The Crossword Of Death: Take A Good Look At It

4.7.23 Psalm 31:5

5 Into your hands I commit my spirit. You have redeemed me, O LORD, the God of truth.

The Crossword of Death: Take a Good Look at It

Today we come here to watch Jesus die. We planned our songs and our worship around it, carrying the cross through the church. Looking at it. Contemplating it.

Is this a healthy thing to do? There was an old TV show called 1,000 Ways to Die in which they chronicled a wide variety of ways that people have died throughout the years. Serial killers become attracted to death. It turns them on. It’s disgusting. You now see in Sweden, Canada and the United States the “right to die” movement, for people to “die with dignity” by killing themselves and giving up on life when it gets too hard. There’s nothing dignified about seeing a teenager kill himself because he’s depressed, just because a doctor says it’s ok.

Even within Christianity death can become an odd obsession. In the early Christian Church people were voluntarily giving themselves up to the authorities so that they would be martyred. In the Middle Ages death was glorified, so that young children went into Crusades in hopes of dying so they could bypass purgatory. In Mexico there is a group of people within a subculture of Catholicism who worship Santa Muerte, otherwise known as Saint Death. They bring offerings to a shrine with pictures of the Grim Reaper on it. That’s not right.

Good Friday is not a time for popcorn. If you’ve ever watched someone die in person it isn’t a pretty thing. Usually it has been after a prolonged illness, where the breathing slows and the heart finally gives out. The person is typically on morphine and doesn’t seem to be aware of what is going on, silently going into the night. That’s not the case here. It’s much more ugly than that. Jesus has no morphine. He’s young. There’s extreme pain and suffering, both physically and spiritually. He can’t even breathe without suffering excruciating pain. We don’t look at this because we enjoy it. It’s an ugly scene, but we do it because we NEED it. Without this death we die eternally, we end up in hell. We have to look at it.

Woody Allen once said, “I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.” Funny as that may be, we can’t joke our way out of it. It’s a reality of living in a fallen world. Like it or not, Good Friday focuses us on death.

What good does it do? In the Old Testament God called for rebellious and stubborn sons to be stoned at the city gate when they wouldn’t respond to discipline in Deuteronomy 21:19–21. The reason he stated was so that, “All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.” In this case the public stoning of a rebellious young man was meant to send shock waves through Israel as a WARNING to all who saw it happen. In another shocking moment a man’s concubine was sexually assaulted to death. The man took her body and chopped it into 12 pieces and sent it throughout all Israel. He wanted them all to be shocked at what happened when they got the body part in the mail. There’s a reason why abortion videos and pictures of aborted babies are made public - so people can see the murder for what it is. It’s more than just a choice. It’s the mutilation and ripping apart of babies in the womb. That’s sometimes why death is publicized - not to rejoice in it, but as a warning and a wake up call. The public execution of criminals on the cross was meant to be used by the Romans as a warning to any insurrectionists and criminals. “Don’t mess with us or you will suffer and die.”

So what’s the message of Good Friday? When Jesus goes on the cross, the message is sent to all of us. It shows us how evil humanity is, to kill the only perfect human to live since the Fall, to want to kill the One who created us. How wicked could we be?!? It also shows us how much God hates sin, to put His only Son through such suffering and abandonment on the cross. God takes sin seriously. The wages of sin IS DEATH. He doesn’t excuse it or laugh about it. It must be punished. If you doubt this, look again to the cross. Sin is serious business. It deserves death and abandonment - it deserves hell.

Death also has a way of revealing what’s on the inside. Back in 2005 Sean Penn starred in a movie called “Dead Man Walking.” He was convicted of murdering two young teens, but blamed it all on the man who was with him. He was a hardened man with a troubled background. Susan Sarandon played a nun who tried to work with him and get him off of death row. In the process, she realized he was not being completely honest about his role in the murders. Finally, when his sentence was not commuted and death was imminent, he had his “come to Jesus” moment. It took an impending death and the dedicated work of a nun to make him finally come clean in the role he played.