Bible Text: John 18:1-19:42 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Lent 2022 | Jesus says to the women who are following him and weeping as He bears his cross to Calvary, “Do not weep for me. Weep for yourselves.” Don’t pity me, pity yourselves. So it will do us no good to feel sorry for Jesus today. Martin Luther particularly insists on this: Jesus’ suffering is no spectacle to make us cry at the injustice, to make us pity a poor man suffering unjustly. We can read Oliver Twist or the Count of Monte Cristo if we want a story like that. We don’t get to pity Jesus. It’s exactly the opposite. Jesus goes to the cross in pity for us, feeling sorry for us. We aren’t in a position to pity Him. He’s God. We’re sinners. He doesn’t need our pity. We need his. You will never find a single sentence in the Bible that tells us to pity God. It’s just not there.
In fact, throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus calls his suffering and death His glory, His Father’s glory, and our glory. He never presents His passion as some tragic story. It is no miscarriage of human justice that evokes ordinary human feeling. Anyone can and should pity a sick baby, or civilians killed in a war – these are the natural feelings of our human race, because we know we too are subject to pain and death, so we hate it when we see innocent life suffer. But Jesus’ death is utterly and totally different. It’s not simply an innocent life that’s ending, not just innocent blood that’s being spilt, not just normal human pain and suffering, this is the death, the suffering, the shame chosen by God Himself, that reveals Himself as our God, the God whose love demands payment for our sin from Himself. He makes Himself the guilty one, takes the sin of the world on Himself, and in so doing makes a spectacle of all evil, of sin, of death, of the devil, by destroying them in His humility and bearing them in the pure body and soul that belong to God Himself.
It’s at His death that the centurion cries out, “Surely this was the Son of God.” God is known here, that’s the point: we know who God is by His death. The power of His creation, the wondrous design of this world, the beauty of right against the ugliness of wrong, these things will only tell us some things about God. To know Him, to know Who He is, to know His essence and His totality, is to know His suffering and His death. Far from pitying Him, we praise Him and glorify Him and honor Him and trust in Him and fear Him, because He suffers and is mocked and faces hell and dies. Because this is God, the true God, who made the heavens and the earth, not some mysterious divine Being in the sky, but the God who takes on our flesh and blood and bleeds for us.
Neither is His glory expressible in any parallel that we see on this earth. It is not like a mother having mercy on her children. It is not like a man laying down his life to save the innocent. The analogy is more like what Pastor Richard called it last night, a man traveling across the world to rescue a rusted can. It’s an absurdity, absurd love. St. Paul puts it this way, “Scarcely for a good man will someone dare to die. Yet perhaps for a righteous man someone would dare to die. But God shows His love for us in this: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.” This is reason for awe, for wonder, not for pity. The horrible pain, the lashes, the thorns, the spit and mocking, the curse of God coming down on Him is terrible, not simply because it happens to the only innocent man who has ever lived, but because it happens to God and it happens for the totally unworthy, for sinners, for the ungodly, for people who deserved what God ended up getting.
But Jesus calls them, calls us, His friends. Greater love has no man than this, than that he lay down his life for His friends. But we were not His friends, at least not because of anything we had done. We deserved to be called His enemies. But He calls Peter, His denier, His friend. He calls the disciples who abandon Him His friends. What manner of love is this? What strange speech is this? What kind of friends are these, are we? But this is how He speaks and His speech is truth. And so He calls you His friend. “All sinful pleasures, heedless I was trying, while Thou were’t dying,” you will soon confess. And yet He calls you His friend. Though you have put Him on a cross and bruised Him and mocked Him and left Him alone to die. Though your sins caused His torture, the torture of God, He calls you His friend. Because He wanted to make you His friend, that’s it. Because His love surpasses anything natural to this world. This is His glory, and it is beautiful beyond expression.
The Old Testament, and especially the psalms, speak about this glory already. This is why the Bible is the Holy Book. It is sui generis, of its own kind, unparalleled, all other books claiming to be holy only cheap and failed imitations. The Bible bears the mark of God, of this glory manifested on Calvary. It is not the bare power of God that the Psalms exalt to heaven. Even when the Psalms say, “Be exalted O God above the heavens, let your glory be above all the earth,” even then, it is to thank Him for His mercy here on earth. God is exalted above all things, as Philippians tells us, when Jesus is exalted above all things, because He humbled Himself, because being in the form of God, and not considering it a hard thing to be equal with God, He became obedient to death, even the death of the cross. Therefore, because of this, because He was lifted up on a cross, he is lifted up above the heavens and we know Him as the Lord, to whom every knee will bow, and ours especially, ours willingly.
The Psalms, the entire Bible, teach us to pray to the God of mercy, the God who desires His mercy and not our sacrifices. And the Bible teaches us to see His power and His mercy as one. His strength and His pity as the same thing. That’s what the cross shows us, the very heart of God, why David could sing, “But I will sing of Your power; Yes, I will sing aloud of Your mercy in the morning; For You have been my defense And refuge in the day of my trouble. To You, O my Strength, I will sing praises; For God is my defense, My God of mercy.” You see this, mercy and power, combined, in poetic parallelism, synonymous in God revealed on the cross.
And this, this is what we think of this Good Friday and every day. We fear and love the God who knows our many sins, who bore them in His body, who suffered for them, who knows the recesses of our sinful hearts, the guilt we have and the pain we deserve, because He has faced it all Himself, and we adore Him for it, we wonder at His love, and we know Him as the only true God, who spent His strength and power to pity us. This is His glory, His Father’s glory, and ours forever and ever. Amen.