“What Are We Going to Do With All This Love?”
John 19:17-30
Last week’s chemical weapons attack in Syria is one of the latest reminders that human beings are capable of doing unspeakable evil to one another.
One doctor who rushed to the hospital estimated there were 500 wounded people when he got there.
They covered the floors of the entire hospital, from the patients' rooms to the operating rooms and the corridors.
The doctor said whole families were killed.
They died of asphyxiation; foam covered their mouths.
Many died suddenly.
He said, "I believe this horrible memory will stay with me for the rest of my life."
Many people have watched YOUTUBE videos of the after-math—the effects of the attacks on people.
I have read descriptions.
I can’t bring myself to look at videos of it.
There are some things that happen in this world that are too horrible.
On Monday of this week a gunman opened fire inside his estranged wife’s elementary school classroom in San Bernardino, California, killing her and one of her young students—just 8 years old—before turning the gun on himself.
What would it be like to be the mother or father of that child…or sister, brother?
A few days ago, one of YOU and I were having a conversation when one of YOU said the following: “I think one of the worst things in this world is human trafficking.
How, as a parent, could you live knowing that your daughter has been snatched away and is going through what she must be going through?”
I can’t imagine.
But, then, I can’t imagine a lot of things.
For instance, for most of my life I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live my life without my father.
But he died this past August, and I—of all people was the first person to come upon his lifeless body.
As a parent, I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a child who is hooked on drugs or suffering from some horrible disease, but so many other people do know—all too well—what this is like.
And as a human being, I can’t imagine what it was like for God some 2,000 years ago, when His Son was nailed to a Cross.
It might be easy for some of us to dismiss what God must have experienced—I mean, He is GOD after-all!!!
But I think we would be doing a great dis-service to our faith and to our Lord if we were to think that the death of Jesus Christ only affected the human nature of the Trinity.
Now, what do I mean by this statement?
According to our faith, there is a union between the divine and human natures in Jesus Christ that can’t be separated.
For instance, we can’t say that it was just the human Jesus Who suffered while His divine nature was somehow just standing off to the side—unaffected by what was going on.
Because of the loving Trinitarian relationship between God the Father and God the Son—it was God in Christ Who experienced the horrible suffering, humiliation and rejection on the Cross.
Both God the Father and God the Son suffered for our sake—for the sake of all of humanity.
God the Father suffered by experiencing the loss of a Son, while Jesus suffered the physical pain and torment of the Crucifixion.
And this is the essence of God’s love for the world, that God, through and in Jesus Christ, feels and shares in our suffering.
As theologians will say: “The Cross of Christ reveals the suffering of God, and God is revealed to us in Christ on the Cross.”
It’s been said that a God Who cannot suffer is a God Who cannot love.
And it makes sense.
God is Love.
And Love—by its nature, can’t just stand idly by, feeling nothing, in the face of evil.
As a matter of fact, because God is Perfect Love—God’s experience of suffering due to the experience of others must be so much more pronounced than anything we can even imagine.
Can you imagine how it must have hurt God when those He created turned on Him and rebelled?
Can you imagine how it must hurt God when you and I continue to turn our backs on God’s love and fail to love our neighbors?
God suffers when we suffer.
And God has suffered the ultimate penalty in order to win our love and set us on the right course.
Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends…You are my friends.”
Crucifixion is an absolutely terrifying death.
It was said that if a person knew that there was a chance they were going to be crucified, it was better to commit suicide.
Crucifixion is the cruelest and most disgusting death penalty known to humankind.
The goal of crucifixion is to inflict the worst possible amount of agony on a person for the longest possible period of time.
Some victims would hang on the cross for days before they finally died with their arms nailed to the cross at the wrists—which were considered to be part of their hands--and their feet nailed as well.
On Good Friday, Jesus experienced all the ugliness and violence the world could put on Him.
And it broke the heart of God.
We really can’t appreciate Easter until we’ve been to the Cross.
We really can’t begin to understand the love of God until we have, at least with some degree of comprehension journeyed through hell itself—realizing how horrible life is without a living relationship with our Creator.
It’s only when we have seen the full extent of evil on display that we can begin to get an idea of how far, and deep and wide is the Love of God found in Christ Jesus our Lord.
To know that God willingly experienced what God experienced because of God’s love for you and me is almost too much to take in.
“What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul?”
It’s only when we understand how lost we are without God that we thank God for what He has done by sending His One and Only Son.
As we are told in 1 John 3:16: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.”
And, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
I don’t know where I would be without the “fraction of an understanding” I have of the love God has for me.
I might not have lived this long.
I am so lost without Jesus.
I am so lost in my sin and in myself.
Why do people kill, rape and steal from one another?
How are people able to exterminate other human beings in gas chambers, with chemical weapons and the like?
I don’t completely understand it, but I do know that it has nothing to do with God.
It is evil living itself out through God’s creation.
It is Satan having his way with us.
And we are all susceptible.
No one is any better than anyone else.
We are all capable of great atrocities.
But at the same time, we were all created to do great things, through Christ Jesus.
And it is by grace through faith that we are saved.
There is nothing we can do to earn it.
All we must do is accept it and believe.
And when we do, there is a great turning which occurs in our lives.
A divine love which enters our heart.
Something brand new enters that we never experienced before.
And life is more than worth the living.
In John Chapter 15 Jesus tells us this: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”
And it is that love which makes life worth the living.
It is in loving God that we learn to love others and it is in loving others as Christ has loved us that we learn to love God.
And that’s what it’s all about—Love!!!
Without love—I am nothing, we are nothing.
With love we have all we need.
And God is love.
On that first Good Friday so long ago, soldiers “took charge of Jesus.”
He carried “his own cross…to the place of the skull.
Here they crucified him…”
“Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened it to the cross.
It read: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS.”
As Jesus hung on the Cross gasping for air, the soldiers divided up His clothing.
“Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas…Mary Magdalene [and the disciple John].”
They were the only ones left.
Later, “Jesus said, ‘I am thirsty.’”
And, “A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ mouth.”
The hyssop plant is what the Isralites used to mark their doors with the blood of the Passover lamb, in order to be delivered from the plague of death the night that they escaped bondage in Egypt.
Now, on the Cross, more blood is shed—this time by the Lamb of God—for the same reason—to save people from the bondage of death.
At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptist spotted Jesus and said: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
Good Friday is the day Jesus fulfills John’s prophetic cry with a cry of His own.
And that cry is this: “It is finished”—which might better be translated as “It is accomplished!” meaning that Jesus’ life has not only reached its earthly finish…
…meaning that not only is His unimaginable suffering finished…
…not only is His obedience finished on the Cross; but something that was not a possibility before, has now been made a possibility.
The chasm between God and humankind can now be crossed.
Jesus has cleared the way.
As Jesus cries out, the knife falls on the innocent Lamb of God, and in that moment all the sacrifices of the ages by all people, from then until eternity, are gathered up and made obsolete forever.
Never again will there be another need for a sacrifice for sin.
Never again will another innocent need to shed blood.
Never again will a debt need to be paid for our salvation.
God has accomplished it.
It is finished!
Forever!!!
I don’t know why some of the terrible things that happen in this fallen world happen as they do.
I don’t understand why people hurt others in such unimaginable ways, but they do.
I also can’t imagine the suffering God went through in order to show us how much we are loved and thus save those who will believe.
But He did.
I also don’t understand why it had to be done this way, but it was.
And I believe it because it has saved and changed—and continues to change my life.
Jesus’ death on the Cross is not the defeat of life and love—instead, it is their triumph!!!
It is finished.
God has done all this for you—for me.
Now, what are we going to do with all this love?
