JESUS THE SAVIOR MARSH 19, 1972
Isaiah 53:)-6 JOHN M. BUCHANAN
John [9:17=22

| Corinthians 1:/8-24

it was the considered opinion of John Catvin that the creeds of the church
ought ta be sung rather than said: that the great theological affirmations of
Christianity are best set to Jiturgy and music, rather than the dry, school—boy
weekly recitation that happens In most services of worship. Now, Calvin
reasoned and wrote prolifically. He was, and is, one of the Inteilectual
giants of western civilization. In his monumental “Institutes of the Christian
Religion", he thought through the perplexing matters of God's Grace, God's
love, salvation, and the whole question of what happened on the cross, in
detaited and scholarly fashion. And any theologian or preacher who presumes
to address himself to these matters today, has not done hls honework untii he
discovers what Calvin had to say about them. But when It came to making a
personal statement of faith; when It came to internalizing the scholarly
theology as persona! witness, Calvin preferred to sfng. For, scholar that he
was, he still realized that personal faith in Jesus Christ is more a matter
of the heart and emotions, than the mind and Inteftect.

That, in turn, sounds very much like St. Pau} - no Inteftectual stouch
himself ~ when he said that "This doctrine of the cross is sheer folly....
God has made the wisdom of this world (the wisdom of the mind, we might
interpret} look foolish."

And so, we think taday about Jesus the Savior, about his death on the crass.
And even as we begin, | should Tike to underscore the suggestion of John
Calvin, that what we deal with this morning has te do with our deepest feelings
and emotions: that it pushes far beyond our ability to think and reason; that
it is more approprtately calfed the music of the heart than the reasons of the
mind,

SO let us begin. "Jesus saves." - "Jesus died to save us from our sins,"
We have an obvious and immediate language probiem. Those phrases, packed with

theological freight and used relenttessiy over the years by the Christian

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Church have become part of our cultures collection of popular enphemisms.
They have ~ let us admit in all candor - very Jittie personal meaning.

To be saved from sin assumes that we have some sense of sin, that we are
bothered by it, want to be rid of it. To be saved from hell assumes that we have
some concept of hell, and that we are interested in not going there. Neither
assumption is very strong: sin and he!| are not very popular anymore. And if
they are not, then what is it that Jesus saves us from?

“To save" in our culture, and our time, means to preserve, to make safe,
+o collect and hoard. We save money in a bank: we save stemps: we collect
coins. Thus the graffiti on the subway wall occasionally chatlenges the
church to say what it means by proclaiming: “Jesus saves Green Stamps" or
"Jesus saves at Bank of America”,

To the Old Testament Jesus - out of whose history and theology the
Christian faith was born, salvation meant “Wholeness, health, total well being."
it meant to be at one with God and other men and one's self. Ta say that
Jesus is an instrument of salvation: to affirm that he saves, means ~ In the
Biblical idtom, that he releases us, liberates and sets us free. if Jesus is
a savior It is because he rescues us from everything that ensares and oppresses
us: from everything that restricts us from becoming the men and women God
created us to be, namely at one with our God, our neighbor and ourselves.

But how does he save? In what sense does he save? What really happened
on the cross?

One thing happened for sure. A good man got kilfed unjustly and unfairly.
We've been talking about the humanity of Jesus, and part of that humanity ts
the story of his death. When he took his smal| band of followers to Jerusalem
for the Passover week, the opposition to him crystallized. The whispers of
retaliation in Gatilea became shouts of hatred in the arene of Imperial Rome and
the Temple of Jerusalem. He came to the city dolng and saying the same kinds of
things that he had done for three years: but this time, in five short days,

after a monumental amount of scheming and conspiring, a way was devised of

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getting rid of him decently and in order. The best the Jews could do was to
charge him with blasplemy - but the Romans weren't about the execute a man
for a religious crime, particularly in that they had their own problems with
the religion of their Jewish subjects. The best they could do was regard
him as a minor irritant to the Pax Romana - the peace of Rome. Brutal as
Roman justice was, it did not provide for crucifying a man because he disturbed
the peace,

What seems to have happened is that the religious jeaders were able to
convince the political leaders that he was a revolutionary, guilty of treason -
and that was a capital offense. The Romans still must have been a little
queasy about it because Pilate, in a last ditch, desparation measure, had
Jesus whipped and shown publically, as if to say "Isn't this enough?" But
the priests had anticipated if and had the crowd now whipped into a blood-
thirsty mob. When Pilate brought him out -bleeding and wounded from the par-
ticularly effective method of whipping (leather straps with sharp pleces of
tead fastened to the end of each) he crowd played its role to the hil? and
demanded his crucifixion.

So the deal was made. Pilate washed his hands of the whole mess, and
ordered a cordon of soidters to do the job, which they had to do That day
anyway, and so they only had to squeeze him in between two thieves. Thus he
died: a slow and painful and humillatingly public death. The one who had
heated and taught love and forgiveness and compassion had nails driven through
his hands and feet, and sharp thorns pressed into the flesh of his forehead,
and a spear pushed into his side. As he hung there, slowly dying from
asphyxiation and shock and loss of blood, he could see fhat his friends had
abandoned him, he coutd hear the insults hurled at him by the audience which
always attended an execution, and he could feel the spittle of other men
running down his face. He exposed his complete humanity for them, and us, and
all men to see: "My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?"

He died, unjustiy, unfairly, unusually brutally. He died for the cause of

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love and peace and forgiveness. He died because he was honest: he died because
he stood for a better way then hatred and revengeance, selfishness. We are, and
ought to be, inspired by his example. A prayer of Chinese Christian pleads,

“O God give us something to die for: if wo have nothing to die for, we have
nothing te tive for’. Jesus of Nazareth had his cause: he lived for it and

died for it. And the rightness ~- the goodness of his cause has been compelling
the hearts of men ever since.

To know that much: is to be moved, perhaps. But if is not fo be saved.
Thus the death of Jesus of Nazareth - has always been overshadowed by the
thealogical assertion that the death was more than martyrdom. The Church sees
divine intention in the death of Jesus. The Church dares to assert that the
story of the crucifixion is feally theistory of Gad doing something in the
arena of human history. In the crucifixion of Jesus the man we dare To
believe that God's own son was obeying the will of God, revealing the love of
God, and that what was then accomplished has radica! imptications for the life
of every man who ever lived. The British theologian J. S. Whale put it this
way: "If Jesus is an unambiguously human martyr and no more, the gospels are
a monument to avast illusion, the Gospe! is a mistake, and the extinction of
the church is only a matter of time". (Christian Doctrine P. 94)

That is the stumbling btock. Something happened on the cross that is
personally saving because the one who died there was more than a martyr. He
was God's own son. Paul saw that it was precisely here that the Gospel is
most vulnerable. The Jews expected a mighty warrior, the Greeks, a philosopher.
And Christianity offers a cross. We're stii! stumbting over it! What does it
mean beyond the death of Jesus own brother? How does it save us?

All religion is based on fhe conctusion that something is wrong with the
human situation as it is. G.K,Chesterton used to answer the question of why
he became a Catholic with the simple statement: ‘To get rid of my sins."

And if you have any feel for history, literature, psychology, art, poetry,

you wilt not take that statesent lightly. Something is out of key at the heart

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of things. Oedipus and King Lear were tértured by it. Dante, Goethe,
Beckett, aven John Updike in Couples,-tell us that there is something tra-
gicaily, frustratingly incomplete with life as it is. Man needs to be
reconciled to something: saved from something: made to feel at home in the
world and with himself.

There are many words for {t, The church has used "sin for so fong that it
has very little meaning: Sin In our time has come to mean infractions
against the going standards of middle class morality. And that isnit it at
@i]. And so we have heard and read a fload of synonyms: “sickness unto death,

alientation, neurosis, psychosis, estrangement.’ In his book, The Meaning of

Christ,Robert Clyde Johnson comes down hard on guilt and proposes that the only
meaningful way to tatk about the human predicament today is in terms of the
unresolved feelings of guift that alt men seem to be carrying eound in their
hearts,

But, for me at least, the condition of contemporary man can be best under-
stood in terms of several crises of confidence.i think if there is anything
we need saving from it is our loss of confidence in our institutions, in
our selves amd in our future.

We find ourselves taday in a sea of skepticism. People don't seem to
believe in the government any more - or the schools - or our economic struc-
tures or our courts - or even our churches. Somewhere alang the line - and it
seems ta have happened in the early 1960's - the American pubsic became
cynical. Perhaps It was ater two Kennedy's and Martin Luther King were
assassinated, and the New Frontier was forgotten, and Vietnam became the fongest
war in our history. Perhaps it was after the deception in S. E. Asta and
My Lai and the Pentagon papers. in any case, | believe we have a monumental
problem on our hands because @ lot of little people ~ not just the revolu-
tionaries - but a lot of tittle people seem to be In despair over the viabtilty
of our Instituttons.

At the same time | believe we have fost confidence in ourseives. The

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Psychiatrists teli us that our major problem is a rampant feeling of jnade-
quacy. We keep feeling smalter and smaifer: more helptess and powerless.
And this, in turn, has cut the bottom out of cur confidence in the future.
With institutions that don't seem to work anymore; with feelings of persona!
inadequacy, the future appears as just so much time to be put in. ! think we
need saved from that. And | don't think that is pushing the crucifixion too
far. Because Jesus wasn’t crucified in a church - he was executed publically -
in the wortd - on @ garbage heap as a result of a quas! political conspiracy.
He died in the same kind of ambiguous situation we find ourselves in today -
and if is here that he offers to set us free.

| an saved from cynicism about myself and my fellow man - by the fact that
Jesus died on the cross. Wallace Hamilton said it this way: ‘Jesus believed
in man so much that He bowed his head and died in the calm confidence that men
were worth dying for, that they had i+ in them fo be the sons of Ged. When
men were doing their worst, he was betting on their best.

| am saved from skepticism about the future by the fact that Jesus
died on the cross: my future, the future of the Church, the future of the
world, any future at all. For what happened on Catvary was that God took a
categorically obscene event and turned it around so that somehow it comes out
meaning love and goodness and salvation. That means that whatever crises life
hands out to us; whatever kinds of persona! crucifixions we have to endure,
God is there to make it come out creatively, redemptively. That happens in our
common life. that happened this week when Christian men in our own community
had to make a difficult and painful decision about the future, in the trust
that God works in every conflict, every decision, everything we do. That
happens in personal suffering and grief when we finally sense that God is down
in the reality of despair with us, and that he can pick up the broken pieces
of our tives so that we come out of it more fully human, more at one with him
and others and ourselves than ever before.

Another man said it for me - and | would use his words: "We are called to

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live in this faith: that nothing, no experience of trouble or suffering;, of
defeat or failure, can come to us that with God's help, cannot be redeemed fer
@ purpose. And to live in this confidence can transform every day." (R.E.
Goodrich - The Protestant Hour 4/20/69)

That is the end of what | want to say by way of thealogy. But there is
one thing more, the major thing really, the thing without which all discussion
of the cross is empty verbiage. It is this: however we wish to discuss the
crucifixion - whatever words we chose - the major truth ts that it was for us.
Jesus Christ died for you and me, And the trouble with that is - that it has
to be felt more than understood. We are saved by Jesus Christ - not when we
understand all the creedal assertions - but when we begin to feel and experience.

AT a Symposium at St. Elizabeth Hospital last week a very sophisticated
psychiatrist kept telling 400 wal! educated peaple to stop fhinking with The
head and starting thinking with the gut. Pardon the crudity - but that is
precisely the level at which we must perceive the death of Jesus Christ.

And so tet us do this now: carefully, openty, honestly. Let me give you
anail. Hoid it for a while: Think about it: when you are ready ~ pass it on
to the one sitting next to you.

Jesus died for you. His crucifixion is the: best thing That ever
happened to you. [It puts a claim on your life and mine.

Listen to a prayer written by Michel Quoist, French priest under the
titte “Jesus Bears His Cross”

Lord, here is your Cross

Your Cross! As Tf it were your cross!

You had no cross and you came to get ours, and alt Through your |ife,

and along the way to Calvary, you took upon you, one by one, the sins

of the world.

You have te go forward,

And bend,

And suffer.

The Cross must be carried.

Lord you waik on sifently; is it true, fhen, that there is a time for

speaking and a time for silence?

Is it true That there is a Time for struggling and another for the sifent
bearing of our sins and the sins of the world?

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Lord, | would rather fight the Cross: to bear it is hard. The
more | progress, and the more | see th: evil inthe worid, the
heavier is the Cross on my shoulders.

Lord, heip me toa understand that the most generous deed is nothing
untess it ts atso silently redemptive.

And since you want for me this long way of The Cross,

At the dawning of each day, heip me to set forth. ALE?