hold his nose lest he pass out. But he stayed with these people and he loved these people. The first thing he did was he began to give them decent burials. People without hope don't really care how a burial goes so they were burying people in very shallow graves that the pigs could dig up. He gave them proper burials, dignified burials that said life matters.

He helped the people build homes for themselves and they helped him build a church. Pretty soon he was carrying the message of the need of the lepers throughout the world to the world. The world was responding. In his sermons and his teachings, he always described himself as a leper. "We lepers" he would say. Then one day he woke up and he had the disease himself. For the next several years he slowly died. The hard part of his death was that when the church and the politicians discovered that he had leprosy they isolated him as well. He was alone, dying a leper.

There is a great difference between the empathy that Mike Hesse felt when I went to visit the leper, and I took upon my own shoulders for a little time that man's pain, and Father Damian who went and had their leprosy. Now, let's bring this teaching into the context of Good Friday. Turn in the Gospels to Mark, Chapter 15, beginning at verse 29. Jesus has been crucified and the text says, "Those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, 'Aha, you who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself. Come down from the cross'. So, also the chief priests mocked him to one another with the scribes, saying, 'He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.' Those who were crucified with Him also reviled him."

Now, if my teaching had been correct it would mean that there was this innocent Jesus who was bearing the sins of the world upon His shoulders, who is listening to these people while they deride him, knowing that He is offering the perfect sacrifice of innocence for those of us who are guilty, knowing that He is the ultimate reflection of the sinless act; knowing that in spite of His physical pain, He was the perfect dying for the sinful. If that had been the case, as I have taught all these years, then why would Jesus cry out, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?, which means, ' My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.'" Those are not triumphant words.

In this morning's Epistle to the church at Philippi, we read this, "Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man and being found in human form, He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross." Do you know what obedience meant for Jesus? More than I had ever imagined.

In II Corinthians, Chapter 5, verse 20, let's read it together, "We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake, He made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God." For our sake He made him to be what? How this has transformed my understanding of the crucifixion. The sins of the world were not placed on Jesus' shoulders. Jesus became the sin--that is how it translates in a real personal way. It means that He took your pride and my pride and He became the expression of that pride. It means He took our anger and became the expression of that anger. It means He took our greed and became the expression of that greed. It means He took our gluttony and became the expression of that gluttony. It means He took our lust and became the expression of our lust; He took our envy and became the expression of that envy. He took our sloth and became the expression of that sin in the flesh. Jesus did not die the sinless one, the sinless offering for all the rest of us sinners, a perfect expression of the ultimate sacrifice. God made Him to be sin.

You know what the cost of that sin is? The Holy God does not look upon sin. The Holy God has no companionship with sin. The stink of sin was so great in Jesus that our Heavenly Father turned his back. That is the consequence of sin, your sin, my sin, that became Christ's sin out of obedience to His Father. It means that in the last hours of Jesus' life on the cross, when He heard the people wagging their heads and deriding him He did not live above those derisions. He knew the derisions were correct; He had become guilty on our behalf. The consequence of being made sin: Jesus would die alone; absolutely, positively alone. The darkness had its way.

If the Holy Spirit moves you towards the Cross this week, then I hope that you will spend some time gazing upon Jesus; because in the presence of the Cross there won't be any of those Hosannas, just silence. There will be the gloom of darkness and in the silence and in the gloom, look at Jesus and you watch Him suffer and you remember that He went through that so that you would never have to. And you remember that the fate of Jesus on that Cross is the fate of everybody who dies without Jesus. But I hope you will also rejoice, rejoice in the knowledge that because Jesus died that way you don't have to, ever, and that through faith in Jesus Christ we have overcome sin, the world--not in our own strength but in His strength. Not in our own victory but in His victory. The promise is clear for us that the day will come when we will close our eyes for the last time here but we will never close our eyes alone. God will be holding us in the palm of His hand. The promise is also that the day will come when we will awake and we will be staring into the eyes of Jesus for always.

"Hosanna, Hosanna, hey Sanna, Sanna, Sanna, Hosanna"?

No, we're better than that. We are called to be better than that. So, let's make this last week of Lent a real journey to the Cross so that when Easter comes we will have a real celebration and not a false one. Then let's let Easter carry us the rest of our lives. Amen.