Good morning! We’ve been walking through the gospels by looking at the hands of Jesus: the hands of forgiveness that wrote in the dust, the hands of healing that healed a man born blind, the hands of service that broke the bread and passed the wine with friends at the table, the hands that humbly washed the feet of the disciples…

This morning we’ll read from John 19:13-18.

Let’s start with this: Jesus’ hands are bleeding. All it tells us in this passage from John is “there they crucified him.” Since we know that in crucifixion the hands of the condemned man were literally nailed to a cross, and since we know that after his resurrection Jesus wanted Thomas and the others to look at the scars of his hands to assure them of who he was, we know: Jesus’ hands are bleeding.

“Crucifixion” is all that the gospel story says. It doesn’t go into all the details of what a cruel, horrible way to die it was. John’s readers would have been well aware of that. Crucifixion was more than a means of execution, it was also a technique the Romans used to maximize the physical suffering of a prisoner, to delay death as long as possible, and it was carried out in a public place to deter others. The hands were nailed to a wooden crossbeam attached to an upright post. The feet were given a small platform to partially rest on so that the condemned man had to struggle to hold himself upright so he could continue breathing. The torture could go on for days before exhaustion and death set in.

Jesus was far from the only person to ever be crucified. But normally crucifixion was reserved for: murderers, rebellion-inciters and those who carried out armed robbery. It was, in other words says one writer, reserved for non-persons.

This week I went back and watched a bit of The Passion, the Mel Gibson movie about Christ’s death that created such a stir a couple years ago. Just walked into Blockbuster, went to the Drama section and picked it out of hundreds of other movies.

…interesting, isn’t it, how a book or a film or a program can get all hyped up in the Christian community (us), the media makes them sound like the final thing that needs to happen before the second coming, we can’t miss it, it stirs up all of this stuff, like this movie we all ran out to see…and then within a couple months it is old news, just another movie on a shelf of hundreds of movies. And we are left once again with the task we’ve always had, figuring out how to walk with Jesus in our world, day in and day out.

Anyway, I checked the end of The Passion for some of the details of the depiction of the crucifixion. As far as I could tell, it was pretty accurate to the Biblical and historical records. I was struck again by how incredibly violent the movie is…and while it does apparently a good job of showing how Jesus died, it deals very little with what we are talking about this morning…why he died.

Jesus’ hands are bleeding.

It’s a strange way to start a sermon, isn’t it? Makes you squirm a little bit. But then, sermons are strange things anyway. What do you want to hear in a sermon? Inspiration? Humor? Interesting stories? People tell me “I want to leave the sanctuary feeling good.” Others say “I have lots of hard things going on in my life. I don’t’ need to hear anything else hard.” I feel that way plenty of times.

But I also find myself changing. There’s too many hard things that go on in our lives and in our world. And more than something that makes me feel good, I want to hear something that helps make sense of the whacked out world we live in.

Because the world is pretty crazy, isn’t it? It’s broken. People die before their time…several parents of Bethany people this month. Others get Alzheimers and lose all sense of who they have been their whole lives. I talked to a public health nurse this week who helped a 14-year-old girl give birth to a child. Someone opens fire in the middle of a party on Capitol Hill and kills six young people. No reason. In Sudan, soldiers kidnap eleven-year-olds and put machine guns and machetes in their hands and teach them how to wipe out whole villages. Unfathomable. Teachers, pastors, coaches take advantage of young people. Marriage vows have become marriage options. Our families are broken apart, our sexual behavior makes the orgies of the crumbling Roman empire blush.

And even as we try to mute the tragedies of life, and the catastrophic movements of cultural decline, we easily become more and more self-absorbed, and our days become treadmills. We are absolutely consumed, Fleming Rutledge says “with things like, how am I doing, did I get enough praise today, does that person appreciate me, is that other person over there getting ahead of me, am I slipping behind, am I letting people walk over me.” The world is really broken. We are really broken.

There just has to be something, some answer, something to grab ahold of in the world, something that makes more sense of things than just insulating myself or grabbing what I can get or just giving up on the ideas like truth, beauty, goodness. There has to be more. And if we need to hear something that is not soft or gentle or feel-good...so be it.

Jesus’ hands are bleeding.

Here is the truth. God is not a god of our making.

The God of heaven and earth is a God who is compassionate, good and merciful…and who hates evil and sin. That is who God is. A God who contains both grace…and wrath. That is who God is. We want the God of grace and forgiveness. We want the God who says only “Oh, don’t worry about the violence, the immorality, don’t worry about it…I’ll handle it. It’s okay. You’re all okay.”

But do we really want that? I don’t think I do.

I want the God who looks at the dead young people on Capitol Hill and has His heart break.

I want the God who looks at it and says “this is wrong, it is so wrong, it is not what I intended.”

I want the God who is heartsick over my preoccupation with my own life.

I want the God who says “I will not, I cannot put up with evil and sin, I cannot, I will not be changed by it, it cannot be part of me or mine.”

I want a God whose wrath is not the opposite of His love, they are not mutually exclusive…but whose righteous anger serves his love. Whose love includes His hatred of sin and evil.

This is why Jesus’ hands are bleeding. He goes to the cross, taking on the ugly sin and providing his grace. Something happens on the cross.

Not all agree! Bishop John Shelby Spong, best-selling author of several books on a Christianity that is frankly totally foreign to me writes “The view of the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God that must be dismissed.”

Or, in a gentler critique, even Mahatma Gandhi says “(Jesus’) death on the cross was a great example to the world, but my heart can not accept that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it.”

So, Why? Why did Jesus go to the cross? Why did Jesus have to die? The first reason, the easiest, is simply:

Jesus died because of evil human beings.

Some were Jews: the Sanhedrin and religious leaders, and the crowd that shouted “Crucify him!”

Some were Christians, really the first Christians. Judas. Peter.

Some were Gentiles, Romans. Pilate, and the soldiers carrying out the execution.

God decided to make people with free will, even a will free enough to chose to reject him. Jesus went to the cross because of choices people made…And with only a small amount of imagination we might figure out how closely our choices resemble some of theirs.

Jesus died so that the scriptures be fulfilled.

Jesus said about himself, “The Son of Man will go (to cross) just as it is written about him.” (Mk14:21)

In Matthew 21, Jesus applies to himself the Old Testament passage… “the stone the builders rejected…has become the cornerstone.”

Even from the cross, Jesus embodies several other things from the Psalms, including Psalm 22, “My God, my god why have you forsaken me?”

In Isaiah 53 we read the early foreshadowing of the servant…a suffering servant, one who gives his life as an offering, whose death makes other people whole.

Jesus’ coming, his life, his death were somehow within the merciful plan of God.

Jesus’ hands are bleeding.

Jesus died because the world is broken, we are broken and need help.

In the Presbyterian Book of Confessions, there is a statement of faith called the Confession of 1967. It was written in the United States, and if you were around in 1967 you’ll remember that was a time of great unrest. The Vietnam War, race riots, college protests, the murders of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. This Confession was built around the theme of “reconciliation,” the need for two parties formerly knit together to be reunited, for healing to take place. And in the section that talks about the cross of Jesus, about the “atonement,” it gives seven different pictures…listen for them:

“God’s reconciling act in Jesus Christ is a mystery which the Scriptures describe in various ways. It is called the sacrifice of a lamb, a shepherd’s life given for his sheep, atonement by a priest; again it is a ransom of a slave, payment of debt, vicarious satisfaction of a legal penalty, and a victory over the powers of evil. These are expressions of a truth which remains beyond the reach of all theory in the depths of God’s love for man. They reveal the gravity, cost, and sure achievement of God’s reconciling work.”

Those are many different images from many different Bible passages, but the thread that holds them together is that in order to save His people, God intervened. He intervened in a way consistent to his character which hates sin and loves mercy. Christ came and acted on our behalf, stepped our dark world and substituted himself for us. Jesus died, scripture says…upholds God’s holy hatred of evil, pays our debt, provides our ransom, defeats our darkness by absorbing it into himself, bears our sin.

How can God express simultaneously…his holiness in judgment and his love in pardon? Jesus hands are bleeding. He dies on a cross. God does not say “Oh, don’t worry about it,” but rather “I’ve taken care of it.”

Jesus died because he made a deliberate choice to do so.

He wasn’t caught off guard. It is why he came. Yesterday morning a group of us looked at how many times the gospel says Jesus tried to tell people why he was here, what would happen to him. Between the different gospels we listed out about 20 different passages. The cross is what Jesus said yes to.

It wasn’t an accident, not a tragedy (in the way we use the word), he wasn’t a victim (could have changed things) nor a martyr (an example for a cause), no, he knew it was going to happen.

Jesus’ hands are bleeding.

You probably haven’t heard of Raymond Kolbe. He was born in 1894 in a small village in Poland. He was ordained in his 20’s as a Franciscan priest, and took the name of Father Maximilian. In the 1930’s he traveled to Japan to do some religious publishing, and was called back to Poland in 1939. When World War II started, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. In May of 1941 he was transferred to Auschwitz.

One night in July, Father Kolbe’s cell block was found to be short one man, which meant someone had tried to escape. The rules of the camp were that if a prisoner escaped, ten would die in his place. The next morning, the commandant went through their ranks and randomly chose the ten who would die. One of those chosen, a Polish sergeant, shouted out “What will happen to my family?!” Father Kolbe stepped out of line, took off his hat and stood before the commander. Observers expected the man to go crazy, but he was so shocked he asked through a translator what Kolbe wanted. Father Kolbe replied “I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take that man’s place, because he has a wife and children.”

To the amazement of all, the commandant agreed. The sergeant was returned to his place in line, and the priest took his place in the starvation bunker. He died on August 14. Father Kolbe, in a sense, absorbed the evil of the Nazis, willingly…to save someone else from their sentence.

When Jesus died on the cross, they put him between two criminals also being crucified. One snarled out at him, derisively, “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” The other said “Jesus remember me.” And the Christ whose hands were bleeding, at the same time absorbed the evil pain of the one and invited the other into the kingdom.

When Christ who both speaks into the face of sin and evil and restores us to relationship with God…he puts a claim on us. On our lives Here’s how the Apostle Paul says it: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God…so we are ambassadors for Christ.” (2 Cor 5)

Accepting the work of Christ on the cross, we walk as his representatives out into a world that has received the means of mending but is still broken and in need of healing. And whether your assignment is in your marriage, in your family, in your workplace, in Afghanistan or Seattle, you are his ambassador, representing the Jesus whose very hands would bleed for others. Let us pray.