Today being Palm Sunday, Stephen spoke from Matt 21:1-18 this morning. Normally we view Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem as the crowd’s acknowledgment of Him as King. The celebration  element is prevalent in the narrative: we see Jesus riding on a donkey with crowds shouting ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ and placing palm leaves and cloaks on the road before Him. Such moments remind us of the ‘red carpet’ treatment accorded to celebrities nowadays, but if we ponder the story further, we see how the story does not finish in the way the crowds expected. Within days, Jesus is reviled and crucified as a common criminal, even though He was indeed King. God often works in ways that are totally unexpected to human reasoning.

The story is also a reminder, however, of the sacrifices God requires of us. As the people gave lavishly, we too are urged to offer ourselves as living sacrifices (Rom 12:1-2). We have an opportunity to lay our burdens and fears down before Jesus and to give Him our sacrifice of praise. We relinquish our desire to be in control and accept that if He is our King, we have to live our lives every day in acknowledgment of this fact. It is easy to view Palm Sunday as a one-off event, the precursor to the events of Holy Week, but it is a time for us to give of ourselves freely to God, understanding that sacrifice, once given, cannot be reclaimed.

The next words from the cross we will consider is the prayer recorded in Luke 23:54: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’

The ‘them’ of this prayer includes those who were actively involved in the death of Jesus: Caiaphas, the High Priest, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, the soldiers ‘just doing their job’… but it also includes Judas the betrayer, the eleven disciples who deserted Jesus and fled… and all mankind, whose sins were the reason Jesus had to die at all. I too need to be included in Jesus’s prayer for forgiveness. We all do.

Forgiveness had been a key theme of the teaching of Jesus throughout His lifetime (see Matt 6:12, 14-15, Matt 18:21-35, Luke 7:36-50.) It is fitting that it remained relevant and was practised even during the agony of crucifixion. Forgiveness and justice may seem at odds with each other at times. We often say we want justice rather than forgiveness when we have been wronged, but justice is not the last word. Forgiveness is the last word, and as we pray for forgiveness as Jesus did, we ‘train our spirits in compassion, not revenge; in understanding, not irritation; in acceptance of a brother or sister sinner, not rejection.’ (Eugene Peterson, ‘The Word Made Flesh’, P 247)

Forgiveness is alien to our human nature. We hold on to grudges; we remember wrongs done to us; we stew in bitterness and resentment. But forgiveness, another facet of God’s grace and generosity, unlocks the door and lets us out of the oven. Jesus knew that it was God’s plan for Him to suffer and die, for only through that agony could the world be saved. He could see beyond the human scheming and plotting to God’s purposes being worked out in His life. When we realise that no weapon forged against us can prevail (Is 54:17), when we understand that God’s purposes are often worked out through suffering and pain but that even what men mean for evil can be turned to good by God (Gen 50:20, Rom 8:28), we find that we can forgive. When we withhold forgiveness, we feel that we are punishing the wrongdoer, but actually, we are the ones who become enslaved by our wrong attitudes and broken by our disobedience. Only as we forgive can we enter the wide open spaces God has provided for us. Only as we are forgiven for all the wrong we have ever done can we know joy and lightness of spirit.

The first cry of Jesus from the cross which we will consider is His cry from Ps 22:1: ‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’ (Matt 27:46)

It is a cry of dereliction, a cry of desolation. Christians traditionally understand this prayer not only as an indication of how we often feel – abandoned by God in difficult times – but of the weight of what Jesus had to endure in order to bring about our salvation. The Protestant reformer Calvin wrote ‘If Christ died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual… Unless his soul shared in the punishment, he would have been the Redeemer of bodies only.’ (Calvin’s ‘Institutes’ II xvi 10) Jesus, who had previously only known the close fellowship of the Father (John 16:32), was alone as God the Holy One could not look on sin. Again, this is a mystery we cannot fully comprehend, for we know that ‘God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them’ (2 Cor 5:19) at this time, but the fact remains that Jesus experienced aloneness and separation from the Father in ways that, because of His sacrifice, we will never have to. He knows more about our suffering, pain and heartache than we can ever imagine:

‘We may faint and we may sink
Feel the pain and near the brink
But the dark begins to shrink
When you find the one who knows

Today is Palm Sunday and as we enter the final week of Jesus’s life and focus on His death and ultimately on His resurrection, we are aware that we are entering a mystery we can never fully comprehend. The fact that Jesus chose to suffer and die for the sins of the world is at the very heart of the gospel as we saw on Thursday; we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block for Jews and foolishness for Gentiles, but Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24). Nonetheless, it is only as we embrace the paradox of God that we can enter in to salvation; as Eugene Peterson comments ‘death and glory do not seem to be natural bedfellows. But in Jesus they are.’ (‘The Word Made Flesh’, P 218)

This week, we will focus our gaze specifically on the cross and on the words that Jesus uttered on the cross. The ‘seven words from the cross‘ of Jesus are often preached about and commented on, for every word that Jesus uttered helps us to see the Father heart of God more clearly and bring life and truth to our lives. As we pray, it’s good to have the prayers of Jesus to guide us and lead us. It’s also notable that although the death of Christ is unique in bringing salvation to the whole world, He does require His disciples to take up their cross daily, deny themselves and die to self in order to be able to follow Him. (Matt 16:24) Rom 6:5-11 makes it clear that we have to enter into His death in order to be able to enter into His life. ‘Death is a nonnegotiable element in being a human creature,’ Eugene Peterson writes. ‘It is also nonnegotiable in being a follower of Jesus.’ (ibid., P 242) Most of us squirm at this thought. Doctors and society as a whole do their best to keep physical death at bay; we believe that if we follow this diet or do that exercise, we can postpone the inevitable. Many disciples are interested only in success and victory, rather like the crowds who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem with great enthusiasm, but who were unprepared for a Messiah who would die within the week. We have to understand that paradox is at the very heart of the gospel, that the way to life inevitably must pass through death.

‘Cross and resurrection are the south and north poles, true gospel polarities of a single, undivided, salvation world,‘ Eugene Peterson goes on to say (ibid. , P 242-3). As we contemplate the prayers of Jesus on the cross, we are reminded that His obedience even to the shame and suffering of the cross led to joy. (Heb 12:1-3) That, too, will always be the case.

The message Paul preached was based on the centrality of the cross: ‘we preach Christ crucified… to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.’ (1 Cor 1:23-24) Later he says ‘I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified'(1 Cor 2:2) and in Gal 6:14 says ‘May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.‘ Clearly, the cross is hugely important to our salvation!

Louie Giglio speaks of how the cross is found everywhere, even in the protein laminin in our bodies:

The cross is so important because it is the means of our salvation. Its importance is found in the emphasis of all 4 gospels, with Jesus teaching clearly that His mission was to die for our sins (see Mark 8:31-32, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:32-34, John 7:30, John 17:1). The apostles too emphasised the importance of the cross in both their early preaching (see Acts 2:22-24, Acts 17:2-3) and in their letters (1 Pet 3:18, 1 John 2:2). The death of Christ gives us access to forgiveness of sins and a right relationship with God (see Eph 1:7, Rom 5:10), allowing us to become God’s children and joint heirs with Christ (Rom 8:17, Heb 9:15). The cross also demonstrates Christ’s supremacy over evil; death could not hold Him and the enemy was defeated (see Col 2:13-15).

As Christians, we need to constantly return to the amazing wonder and grace found at the cross. The cross insults our intelligence (it’s too simple, too ‘good to be true’, we reason), our ability (there is nothing left for us to do to gain salvation except receive Christ’s sacrifice by faith), and our ambition (we learn to glory in the cross rather than in our own achievements or abilities). Nonetheless, it is the power of God for our salvation and the gospel message we must constantly preach.

Tonight’s Bible study looked at 1 Cor 1:18-25, where Paul reminds the Corinthians of the centrality of the cross, a message which makes no sense at all to the Jews or Gentiles but which ultimately reveals God’s ways of working. The message of Christ crucified and the centrality of His saving, atoning work on the cross has to be our main focus, not only at Easter but at all times. Without this message, people cannot be saved, cannot be reconciled to God, cannot be forgiven, cannot enter into eternal life… but it is a message which will always look like weakness and foolishness to human reasoning.

For Jews, the idea of a crucified Saviour made no sense, since they knew that ‘cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.’ (Deut 21:23, Gal 3:13) The Old Testament scholars pointed to the Suffering Servant (see Ps 22/ Is 53), but scholars found it hard to reconcile the idea of a Messiah who would come as a mighty conqueror and defeat all Israel’s enemies with this image of ‘conquering through sacrifice’ (Graham Kendrick). Their reasoning was ‘How could anybody put faith in an unemployed carpenter from Nazareth who died the shameful death of a common criminal?’  Greeks, on the other hand, placed all their faith in philosophy and reasoning, but their emphasis on human reason could not fathom how weakness could be part of God’s plan. Paul’s quotation from Isaiah 29:14 reminds us of how Israel constantly looked to other nations for salvation, when only God could deliver them (see Is 29 & 30). However we may imagine scenarios of God’s deliverance, these can never match what God actually does, as these examples demonstrate!

• God used trumpets to bring down the walls of Jericho. (Joshua 6)
• He reduced Gideon’s army from 32,000 to 300 to rout the armies of Midian (Judges 7:1-25).
• He used an ox goad in the hand of Shamgar to defeat the Philistines. (Judges 3:31)
• With the jawbone of a donkey He enabled Samson to defeat a whole army. (Judges 15)
• David killed Goliath with a sling and a stone (1 Samuel 17)
• Jesus fed over 5,000 with nothing more than a few loaves and fishes. (Luke 9)

God’s ways often involve paradox (‘a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a truth’ (OED).) Divine and human values are completely at variance with one another, and only those who accept the apparent absurdity of the cross  can be saved.