8-11-19 Grace-Tucson Sermon

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John 19:16-24, 28-30 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke

“The Journey to the Cross”

Summer Series: Joy for Our Journeys 6 Sunday, August 11, 2019

Imagine if you will that church is dark. There is no sunshine streaming in through the windows, and in fact there are some black curtains hung over the windows so that you can’t even make out the stained glass pictures. In fact, there are lots of black curtains and shrouds, over some of the lights, over a large cross in the front of church. And where we often find colors like green or red or white, there is either black or nothing at all. And imagine that in the darkness there is one candle sitting up front, providing a focal point for meditation in church. For some of you, maybe for many of you, that is not a terribly difficult scene to imagine. You have seen it before. You recognize what I am talking about is the Tenebrae service on Good Friday. You know how that service begins with not a single candle lit in front of church, but with seven candles lit. And you know that during that service, those candles are extinguished one by one until only one is left lit. That represents for us the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. As the candles go out, so do the lights, little by little, until the church is almost completely dark. And then the single candle, all that is left of the candlelight that started in front of church, is taken away. And everyone knows what that means. On the anniversary of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, we have come to the point of recalling how he bowed his head and died and how his lifeless body was laid in a tomb not far away. And the imagery, the pageantry even, of that service, put together with the words of Scripture and the music of hymns and solos, can be very powerful. It has helped many of us over the years feel a little bit of what it might have been like to stand near the cross and to witness the darkness, not of the evening the way that we do it, but darkness that was just like that except it came in the middle of the day. And it helps us to focus on what death does and how sudden and final it seems. This morning, we are speaking about Good Friday without the darkness and without the candles. We are observing once again what the death of Jesus Christ on the cross means for us. Just like last week was a celebration of Christmas without the trees and presents and lights, so today we are gathered to observe Good Friday in a way that is very different from our normal observation. Today we consider our Savior’s journey to the cross. I suppose we could also have called this journey the journey to Golgotha. That is the name of the hill just outside of Jerusalem where Jesus was fastened to the cross and executed. As our lesson notes, that journey involved Jesus carrying his own cross to the place where he would die. We could be reminded of the cruelty and torture that Jesus faced both before and after that journey. We could speak at length about how the Roman execution squads were experts at inflicting maximum pain and abuse and humiliation. But this morning we note that this journey was much more than a walk from Jerusalem to Golgotha. This was the journey of a king to rescue his subjects. As the sign that was affixed to his cross explained, the man on that cross was Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Last week we spoke about his birth, how true God, the second person of the Trinity, became a true human being. That means that in one week’s time, we have skipped past thirty plus years of his growing, maturing, teaching, performing miracles, and living in perfect obedience to his heavenly Father. We’re not skipping these things because they are in any way unimportant. In fact, I am bringing them up now because they are incredibly important. I am mentioning them now because the entire life of Jesus was really leading toward the place we visit today, toward Golgotha, toward the cross. Even the reason that he was born in Bethlehem as a tiny baby was so that one day he could die on the cross. His life on earth was one long journey to the cross. When he made it there, the Jews that day were not happy at all with the sign Pilate left on Jesus’ cross. They wanted it to say that Jesus claimed to be their king. They wanted to make clear that they did not consider him their king. They weren’t interested in a king who would die on a cross. But the sign stayed. And it


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