"A 'Hyper' Savior"

     Dear Friends in Christ,  

   I have a confession to make, something that you may have never known about me even though I’ve been the pastor here for the past 17 years.  I am a wimp.  I admit it.  I don’t like pain.  Therefore I don’t like going to the doctor or the dentist because even though I know these health care professionals mean well, they are known to inflict pain on you, especially with those sharp things called needles.  When I hear the words “You’re going to feel a little stick,” I tense up.  I sweat.  My heart pounds.  Believe it or not, years ago I used to give blood whenever the opportunity arose, but I felt like I was becoming more of a liability than an asset for the people running the blood drive that I finally stopped going.  I even remember one time getting light-headed while standing in line just thinking about what was soon to happen and having to sit down to get the blood flowing back to my brain again. 

   But one of the worst experiences I ever had with a doctor occurred some years ago when I went to an ear, nose, and throat specialist to have a persistent, stabbing pain in my throat checked out.  To make a long and rather unpleasant story short, after his initial examination of me he led me to a back room where he pulled out this scope that looked like some type of medieval torture device.  Then, before I had any time to object or ask any questions, he was threading that silly thing through my left nostril while giving me instructions to keep my mouth closed and breathe through my nose.  The whole time he was doing this, I had my eyes closed in a squint that I’m sure reflected my extreme discomfort and when he finally pulled the scope out, it was like a dam burst in my eyes as they began to water profusely.  I barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief, thankful that it was all over, before he said: “Now I’m going to go in through the right nostril.”  So I braced myself and he started giving me the same instructions: “Keep your mouth closed…Breathe through your nose.’”  And when I inadvertently opened my mouth one time, he said it again, only more firmly: “Keep your mouth closed…Breathe through your nose.” 

   And it was at that point that I had a less than pastoral thought go through my mind.  What I really wanted to do was say, “Listen, Doc, how about you and me trading places here.  You let me stick that thing up your nose until it tickles the back of your throat and you see how easy it is to keep your mouth shut and breathe through your nose.”  I didn’t say that because I knew that even if I did, the doctor wouldn’t take me up on my offer.  He wouldn’t dare swap places with me.

   But you know what, my friends?  If you have a pain in your heart, an affliction of the soul, a cancer of the spirit, you need to know that there is somebody who will swap places with you, somebody who will not only take it from you, but who also took it for you.  And that of course is Jesus, the one whom we’re calling in my current sermon series “The One and Only.”  So this morning, as we find ourselves firmly entrenched in the of the season of Lent, we want to spend our time talking about what theologians typically refer to as the vicarious, or substitutionary, atonement of Christ.  And we’re going to so by visiting Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane for it was there that he wrestled with what lay before him, and it was there that he ultimately resolved to go through with it.

   I think most of you know the story well.  Following his last supper with the disciples in the upper room, Jesus leads them out to one of his favorite places of escape, a peaceful grove of olive trees called Gethsemane.  Once there, he takes Peter, James, and John with him farther on into the garden and asks them to watch and pray with him.  Then going about a stone’s throw away from them he falls to the ground and prays: "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."

   Now, what emotion would you say Jesus was feeling at this point of his Passion?  Do you think it would be appropriate to say that he was feeling fear?  I think so.  And I say that knowing full well that someone might object to it.  Someone might say, “There’s no way that my Savior and Lord could ever be afraid.”  And I would agree with that, at least from the perspective of his divine nature.  For God fears nothing.  But here in the Garden of Gethsemane we see the human nature of Jesus showing through more clearly than I think we do at any other time of his life.  Listen to some of the phrases different translations of v. 37 use to convey this to us.  The NIV Bible says Jesus “began to be sorrowful and troubled.”  The King James Version says he “began to be sorrowful and very heavy.”  The New Living Translation says “he began to be filled with anguish and deep distress.”  The New Century Version says “he began to be very sad and troubled.”

   Regardless of how you put it, the point is obvious.  We’ve never seen Jesus like this before, have we?  He wasn’t like this when he and the disciples were caught in that ferocious storm on the Sea of Galilee.  He wasn’t like this when he found himself going nose to nose with Satan in the wilderness.  He wasn’t like this when he found himself regularly butting heads with the religious leaders of his day.  Never before have we heard Jesus utter words like these: "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”

   And while some people might find this very disturbing, I find it very comforting.  It’s nice to know that we have a God who understands, a God who can relate to us when we find ourselves faced with despair and distress, with depression and discouragement, because he allowed himself to feel all of that and much, much more that agonizing night in the garden.

   But the question is, why was he afraid?  What was he really fearing?  Most of you would probably say he was fearing the suffering he knew he was about to endure.  And I would agree with that to a certain extent.  But I also believe there was more to it than that.  I would suggest to you that the one thing he was fearing more than anything else was fury, the fury of his Father that he refers to in our text as a cup.  In v. 39 Jesus prays: "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.”  Did you know that in the Bible the word “cup” is often used as a symbol of God’s wrath?  For example, in Jer. 25:15 God tells his faithful prophet: "Take from my hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it.”  In Rev. 14:10 the following warning is given to the one who rejects Christ and instead follows the beast: “He, too, will drink of the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.”

   It’s pretty obvious from these and many other passages just like them that the word “cup” is often equated with God’s wrath, his anger, his fury.  And while we don’t normally like to focus upon that side of God, I’d like for you to think of God’s wrath this morning as justifiable wrath.  Now what do I mean by that?  Well, recently I came across a true story that will illustrate this for us.  It’s about a church that had been vandalized.  These mean-spirited vandals had not stolen anything, but they did make their way into the baptistry in the front of the church where baptisms by immersion were performed, and they had taken markers and written words of profanity on the walls.  They had treated the towels in the baptistry like toilets.  In other words, they had purposely desecrated this otherwise very holy place.

   Now when you hear a story like that, what emotion does it evoke in you?  What if something like that were to happen in our church?  Wouldn’t you be just a little angry at whoever did it?  And wouldn’t such anger be justified? 

   Well, take that anger that we fallen sinful human beings would feel toward something like that and multiply it by infinity and you get some idea of how an unfallen and sinless God feels every time we disobey him and disappoint him, every time we desecrate or profane our world, our relationships, his name, our bodies which the Bible even identifies as his temple.  That’s why I say that his anger toward sin is justifiable.

   And in the Garden of Gethsemane, all of that anger, all of that hatred toward sin – not hatred toward you, but hatred toward sin – was poured into a cup, if you will, and it was handed to Jesus to drink.  And the contents of that cup were so putrid, so frightening, so overwhelming that even Jesus wondered whether there might be another way to accomplish what needed to be done.  He prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.”  But then he added those incredible words of submission:  “Yet not as I will, but as you will."  

   Let me ask you something, my friends.  Getting back to the story I just shared with you about the church that was vandalized, had you been a member of that church and those vandals were caught, would you have gone to the police and said, “Please don’t punish them.  Whatever you need to do to them, just do it to me.  Take their name off the police report and write my name there.  Put me in handcuffs.  Take me to jail.  And let them go free.”  Would you have done that?  Neither would I.  But that is precisely what Jesus did for you and me when he drank the cup of God’s wrath.  And the reason he did is because as great as his hatred is for sin, his love for the sinner is greater still.  So he took our place. This is a theme that runs like a golden thread throughout the Bible, this substitutionary atonement of Christ. In the Old Testament, for example, we find passages like Isaiah 53:5-6 which says: “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” And in the New Testament we find verses like 2 Cor. 5:21 where the Apostle Paul writes: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

   Notice that I’ve underlined the word “for” on the screen because the Greek word that is translated “for” is such an interesting word.  Transliterated into English it would look like this: hyper.  Now we use that word to describe someone who has an excessive amount of energy that they have trouble keeping under control.  But in the Greek that word really means “in place of, on behalf of.”  In Gal. 3:13 Paul writes: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”  He became a curse in our place, on our behalf.  In John 10:14-15 Jesus puts it this way: "I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me…and I lay down my life for the sheep.”  Over and over again that little word is used in the New Testament to describe Jesus’ substitutionary atonement.  That’s why I’ve entitled my sermon today “A Hyper Savior.”  Jesus is a Savior who was willing to act on our behalf, to be punished in our place, to die as our substitute.

   Many of you have seen Mel Gibson’s movie that came out several years ago entitled “The Passion of the Christ.”  I don’t know how it affected you, but I distinctly remember the whole time I was watching it, there was one thought that kept running through my mind.  And that was, “He did this for me.”  He endured the agony in the garden for me; the pummeling from the Jewish leaders for me; the brutal scourging at the hands of Pilate’s soldiers for me; the spit in his face for me; the nails in his hands and feet for me; the spear in his side for me.  Such incomparable love from this incomparable Savior deserves a response, doesn’t it?  But what kind of response could we possibly give?  What kind of response would be fitting for such an incredible sacrifice?  Well, I think the hymn writer Isaac Watts had a pretty good handle on that when he wrote the final stanzas of 2 of my favorite Lenten hymns.  And I’d like to close with those.  The first hymn is Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed.  And the final verse goes: “But tears of grief cannot repay  The debt of love I owe; Here, Lord, I give myself away: It’s all that I can do.”  The 2^nd hymn is When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.  It ends with these words: “Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a tribute far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.”  May you be willing to give your all to the One who gave his all for you.

      Amen.