Mark 15:16-20
* March 25, 2009 *
Midweek Lent 5 * Prof. Daniel
Leyrer
Dear friends who watch with Jesus this little hour,
Tell me if you can hear these words and not feel angry, READ MARK 15:16-20. I believe a righteous anger wells up inside me at these words. How dare they show such cruelty to any person, let alone the perfect, sinless Son of God! How dare those soldiers mock Jesus’ kingship when, in fact, he is the King of kings and Lord of lords! How dare they blaspheme his holy name by only pretending to worship him, by making a brutal game of it! How dare they!
How dare I! That’s what I should be saying. How dare we! That’s what repentant sinners like you and me confess this day. Just like those Roman soldiers we have despised our Savior’s claim – the claim of who he is, the claim he has on our hearts and lives. Oh, our despising of Jesus’ claim may be different in kind from that of those pagan ruffians, but it is not different in severity.
And
so this day, too, we hurry to
They didn’t take him seriously. That really was at the base of the soldiers’ sinful treatment of Jesus. He rode into town as a king a few days earlier, but they didn’t take him seriously. When Pilate asked him a few hours earlier, “Are you the king of the Jews?” he replied, “Yes, it is as you say,” but they didn’t take him seriously. To a Roman soldier he was either the head of a loser nation or the head of a loser religion. Either way, they weren’t about to take Jesus seriously. And so, they mocked him. They beat him. They spit on him.
Do you see Jesus being taken seriously in the world around you? Perhaps you have been in a college classroom where it seems like the professor takes it as his or her highest calling to destroy any trust you might have in Jesus Christ. Turn on the television, go to the movies. How will the person who has a simple, childlike faith in Jesus be portrayed? As a good person; or a judgmental, intolerant, narrow-minded, bad person? Has anyone ever told you to keep your religion, your faith, your Jesus to yourself? They just don’t take him seriously. So they mock him. They ridicule him. They deny his claims.
And yet, brothers and sisters, the finger must be pointed inside these walls, too. For we have been tempted, and we have succumbed to slide into the very attitude we decry in the world around us. We have heard Jesus preach, “Let your light shine before men,” but we have let the workroom, the classroom, the living room stay dark rather than be made fun of for our beliefs. We haven’t always taken him seriously. We have heard Jesus preach, “I tell you that anyone who looks at a person lustfully has already committed adultery with that person in their heart,” but we have laughed at the lewd jokes or looked with lust. We haven’t always taken him seriously.
And it is then, dear friends, when the siren call of the cynics comes on even stronger. “Should you take him seriously? Shouldn’t you join the 21st century? Shouldn’t you captain your own ship through life? Shouldn’t you finally throw away that crutch called Jesus?”
In the crucible of that temptation, pray, Christian, pray! Father forgive us for despising Jesus’ claim on our lives! Father, forgive us for thinking we are more important than he! Father, let your Son be the very foundation of our lives!
Jesus finished his Sermon on the Mount by saying that a person who hears his words but refuses to put them into practice is like a man who builds his house on sand. As rock solid as those Roman legionnaires thought they were, they had based their life on shifting sand. “Repent and believe in the Christ! The kingdom of heaven is near.” These were messages that, apparently, they had rejected. And that rejection of Jesus and his words made all the difference. Without any true foundation in this life they certainly were not ready for the next life. To the self-acclaimed “masters of the world,” Jesus and his words were just so much silliness.
By God’s grace, we know better. We who have come to praise Jesus for his forgiving love today know, by the Spirit’s power, that this Lord Jesus most definitely has a claim on our lives. We pray that he is the foundation of our lives. Consider his claim on your life, my friend.
The Bible says that our Lord Jesus “endured the cross, scorning its shame, for the joy put before him.” In the joy of a sinless soul Jesus considered you and me at the crack of the whip, at the sting of the insults, at the piercing of the nails, and he said: “For them. For them I endure these things. No one takes my life from me. Willingly I give it up for them. For them.”
You see, even as we view these soldiers, these sadistic mockers, something beautiful is happening. Jesus is redeeming us. He is purchasing us to be his own. He is plucking us out of the burning building of our own sin. He’s laying claim to us.
I don’t think we can ignore that. And I know that as the redeemed children of God we don’t want to ignore that. No, we let Christ’s rescue mission for us be the very foundation of our lives! That means we get to belong to him and not just ourselves. That means we get to act for him and for others, and not just for ourselves. That means we get to serve him and others, and not just ourselves. That means Christ and what he says is the foundation of our lives, not as a burdensome imposition, but as our Savior once said: “an easy yoke, a gentle burden, by which we find rest for our souls.”
We’ve been reading from Mark chapter 15 today. Just a few verses later we read of a Roman centurion who, at the foot of the cross, watched Jesus give up his dying breath. That soldier said: “Surely this man was the Son of God!”
I’ve always hoped he was one of the soldiers we heard about tonight. A soldier who had a change of heart about Jesus after seeing and hearing the gospel on the cross. I can’t say that for sure about that centurion. But I will say this. God has changed us by Jesus’ cross. Through Christ’s perfect payment for our sins God has made us his children. He has claimed us to be his own. Ignore that claim? Mock that claim? Resent that claim? No way! That’s not who we are! May God continue to grant us the strength to boast in Jesus’ claim on us and build our lives on Jesus’ love for us. Amen.
For us, by wickedness betrayed,
For us, in crown of thorns arrayed,
He bore the shameful cross and death;
For us he gave his dying breath. Amen.
CW 371:5