Good Friday Sermon
“The Tomb Speaks of Death”
Mark 14:32-36, 15:34
For the body of Jesus, Good Friday ends in a tomb. The lips of the tomb, the mouth through which the cold body of Jesus was passed, speaks to us. The tomb has two messages. One is of death, the other is of life beyond death. The message of life beyond death is not a fable, a fabrication, a pie-in-the sky hope, a grasping for straws.
It is real; more concrete than the air we breath or the floor under our feet. Yet life beyond death is the Easter message spoken by the empty tomb, and tonight we are carrying the crucified body of Jesus through Good Friday.
On Good Friday the tomb speaks of death. It tells us that we are to die with Jesus. The death of Jesus began before His betrayal by Judas, before His arrest, before He stood before Pontius Pilate, before the whipping, the beating, the nails hammered into His hands and feet. The death of Jesus began in the Mount of Olives. We see Jesus beginning to die when He prays, “Father, if You are willing, take this cup from me, yet not my will, but Yours be done.”
Why did Jesus have to die? Why has one of our own members, Fae, been suffering set back after set back for over a year with a disease that not even the Mecca of Medicine, the Mayo clinic, can figure out? Why does Art, son of a former pastor, seem to pass from one trial into another? Harold, why did Iantha go through all of her testing? I could have a very long listed if I included everyone at Immanuel who struggles with the question of why does suffering come to the Saints of God.
If God is all powerful, and if God is all good, then why doesn’t He stop the suffering! Why doesn’t He intervene and save us the pain, the humiliation, the fear for tomorrow? Why doesn’t an all powerful and all loving God devise another way for our salvation
other than the torturous death for Jesus? “Father, if you are willing,” prays the Lord Himself, “take this cup from me.”
Why the cup? Why the suffering for Christ and the Saints? Why? Why? Why?
It’s right when we say that God is all loving. It is also right when we say that God is all powerful. Yet we like to stop with these two traits of our sovereign God. We want to neglect the third important characteristic within God’s nature. Clothed in sin, we would put aside the fact that God is also all holy. He has no evil within Himself; none whatsoever.
And let’s be clear on something else. When we say that God is all powerful, we mean that there’s nothing outside of Him that can limit God in any way. Unlimited by anything beyond Himself, God still acts according to the fulness of His nature. It cannot be said, for example, that God is so powerful that He can do something that is evil. Why? Not because something outside of God prevents God from doing evil. No, God does no evil because it is not in His nature to do evil.
When God didn’t provide an alternative to the cross for Jesus, it wasn’t because He lacked the power. No, He has all power. The only possible answer to the suffering of Jesus is that it had to be. Not because something, or some justice, outside of God was forcing God’s hand. God the Father, by His all powerful, all loving, and completely holy nature sent Christ to the cross.
Jesus began to die rightly at the Mount of Olives. He died to His own preferences. He died to what He wanted, consenting to the will of His heavenly Father. Jesus trusted that whatever lay ahead was not out of control, but resided within His Father’s total
power, unreserved love, and untainted holiness. The tomb speaks of Jesus dying rightly.
We however, can die wrongly in our bewilderment and suffering. I have seen Christians “die” when they suffer or a loved one suffers. O’ not in the body, but in the spirit. They give up on God. They conclude that God is too big or they are too small to
merit divine attention. Some who give up on God walk away into unbelief. Others continue to believe, but their spirit has been crippled–cut off at the knees. Life forever rests under the pal of death. A numbness sets in concerning God and His promises.
There are those times when we are broken down by a lingering and worsening problem. The problem can be a disease of the body or sickness within a relationship.
It can come as a financial reversal or the sudden death of someone we love and value. It comes and we don’t want the cup that we are forced to drink.
Suffering comes to us, and we die to God. We see the cancer, the death, the broken relationship as signs that God doesn’t really care for us. And we die. We die to the promises of God. We do not die rightly by submitting to God’s will. We die wrongly by giving up on His promises.
Do you remember the time when Jesus stood before the tomb of His good friend Lazarus? He wept. Why did Jesus weep? Was it because He felt powerless in the
face of death? Did he weep because Lazarus was dead, and that’s that!
Not at all. He knew what He intended to do. He knew that He had the power to do what He intended to do. It wasn’t for the bodily death of Lazarus that Jesus wept. He wept for the spiritual deaths of so many who surrounded Him. They were angry with Him! Why couldn’t Jesus have come quickly to save His friend Lazarus? What kind of a friend was Jesus to Lazarus? They grumbled against the Lord. To be angry with
Jesus is to be angry with God. Jesus is God.
And Jesus looked around and He saw all the dying–all the distrust of Him and the promises He had given. They were dying wrongly. They were all dying wrongly.
To die rightly with Jesus is to die to our selfish will. It is to submit to what God has ordained in either His active or permissive will. Dying rightly is believing the promises of God.
Has your loved one died? What has God promised? “He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live...” Do you believe that the souls of the faithful who die have crossed over into life everlasting? Or have you died wrongly, and you despair because your worn spirit tells you that the loved one is lost forever–despite all the hopes of your
Christian faith.
Have you died wrongly after years of personal suffering, or watching the suffering of a loved one or friend, so now life is numb to you. Does despair silently lace each moment of your life with depression and muted rage?
Why doesn’t God deal with evil by simply destroying it before it gets its pound of flesh from us?
I don’t know the answer to that question. What I can tell you, is that the answer lies within God who is all powerful, all loving, and completely God. I can tell you that not even Jesus was spared the pains of this broken world.
“Father, can this cup be removed? Is there another road but to Calvary and the cross? Father.... Father.... Father....”
Hebrews tells us that Jesus was tempted in every way as we are tempted. And I proclaim to you a strange gospel this Good Friday. Jesus also suffered our feelings of wrongful death. He knows what it feels like when we cannot understand where God is in the sickness, in the suffering, in the dying. “My God, My God,” He cries, “Why have You forsaken me?”
Jesus, true man and true God, knows our numbness and pain when we are perplexed–when we just can’t figure out why God is doing what He’s doing in our lives,
or allowing what He’s allowing.
But for Jesus, He did not sin in His despair. He died rightly because even in His bewilderment he submitted to God. “Into Thy hands I commit my spirit,” He cries.
The tomb speaks of our dying. We can die wrongly–perplexed by our situations we can die to the idea that God is good; that He cares for us and those we love in concrete and tangible ways. Or we can die rightly. We can die with Jesus, attached to Him
through the waters of Baptism and trusting all His promises.
The tomb speaks of the death of Jesus. Jesus started to die at the Mount of Olives when He, terrified by what lay ahead of Him, said, “not my will, but Thy will be done.” When the body of Jesus was carried to the tomb, it was evidence to His enemies and to
many of His disciples that He was not the Messiah–that much of what He said could not be true.
Today we continue to be tempted to doubt that Jesus is the Messiah when bad things happen; that He continues to live and reign as ruler over heaven and earth. We
wonder if it’s all true when we pray to Jesus our heavenly intercessor and nothing changes, perhaps for years. We carry the dead body of Jesus to the tombs of our hearts.
Are you dying rightly with Jesus, or wrongly? Do you trust the promises of God, or in the midst of life’s perplexing problems and painful conditions are you dying to the goodness of God–dying to trust and hope?
Jesus knows what it’s like to be perplexed. It is no sin to be perplexed, for Jesus was sinless–we are told this over and over again in the Bible. But He was perplexed. “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Yet in it all, in the brokenness of this world
that brought Him to the cross, our Lord never gave up on His heavenly Father. “Into Your hands— Your hands!-- I commit my spirit.” Obedient He was, even unto death on a cross!
The death of Christ which began at the Mount of Olives is spoken from the tomb. It is one of the messages of the tomb. Yet to the faithful it is not a message of despair, but a beacon of hope. It says to us when we are perplexed and suffering that God is not out of control... our situation (no matter how bad it is), is not out of control. God is working something through it all. The tomb tells us that the world is broken and that as we travel on the way to New Jerusalem in this broken world it is quite natural, quite ordinary, to suffer.
The tomb tells the Christian that as God the Father loved His Son even though it did not prevent His cross, so God loves us even when bad things happen to us and those whom we love. The tomb of Christ tells us on Easter morn that all of it–ALL OF IT!-- the pain, the suffering, the cancers, the tragedies, the deaths–ALL OF IT!-- will be whipped away by God someday. Gone Completely!
Today the tomb speaks of a broken world where sin brought Jesus to the cross... it speaks of human suffering... and we are invited to trust God through it all knowing that Easter morn is just around the corner.
And Jesus cried loudly, “LAZARUS, COME OUT!” Amen.
