[Sermon preached on 18 February 2018, 1st Sunday in Lent / 3rd year, ELCF Lectionary]
I was still a student when we gathered with a group of theological students for a training seminar on pastoral counseling. One of the members shared some of her childhood experiences that had recently come to the surface. For years on end, she had been sexually abused by a close relative, and there had been nobody to help her.
We all listened with deep sympathy to her as she unraveled her experiences and feelings, sobbing and stammering. Most of us were dead silent, not knowing what to do or say. The woman sitting next to her gave her a tight hug, sharing in her tears. Then a couple of students tried to give her some words of comfort. One said something like, “I can imagine what you must have been going through.” The other added something like, “I know how you must feel right now.”
And I remember how this young woman jumped up from her seat and shouted,
“No, you don’t know how I feel right now! You cannot imagine what hell I have been going through, unless you have been going through the same hell!”
For me, as a theological student at that time, that was such a powerful and unforgettable lesson. We are being trained to give help and support to people in all kinds of crises. But our professional help so often remains detached and superficial, because the experience that we face in the other person’s life is foreign to us. Honestly, we have no clue apart from our textbooks, lectures, and research reports. And to suggest, that we do have a clue—that we can identify with the pain and suffering of the other person—is to play down the immense traumas that they may be experiencing. It is unfair. — Worse even, it is cruel! We can sympathize. But we cannot empathize. Because we haven’t been there.
Often, peer support is much more helpful and much more healing.
Alcoholics Anonymous brings together people who all share the same problem.
“I am Jim and I am an alcoholic.”
“I am Carolyn and I am an alcoholic, too.”
And when you come to an AA meeting as a first-timer, you suddenly feel that here are people you can talk to, people who listen and who really understand from the inside—with their brains and with their hearts—what you are going through.
In today’s reading from Hebrews we are told that Jesus is a person with whom we can share everything. He became one of us “in every way”. He went through all the possible temptations that we may go through. In fact, he was under a far heavier attack from the forces of evil than anyone of us will ever be. He can really empathize with us.
First, right at the beginning of his ministry, he was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by God and tempted by Satan. The Gospel of Mark spends only two sentences on what was a crucial forty-day experience in Jesus’ ministry.
Only from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke we find how Satan used all his force and shrewdness to try to make Jesus abandon his calling. He offered him not only relief of his immediate needs, but also a shortcut to getting the whole world under his control. But even though Jesus was physically weakened after forty days without food, he rebuked Satan. He was determined to remain faithful to the mission he had received from his Father.
Later in his ministry, Satan used Peter, the trusted disciple of Jesus, to try to get him off track. Peter tried to convince him that the Son of the living God need not suffer and die at the hands of his enemies. But Jesus rebuked him and said: “Get away from behind me, Satan!”
And still in the very end, in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross, Satan was whispering in his ears, that Jesus could call upon legions of angels any time to deliver him.
But Jesus stayed faithful to the bitter end. He defied even the toughest temptations.
Jesus did not only resist the most powerful temptations, he also faced the excruciating suffering of death on a cross. He did not back out. He bore the humiliation, the shame, the guilt and the pain that the cross on Calvary caused him. Not because he deserved it. But because he was on a mission to save the world, to save people like you and me.
Jesus stayed faithful to the bitter end. In temptations and in suffering. And that is precisely why he can identify with our temptations and our suffering, our desires and our fears. That is why he can empathize with us and help us.
Jesus became “fully human in every way”.
It is something very hard to grasp, and yet it is so essential for us to understand this on an existential level. Jesus was not 50% human and 50% divine. He was not even 90% human and 10% divine. He was 100% human and at the same time 100% divine.
Hebrews 2 calls him “fully human”. But in the first chapter we see how Jesus is also fully God. Listen to these words from Hebrews 1:1–3:
“God has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”
How should we think of this in the practical context of the life and ministry of Jesus on earth? How can we make the equation match: One plus one equals one?
This is a very difficult question, and it would take more than a twenty-minute sermon to resolve it. In fact, even a lifetime would not be enough to explain it. But perhaps Paul can help us here. In Philippians 2 he quotes from a very early creed, a statement of faith that was used already in the churches of his time. I come back to these words often in my sermons, simply because they are so crucial, both for our understanding of Jesus Christ and his ministry, and for our life and calling as Christians. I quote:
“Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
This is not about God putting on a human disguise, as it were: God acting as if he were human. If it were so, the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness would be sheer theater. But then, it is hard to imagine that Satan would go along with such a game. After all, he should know very well that he had no chance whatsoever, if it all were only a play on a stage.
The temptations of Jesus—from the wilderness to Peter, to Gethsemane, and to the cross—were real, because his humanity was real. Jesus “emptied himself”, says Paul. We can only try to guess at what this implies.
Many Christians think that, though Christ had a human body, he did not have a completely human mind. Some imagine, for example, that he possessed a divine awareness as a baby. That means he could be smiling and chuckling in his mother’s arms, pooping in his diaper, and faking complete ignorance, while actually thinking, ‘You imagine I’m a helpless baby! You should know that I actually created the universe!’ Such thinking is a mundane version of an ancient heresy called Docetism—that Christ only seemed to be man.
In reality, while it is true that the Son of God retained his divine qualities from the womb to the grave, he had submitted the exercise of those qualities to God the Father—that is what ‘he emptied himself’ really means. What does that imply? It implies that Christ’s awareness of his identity as the Son of God came when the Father willed it and only to the extent that the Father willed it. His great acts of supernatural power were possible only when his Father permitted them and inspired him to do them.
Jesus himself said this very clearly in John 5:
“I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”
In other words: it is not simply that he does not act in independence of the Father. He actually cannot act in independence of the Father.
I guess the point I am trying to make is this: Throughout his human life and existence, Christ remained God, while at the same time being absolutely human in body, mind and emotions. This means that Jesus grew from infancy, through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood into maturity—in both body and mind, the same way as you and I. His body developed naturally, as did his mind and emotions. Not only that, but both as a child and as an adult he experienced a wide range of human emotions—anger, joy, sorrow—you name it.
“He became like us, fully human in every respect.”
But why?
Hebrews 2 answers the question this way:
“In order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.”
The Jewish High Priest was a mediator between God and the people. He brought offerings on behalf of the people and pleaded for the atonement of their sins. Then he turned to the people and on God’s behalf declared to them that their sins had been forgiven.
Because Jesus was both fully man and fully God, he could in his very nature represent the people to God and God to the people. He could plead for his people to his heavenly Father and boldly declare the forgiveness of sins—even to people who in the minds of the righteous folks were beyond reach of God’s favor and mercy.
In order to bring that about, the supreme High Priest had to bring the supreme sin offering.
You may remember that when Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, God intervened at the last moment and provided a ram to replace Isaac on the altar. In the same way God provided the ultimate sin offering when he gave his only Son on the cross for the sins not only of his people Israel, but of the whole world.
Jesus is both the supreme High Priest and the supreme sacrifice to atone for our sins.
“Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”
When we feel weak when temptations come our way, we should know that Jesus has been there. He knows the mighty power of Satan’s temptations. But he resisted. Therefore, we can come to him for help: for strength and wisdom and “peer support” to fight whatever entices us to compromise our calling as disciples of Jesus for some short-term benefit, pleasure or convenience.
When the threat of violence and suffering stares at us—and this is something that we as Christians should be more and more prepared for, even here in post-Christian Europe—we should know that Jesus has been there, too. He knows the anxiety that the threat of suffering creates. But he persisted. He was ready to go all the way to the cross, for it was his calling. And we can look to him for courage to endure whatever we must in order to remain faithful to our calling as his disciples.
Jesus has gone through it all. — All, that is, except through the experience of sin. Jesus was without sin from birth to death.
So, does that mean that when we struggle with the burden of guilt, Jesus is unable to help us? Not at all! On the cross he took our sins upon us. He never sinned, but he did carry the burden of sin on his shoulders. And he atoned for them both as a High Priest and as the sacrificial lamb.
Jesus said:
“Come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
That is ever so true when that burden is the result of our disobedience to God and its consequences, or when that weariness is caused by our constant failure to meet up to God’s standards. Jesus knows our past, however messy and dark it is, and he has atoned for it.
Like he said to the adulterous woman who was brought to him by the hypocritical leaders of the Jews, so he says to us:
“Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more!”
Amen.
