March 18, 2007
The Perseverance of Jesus
Hebrews 12:1-4
Annie Dillard is one of my favorite authors. In one place she
writes: “You don’t have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to
look at the stars, you will find that darkness is required. The stars
neither require it or demand it.” Darkness is a part of the human experience.
It happens to all of us at some time. It is true that you will see and
experience things sitting in the dark that you never did in the light, but stars
can seem like a small reward when you are surrounded by darkness.
Many people complain to God with the words of the Psalmist,
“Awake, O Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever.
Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression?” (Psalm
44:23-24). I have sat with many, many people over the years who have
experienced great pain and sorrow in life. In fact, it seems to me that life is
really unfair. Some people seem to go through life with few problems and great
blessings. It all seems to come together for them. They have it all: good
family, good health, and adequate finances. For others, every trouble going
down the road seems to stop at their house.
When that happens, people begin to wonder what they have done
wrong, as if somehow they are being punished. Or they begin to think that God
hates them. One young mother wrote Phil Yancey about how her joy turned to
grief when she delivered a daughter with spina bifida, a birth defect
which leaves the spinal cord exposed. She wrote several pages in spidery script
telling the story of how the medical bills had drained the family finances. Her
marriage had come apart because her husband resented all the time she devoted to
their sick child. She began to wonder if there was a loving God after all and
sought his advise.
Over the years I have sat with families with deep sorrow. Some
were people whose children died. I have grieved with people when a family
member committed suicide. A few families even had family members murdered.
Many have had troubled children who seemed intent on destroying their lives and
striking out in bitterness against the family. One young teen in a church I
pastored several years ago had been out of control for years, even though he had
good and capable parents. When he was 10, he set their house on fire. But one
day, when he was a senior in high school, he took a shotgun out of his parent’s
bedroom and drove to his girlfriend’s house. They had a baby together. As he
drug her out of the house by her hair, her parents grabbed the baby out of her
arms. He drove to a gravel pit and shot his girlfriend and then turned the gun
on himself. A tragic end to a tragic life.
What would you say to those parents? How would you
comfort them? How would you talk to them about where God fits in all this?
Jesus confronted people like this all the time — the widow whose only son had
just died, the man blind from birth, lepers, people rejected by society. Of
course, his response was to bring the boy back to life, heal the blind man, cure
the lepers, and forgive and welcome the ostracized. It’s not so easy for us.
But Jesus also experienced his own personal troubles with life as well. Jesus
lived with many difficulties, annoyances, trials, frustrations, and of course
the awareness of his impending suffering, crucifixion and death. The terrible
injustice of this perfect and righteous man having to die for a rebellious and
sinful world would have made anyone else bitter.
Let’s look at the life of Christ and consider what he faced.
First of all, Jesus faced opposition from people. The Bible reading
today said, “Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that
you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Hebrews 12:3). Jesus had all kinds of
difficulties with people who tried their best to make his life miserable. There
were the legalistic religious leaders who plagued his every step. They were
always looking over his shoulder to see if he did something wrong or said the
wrong thing. They were constantly plotting ways to do away with him. They held
his feet to the fire over every little religious law they could come up with.
They demanded to know why he would associate with sinners. They complained when
he ate in the homes of sinners, and gave them attention like they really
mattered. They brought a woman caught in adultery (a situation they had
probably set up), and said that the law demanded that she be stoned to death, so
was he going to obey the Scripture or not? After all, adultery is one of the
big ten. They tested his political loyalty and asked whether it was legal to
pay taxes or not. They planted sick and disabled people in the synagogues where
they knew he would be, to see if he would break one of the Ten Commandments and
heal on the Sabbath. They took what he said about rebuilding the temple,
exaggerating his words and twisting them into an indictment against him. They
maligned what he believed and who he was. They watched his every word. They
dogged his every step. They opposed him at every turn. They hated him. They
were constantly looking for a way to do away with him. And all that was from
good, religious folk.
Then there were his disciples. They never seemed to really “get
it.” He is teaching people and loving them, and the disciples are trying to
keep people away — children and others they considered outsiders. Jesus was
trying to get them to understand about his coming death and suffering, and they
weren’t listening, because they were so busy arguing about who was the
greatest. What a grief and disappointment there were at times.
Then there were the crowds who were always ready to be healed or
eat some Jesus-made-bread, but disappeared when he asked for faithful and
obedient discipleship. The wanted the miracles, but where were all the people
Jesus healed when he was on trial? At one point Jesus said, “O unbelieving and
perverse generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up
with you?” (Matthew 17:17). He had to endure the opposition of people.
Human relationships are the most rewarding and the most painful
part of life. It is amazing what people can do to each other. More suffering
has come from what some human beings have done to other human beings than any
other source. One thing that Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ
did for us was to get us in touch with the horrendous suffering Jesus endured at
the hand of others. And it has happened all through the history of the church.
The pages of history are littered with martyrs who endured enormous suffering
for the sake of Christ — things done to them by their fellow human beings. The
Bible talks of the rejection and suffering of the people of God through the ages
when it says, “There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so
that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and
flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning;
they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in
sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated — the world was
not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and
holes in the ground” (Hebrews 11:35-38).
And since the time of Christ believers have been hung, burned at
the stake and tortured, and many times it was at the hands of the church. Think
of what happened to Martin Luther, John Wesley, John Huss and many others. Our
fellow believers around the world are suffering at the hands of others at this
very moment. People in our own community are suffering abuse, some of it in
their own home. There are terrible things done by human beings to other human
beings of every description. And if that is happening to you, realize that
Christ has suffered before you and is with you now in your suffering. You
should not be silent. God is with you, not against you. You have not done
something wrong for which you are being punished. It is not your fault. God
cares for you and is concerned about your hurt.
The second point is that: Jesus faced the evil of a fallen
world. Because we live in a fallen world, that is, a world that has fallen
away from God, all nature has been affected. The Bible puts it this way, “The
creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For
the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the
will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be
liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of
the children of God” (Romans 8:19-21).
Sin has warped the world. With sin came evil. The world is now
a place where good things can happen to bad people, and bad things can happen to
good people. Just ask Job. The Bible says of him: “This man was blameless
and upright; he feared God and shunned
evil.” A good man, and yet, he lost everything he had. His children were
killed in a storm. He became ill with a disease that was extremely painful and
made others not want to be around him. These things all came to him through no
fault of his own. Even after all this happened to Job, the Lord said of him,
“There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears
God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity, though you incited me
against him to ruin him without any reason” (Job 2:3).
It is amazing to me that I have at
times heard Christians say, “Well, Job must have sinned in some way or done
something wrong, or God wouldn’t have let all those things happen to him.” It
doesn’t matter what the Scripture says, they want to believe these kinds of
things won’t happen to them if they keep their nose clean. But these kinds of
things do happen to committed Christians. Unjust things. Hurtful things.
Disastrous things. Christians get cancer and die in accidents. Storms take
away the homes of good people. People who love God experience financial ruin.
We live in a fallen world which is unpredictable. Anything can happen and
sometimes does. But this was the experience of Jesus. Bad things happened to
him. His life was not easy.
Jesus endured the hardships of life.
He said, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man
has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). He experienced thirst, hunger and
pain. He endured physical discomfort. He went through storms. He suffered
beatings and death.
So how do we handle it when we face the
injustice of life? What do we do when we have tried to follow God and we still
experience suffering? What happens when we have tried to be faithful to Christ
and still experienced a divorce, the death of a loved one, or a personal,
life-threatening illness? We follow the advise of the Scripture today: “Let us
fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy
set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right
hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful
men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Hebrews 12:2-3). In other
words, look to Jesus who also suffered. Look to him and follow his example. As
he endured the cross, you must endure yours, and you do it for the joy that is
set before you — the eternity of life in him. He scorned the shame, that is, he
endured it bravely. He thought little of it. He disregarded the shame. I like
to think it could translated, “Jesus sniffed at the disgrace,” or “He laughed at
the shame.” He knew what he had come to do. He was pressing toward his goal
even though it contained pain and shame in the offing. He was looking forward
to the joy ahead of him. The Bible says, “So we fix our eyes not on what is
seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen
is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).
Jesus understands because he has been
there. God did not spare him from suffering, rather he immersed him in it. The
Bible says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with
our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we
are — yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with
confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time
of need” (Hebrews 4:15-16). One of the greatest comforts we have is that we
know Christ has gone before us and suffered in this life. He suffered for us,
and suffers now with us. We turn to someone who understands.
I recently read an article that told
this story, “The most sacred symbol in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, is a tree: a
sprawling, shade-bearing, 80-year-old American Elm. Tourists drive from miles
around to see her. People pose for pictures beneath her. Arborists carefully
protect her. She adorns posters and letterheads. Other trees grow larger,
fuller — even greener. But not one is equally cherished. The city treasures
the tree not because of her appearance, but her endurance. She endured the
Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh parked his death-laden truck only yards
from her. His malice killed 168 people, wounded 850, destroyed the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building, and buried the tree in rubble. No one expected it to
survive. No one, in fact, gave any thought to the dusty, branch-stripped tree.
But then she began to bud. Sprouts pressed through damaged bark; green leaves
pushed away gray soot. Life resurrected from an acre of death. People
noticed. The tree modeled the resilience the victims desired. So they gave the
elm a name: the Survivor Tree.”
Maybe your life is buried under the
rubble of some disaster in your life. Jesus’ life was too. His crucifixion
looked like a miserable end to a good life. But he rose from the rubble,
brimming with life. Because he lives, you too will live. Because he rose, you
too will rise.
Rodney J. Buchanan
March 18, 2007
Mulberry St. UMC
Mount Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
Mulberry
Street United Methodist Church