10. The God Who Dies—And Lives Again
10
The God Who Dies—and Lives Again
When you think of the biographies of important people, whether artists, football hunks, an Einstein, a political figure—it doesn’t matter—never is there any suggestion that they were born in order to die. If the party is no longer living, then there is some mention of the person’s death, no doubt, which may be heroic or ordinary, prolonged or quick, accidental or the result of old age—it may be all kinds of things. But never do we speak of someone being born in order to die. That is true for Muhammad. It is true for Gautama the Buddha. There may be stories of their deaths, but no one suggests that the purpose of their coming was to die.
This is why the four Gospels (the first four books of the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) are so hard to classify. People have written scholarly volumes on what genre of literature they fall into. Is it a tragedy? Well, Jesus rises from the dead, which doesn’t sound all that tragic. Is it, literarily speaking, a comedy? But they are a different species. They are too serious for comedy: the centrality of the cross and what is achieved and the barbaric awfulness of it all amidst its splendor—they cannot be reduced to one-word expressions. Are the Gospels biographies? That is probably as close as you can get to an adequate label. A New Testament Gospel is somewhat akin to first-century Hellenistic biographies, I suppose. But there aren’t any other first-century Hellenistic biographies where the plotline says that the reason the central figure came was to die. The New Testament Gospels feel very different from first-century Hellenistic counterparts.
Have you been exposed to some of the literature that gets promoted every Easter season? Around about Easter the press loves to drag out the latest scholar who has written something on the Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Thomas or some other Gospel not included in the Bible. Various people line up to say, “These are as authoritative as the Gospels in the New Testament, and we should incorporate them again too. Originally, Christianity was much broader, and then it got narrow and orthodox and mean. But originally it was much, much broader. There were a lot of Gospels.”
This revisionist history really cannot stand up to close scrutiny. The earliest of these other so-called Gospels is about mid-second century, and they drag on for another century and a half or two centuries. None of them is connected with the first generation of eyewitnesses the way the canonical Gospels are (that is, the Gospels in our Bible), not one of them. But there is more to it than that.
Consider the so-called Gospel of Thomas. It is a short book of 114 sayings supposedly credited to Jesus and includes two tiny historical snippets. That’s it. In other words, it is completely unlike the Gospels in the New Testament, all of which drive toward the cross and resurrection of Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas leaves these climactic events out. In fact, in the first century people didn’t speak of four Gospel books: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They spoke, rather, of one gospel message: the gospel of Jesus Christ, the one gospel of Jesus Christ according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, and according to John. There is one gospel with various witnesses describing what this Good News about Jesus Christ consists of, telling this spectacular news about the Savior who invaded history to save his people from their sins. Only later did people start referring to them rather loosely as “the Gospel of Matthew” or “the Gospel of Mark,” but even then it is really important to see that all four of these books (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) say something about Jesus’s forerunner (John the Baptist, the one who announces Jesus), origins, and ministry (they talk extensively about what he did, what he said, how he preached, some of his miracles, his parables, his sayings, some of his sermons), and then at the end he is crucified and rises again. All along the story has been driving toward his death. This is essential to the plotline in each book.
An important part of this plotline is how Jesus starts talking about how he is going to die. In Matthew 16, when Peter confesses that Jesus really is the promised Messiah, the one who comes from David’s line, the one whom they were expecting, Jesus goes on to say, in effect, “Yes, and you know, I must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things and be crucified and the third day rise again.” Then one of the disciples replies with words to this effect: “No way. That cannot be. The promised Davidic figure, the promised Messiah, is so strong, and someone like you can do miracles. How are they going to stop you?” But Jesus keeps insisting again and again: he will be betrayed and killed, and this is the center of his heavenly Father’s plan. Jesus came to die. That is why each of the Gospels finds Jesus insisting that he came for this purpose.
But Jesus adds some very strange clarifications: “I’m not going to die as a martyr. No one can take my life from me. I lay it down myself. I have the power to lay it down, and I have the power to take it again” (see John 10:17–18). He does not classify himself as a martyr but as a sacrifice. He is not simply the sad victim of a vicious conspiracy or a nasty historical mistake. He is a willing sacrifice.
That is why these books sound so strange to anyone who reads a lot of biographies. There is no one quite like him. Even when he is being arrested and dragged away, his disciples wonder if having courage now means to pull out a sword and slash at the attackers. Jesus’s response is, “Don’t you understand? I could in theory call twelve legions of angels. Do you really think an unruly mob is going to stand up to twelve legions of angels?” (see Matt. 26:50–54). But he didn’t come to be rescued. He came to be butchered. He came to die.
Moreover, in ordinary biographies, once you do have people safely buried in the ground, they stay there. But Jesus comes to die and rise again. This pair of events, Jesus’s death and resurrection, are so central to everything the Bible says about Jesus and all the purpose of his coming that the apostle Paul, writing a couple of decades after Jesus rose from the dead, announces to his readers in 1 Corinthians 15 that he is going to lay out the matters “of first importance” (15:3)—and he first says, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (15:3), and then he spends much of the rest of the chapter talking about Jesus’s resurrection. These are matters of first importance. They are the basis of everything in Christian belief, conduct, and understanding. We have to get this right, or we have no part of Christianity left.
There are many ways to go about studying Jesus’s death and resurrection. We could go through all of the accounts of his death, for example, and all the allusions to his death. What I am going to do is direct your attention rather quickly to one of the actual accounts of his death, the one found in Matthew 27. Then I shall switch to a passage in John that talks about his resurrection. Much more could be said about these passages[1] (and of course there are many other passages), but I shall center this chapter on these two so that we have some focus to what we are saying.
The Ironies of the Cross (Matt. 27:27–51)
The account we have here of Jesus’s death is carefully shaped by Matthew. Matthew is a skillful, God-inspired writer. Of the New Testament writers, the two who are most given to irony are Matthew and John. At one level Matthew is simply describing what happened, but he relates it in such a way that what he shows you are the ironies of the cross, the real meaning behind the raw events. By “irony” I mean words that convey in their context the exact opposite of what they formally say. That’s irony. What you will discover is that in each of several paragraphs Matthew lays out what happened when Jesus died, describing it all with such a delicious dipping into irony that we begin to see what God is really doing in this death.
Instead of printing the entire narrative, we shall lay out the text section by section as we go along.
1. The Man Who Is Mocked as King Is King (Matt. 27:27–31)
27Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. 28They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, 29and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand as a scepter. Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him. “Hail, king of the Jews!” they said. 30They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. 31After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.
Matthew 27:27–31
Already Jesus has been savagely beaten as part of the interrogation process. That was standard procedure. Then after the sentence was passed, he was savagely beaten again. That too was standard procedure. Once you were condemned to be crucified, you were beaten again before you were taken out and crucified. He has already suffered all of that.
What takes place here is not standard procedure. This is barracks-room humor. They put some sort of robe on him as if he is an emperor, and they twist into a crown one of the spiked vines that they have in the Middle East. They ram it down onto his head. They put a stick in his hand as if it is a scepter and pretend that he is a great monarch. “Hail, king of the Jews!” they say, bowing down, slapping his face, laughing. Such fun. They take this stick that is supposed to be the symbol of his power and bash it against his head again and again. More laughter. Barracks-room humor.
But every time they say “Hail, king of the Jews!” they mean the opposite. In the context the words actually convey nothing but derision and scorn. They think that their humor is deeply ironic and very funny. But there is a deeper irony. Matthew knows, and God knows, and the readers know that Jesus is the king. The man who was mocked as king is the king. That is the first deep irony in this passage.
After all, how does the Gospel of Matthew begin? “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham” (1:1, emphasis added). Jesus is in the Davidic line. He has the legal right to the throne. And all through the book there are allusions to Jesus being the king. He tells some parables in which—for those with eyes to see—the king in the parable is Jesus himself. In fact, as part of the procedure during Jesus’s trial before Pilate, the Roman governor, Jesus is asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” From Pilate’s perspective, if Jesus says yes then he could be condemned: his words would be a confession of treason. Jesus would be setting himself up against the Herod family (which supplied the local petty monarchs in the area) or even setting himself up against Caesar in Rome. Jesus would be a usurping king. Jesus answers with a kind of affirmation: “It is as you say. You have said this.” But he does not want simply to flatly say, “Yes, I am the promised king”—because what Jesus means by king is not exactly what Pilate means by king. Nevertheless, he is the king of the Jews.
In fact, when you read the whole New Testament, he is not only the king of the Jews, he is the king of you and me. How does Matthew end his Gospel? Jesus, risen from the dead, says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18). Quite frankly, he claims to be king of the universe. He is certainly the king of these soldiers who are laughing at his supposed power as king. Matthew wants us to see that the man who is mocked as king is king.
But what sort of a kingdom is it? What kind of kingdom is it where the king lays down his life not because he has been overpowered by a competitor but as an act of voluntary self-sacrifice? Most kings surely would want to go out and fight. Jesus refuses to do so. In fact, in one remarkable passage a few chapters earlier in Matthew, Jesus actually talks about the nature of his kingdom. I have alluded to it before. In Matthew 20, the mother of James and John and her two sons (two of Jesus’s disciples) approach Jesus, and what they want is to sit one on the right and one on the left in Jesus’s kingdom. They want political power. But Jesus goes on to say,
25You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—28just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Matthew 20:25–28
Jesus is not recommending that his followers adopt the stance that makes them everybody’s doormat, useful only for other people to wipe their feet on (that is not the point), nor that they should deny any sort of authority when they are put in a position of authority (that is not the point). The problem is that in this world, when we gain authority, we start lording it over people. We start thinking that it is our due. But Jesus is the sort of God—he is the God who is there—who loves because he is that kind of God. His aim is to serve. He does not come to be fawned over but to serve, and to serve finally by giving his life a ransom for many. That is why he comes. For the first three centuries of the church’s history, ordinary Christians understood this very well, for they often depicted Jesus, with their own delicious irony, as the king who reigns from a cross.
That is the kind of kingdom over which he reigns, for he expects his followers to exercise authority in exactly that way.
There is the first irony: the man who is mocked as king is king.
2. The Man Who Is Utterly Powerless Is Transcendently Powerful (Matt. 27:32–40)
32As they were going out, they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and they forced him to carry the cross. 33They came to a place called Golgotha (which means “the place of the skull”). 34There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. 35When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots. 36And sitting down, they kept watch over him there. 37Above his head they placed the written charge against him: THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.
38Two rebels were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. 39Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads 40and saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!”
Matthew 27:32–40
Here is a horrible picture of the most abject weakness possible. When the sentence was passed, you were beaten again, and then you were forced to carry the crossbeam (the horizontal beam of the cross) on your shoulder out to the place of execution where the upright was already in the ground. There you were stripped and either nailed or tied to the crossbeam, which was then hoisted up and attached to the upright. You hung there not only in pain but in shame: when men and women were crucified, they were crucified naked.
In former times there had been occasions when the soldiers had left somebody hanging on a cross, and friends of the victim had actually managed to come along and take the person down. Victims had been known to survive. At this point in Roman history that wasn’t possible: it was now imperial policy to leave a group of four soldiers at the site to guard the body until the victim was unambiguously dead. And you pulled with your arms and you pushed with your legs to open up your chest cavity so that you could breathe, and the muscle spasms started so that you collapsed. But then you couldn’t breathe. So you pulled with your arms and you pushed with your legs so that you could breathe, and then the spasms started again and you collapsed. That could go on for hours, sometimes days, and the soldiers kept watch. If for any reason the soldiers wanted to finish you off a little faster (for example, because a special feast day was about to dawn), what they would do was smash your shin bones. Then you couldn’t push with your legs anymore, and you would suffocate in a few minutes.
At this point Jesus is as powerless as you can imagine. There is no way out. There is no hope. And he is so weak from his repeated beatings, he isn’t even strong enough to hoist the crossbeam on his shoulders and take it out to the place of execution. By trade a carpenter, Jesus is now so weak he cannot lift a piece of wood, so they have to conscript somebody else to do it for them, a man identified as Simon from Cyrene.
Then the mockery begins: “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!” (Matt. 27:40). Now where does this insult come from? It seems strange in our ears. But it too showed up in the trial—not the trial before Pilate but the trial before the high priest in the previous chapter (Matthew 26). Some had tried to make this part of the charge against Jesus. The reason it could, in theory, have been very dangerous, was this: the Roman Empire was a highly diverse place, religiously speaking, so one of the things that the Romans did to keep the peace among competing religions was make it a capital crime to desecrate a temple, any temple. If you desecrate a temple, any temple, then under Roman law you die. So if someone heard Jesus saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I’ll raise it again,” perhaps the first part of his utterance could be worked into conspiracy for a capital crime, that is, destroying a temple. Because the witnesses couldn’t get their stories straight, this charge actually went nowhere. Jesus was finally charged with treason, with setting himself up as king over against Caesar. Apparently, however, some who had heard this charge at the trial find it amusing. They look at Jesus in his most abject weakness, and they say, in effect, “So, big mouth—you’re so strong, aren’t you? You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days—look at you now, strong man!”
If you have ever helped build a house with Habitat for Humanity, you know that with a decent foundation laid, a lot of planning, a good engineer, a certain amount of pre-fab, and forty strong-backed volunteers, you can put up a small house in a day. But you could not put up one of the temples in the ancient world in a day. In fact, you could not put up one of the cathedrals in Europe in a lifetime. Not one of the original architects of the great cathedrals in Europe ever saw the finished product. It took more than one lifetime to build one. In Jesus’s day, just the current beautification project of the temple in Jerusalem had already been going on for forty-six years. Moreover, by Jewish law you were not allowed to hammer a stone within hearing distance of the temple. All those stones had to be measured, cut, brought in, and set in place without hydraulics. No wonder the temple took a long time to build. Yet Jesus did say, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I’ll build it again” (see John 2:19). When the mockers hurl Jesus’s words back in his face, they think they are using irony to be funny. When they say, “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days,” they mean precisely the opposite: he can do nothing of the kind. He is in fact hopelessly weak, dying, and damned on a cross.
But Matthew knows, and God knows, and the readers know, that by this death and the resurrection around the corner Jesus is destroying the temple and rising again. When early in his ministry Jesus used these words, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days” (John 2:19), his disciples did not have a clue what he was talking about. They probably muttered under their breath, “Jesus is saying something deep again, very mysterious.” But then John comments, “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken” (John 2:22).
The point is that the temple in the Old Testament was the great meeting place between God and human beings, as we have seen. It was the place of sacrifice. Now Jesus, referring to his own body, says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” He means that by the destruction of his own life and its resurrection, he becomes the great meeting place between God and human beings. By rising again after his death, he becomes the great temple with all the power that is required to bring someone back from the dead. The great meeting place between God and human beings is no longer a building in Jerusalem with its sacrificial system. It is Jesus himself.
Thus, while the mockers think their mockery is cast in humorous irony, we cannot help but see an even deeper irony, for the man who is utterly powerless is in fact powerful. He is the temple of the living God.
3. The Man Who Can’t Save Himself Saves Others (Matt. 27:41–42)
The mockery continues: “In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. ‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he can’t save himself! He’s the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him’” (Matt. 27:41–42).
What do we mean by the verb “to save”? What does it mean on the streets of Minneapolis or Chicago or London? It depends who is using it. If you are a banker, saving is something that we are supposed to do (if the market does not wipe it all out) to protect our investments and prepare for retirement. If you are gifted in sports, saving is what the goalie does to stop a goal, whether in soccer or ice hockey. If you are a geek, saving is what you are supposed to do so that you do not lose too much data if your hard drive crashes. So we use the verb “to save” in a variety of different contexts, don’t we? What does Matthew mean?
We had a glimpse of the answer three chapters back. When Joseph is told that Mary is pregnant, he is told that he must give the baby “the name Jesus [Yahweh saves], because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21, emphasis added). “Saving” in Matthew’s Gospel means saving people from their sin: from its guilt, consequences, eternal effects, and power in this life. That is why Jesus came. Even when Jesus “saves” people by healing them, this is a function of his determination to save his people from their sin, including the temporal effects in this life (see Matt. 8:14–17).
But now the mockers are chanting, “He saved others”—that is, he helped them, he cured them, he was such a good savior. “But he can’t save himself!” In other words, “Look at him. He is completely shackled; he is completely tied down. There is no way he can save himself, which shows that he is not much of a savior at all.” So when they say, “He saved others,” again they mean with cheap irony, “He is no savior to be respected at all.”
But Matthew knows, and God knows, and the readers know, that it is by staying on that cross that he saves others. Strictly speaking, he cannot save himself and save others. If he saves himself, he will not be able to save others. When they say, “He can’t save himself,” they mean that he is so attached to the cross, so nailed to the cross, that physically he cannot get down. But Matthew knows that he could get down. He could still call his twelve legions of angels. But he cannot save himself if he is to save others because the very purpose of his hanging on that cross is to bear my sin in his own body on the tree. If he does save himself, I am damned. It is only by not saving himself that he saves me.
So once again, there is a deeper irony hidden behind the mocking irony of the mockers. Unlike what the critics thought, their words are true. He saved others; he can’t save himself.
I suspect that part of the reason that we have initial trouble absorbing this is that we live at a time in Western culture where a lot of conduct is constrained by force of law or just by force. In other words, we do not have much place left for a kind of internal moral imperative.
Did you see the film Titanic when it came out? As the great ship is going down, people are scrambling for the lifeboats, of which there are too few. There are a lot of well-to-do men on the boat, and they start scrambling and shoving the women and children aside so that they can reserve their own places. The sailors pull out handguns and fire in the air and say, “Women and children—the boats are for women and children.” Historically, of course, that is rubbish. There were numerous wealthy men on that boat. John Jacob Astor was there, the Bill Gates of 1912, the richest man. He got his wife to the boat, and when others said to him, “You get in too, sir,” he said, “No, this is for women and children,” and he stepped back and drowned. Benjamin Guggenheim was there. He was pulled apart from his wife and yelled to someone between, “Tell my wife that Guggenheim knows his duty.” Guggenheim stepped back and then drowned. She was saved. Despite the fact that in third class many people were locked down, there was not a single report of wealthy men on deck scrambling to save themselves by jeopardizing women and children. Isn’t that stunning? When Fareed Zakaria commented on this in a New York Times article,[2] he brought to mind the obvious question: Why did the producer and director distort history and say what isn’t true? Why didn’t they tell the truth about what happened at this point? Zakaria’s answer to this question: because if they had told the truth today, nobody would have believed them. For at the time there was still enough of a culture of chivalry, often fed by Christian self-denial for the sake of others, that an internal moral imperative drove many men, out of resources from within themselves, to do something self-sacrificial for others.
That is what drove Jesus supremely: he came to do his Father’s will, and his Father’s will is that he should sacrifice himself for all those who in grace would believe. To a lesser degree, that is the way Christian motivation must operate in us once we become Christians, followers of Jesus. We are changed by the new birth; we are strengthened by the Holy Spirit living and working within us. There is an internal moral imperative, a transformation of heart—doubtless not more than a pale reflection of Jesus, but in the same line, wanting to sacrifice for the sake of others.
4. The Man Who Cries Out in Despair Trusts God (Matt. 27:43–51)
The people are still mocking:
43“He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” 44In the same way the rebels who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him.
45From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. 46About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
47When some of those standing there heard this, they said, “He’s calling Elijah.”
48Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink. 49The rest said, “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.”
50And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
Matthew 27:43–50
So is Jesus actually giving up at this point, caught up in the web of miserable circumstances, drowning in despair? Is that the message we are to learn? “Push me far enough, and I too will collapse”? Oh, his cry is much deeper than that. Because of Jesus’s death, because of his willingness to stay there, in the very next verse beyond this paragraph, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom” (Matt. 27:51)—the veil of the temple that set off the very presence of God from the rest of the people. Then the Most Holy Place, where only the high priest could enter once a year, is exposed. The veil is torn apart as if to indicate that you and I—ordinary human beings without priestly pretensions—can actually get into the presence of God because Jesus’s sacrifice really has paid all the debt that the blood of bulls and goats could never ever pay for through the sacrifices we saw a few chapters back. Now Jesus dies, and in his cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he is crying in the bleakest, darkest, most pitiable despair, not because he does not know that he is doing his Father’s will but precisely because he does know that he is doing his Father’s will. He is trusting God, and that Father’s will is to bear my sin in his own body on the tree, absorbing the curse, discharging the debt, paying the guilt, and tearing the veil so that I can get into the Most Holy Place, into the very presence of the living God.
Can God Die?
I titled this chapter, in part, “The God Who Dies.” In some ways that title is a bit slippery, even potentially misleading. By and large the New Testament does not talk of God dying. It speaks of Jesus being the God-man, and it speaks of Jesus dying. Never is there a hint that the Father dies. Of course not: he is not a human being that he could die. Only the Son can die, only the “Word made flesh.” Jesus can die because he is a human being, a man. But if he is also confessed to be God and worshiped as God (see for example John 20:28), is there not a sense in which we may speak of God dying?
By and large the Bible avoids such choice of words. Once in a while, however, we find passages that come so close to this. When the apostle Paul gives a speech to some church elders from Ephesus, he says, “Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood” (Acts 20:28, emphasis added). Isn’t that remarkable? “God . . . with his own blood”? Now, of course, if pressed, Paul could parse that a bit. He could say, “Of course, the person I have in mind is not God the Father but the Son of God, Jesus, who is himself God, and because he is God and because he does give his life and shed his blood, therefore, it is appropriate to say that God sheds his blood.” If you want to unpack it, that is what Paul means.
Nevertheless, do not let the shock of the language stop you. This is God’s action in Christ Jesus, the man who is also God. This is not the death of one human individual and no more. It is a human individual who is also the living God who hangs on that cross, not because he is forced to do so by circumstance but because he is fulfilling in himself all of the strands of the Old Testament’s sacrificial system, the temple system—all the strands from the fall and the promise of the seed of the woman coming to crush the serpent’s head by his own death. Elsewhere Paul can write, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8, emphasis added). As the old hymn says,
Bearing sin and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned he stood.
Sealed my pardon with his blood!
Hallelujah, what a Savior!
Philip P. Bliss
It is appropriate to speak of the God who dies.
At the end of World War I, that bloodiest and most stupid of wars, several English poets (Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brook, one or two others) wrote some very moving poetry about the sheer savagery of the war. One of the minor poets was Edward Shillito, whose piece “Jesus of the Scars” deserves wide circulation. The poem ends by saying,
The other gods were strong, but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.[3]
So when we face the ravages of uncertainty, when there is suffering and agony in our lives or in the world, and we wonder what God is doing and we have no answers and we reread the book of Job (that piece of wisdom literature we saw in chapter 6) and we hear God saying through four chapters of rhetorical questions, “Be still, Job; there are many things you do not understand at all,” we can now actually add something more that we do understand:
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.
You can trust a God who not only is sovereign but bleeds for you. Sometimes when there are no other answers for your guilt or your fears or your uncertainties or your anguish, there is one immovable place on which to stand. It is the ground right in front of the cross.
The Resurrection
As important as the cross is, it is not the end of the story, for all of the New Testament writers focus equally on the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. The resurrection accounts are rich and diverse. There is no way they can be reduced to mass hallucination. Jesus appeared to many people many times over a period of forty days or so. He appeared to ones and twos; he appeared to as many as five hundred at a time; he appeared to the apostles more than once; he appeared in locked rooms; he appeared on the seashore and ate some fish that he was cooking for them. The witnesses multiply. He shows up when they are not expecting him, and he shows up when they are. He cannot be categorized or dismissed or domesticated. The resurrection appearances are simply too frequent, too diverse, and supported by too many witnesses. What do you do with them?
If you think that the early Christians made this up or were somehow hoodwinked or fell victims to mass psychology of some sort, it is hard to explain why they were willing to die for their faith. If the resurrection is a fairy story a bit like “Hansel and Gretel,” my question is, “How many have offered to die for Hansel and Gretel?” But the early Christians were willing to die for their conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead. They had seen him, touched him, handled him, eaten with him, after he had risen from the dead—and they were transformed by him. In fact, he promised them resurrection bodies of their own one day. They believed that he was Lord.
Why Doubt the Resurrection of Jesus? (John 20:24–28)
One of the most moving scenes describes what takes place on the second Sunday, the Sunday after the Sunday when Jesus rose from the dead. The first Sunday, resurrection Sunday, Jesus appeared to some women, to Peter and John, to a couple walking to the little town of Emmaus, and to ten of the apostles. Now on the second Sunday, we read these words:
24Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
John 20:24–25
This is the kind of doubt that springs from hurt. He did not want to be duped. He had believed that Jesus was the Messiah, and then Jesus had died. That made no sense. He was lonely and scared. He was still a pious, Jewish monotheist, but he had been snookered (he thought) once and now he wasn’t going to talk himself into believing that Jesus was back after all. He was going to have to see for himself. He was not going to have an easy faith, just believing somebody else’s account. He wasn’t going to do that. In other words, he wanted to distinguish between faith and gullibility, so he therefore laid out the most extreme test he could imagine. He wanted to be sure that the body that went into the tomb was the same as the one that supposedly came out or had some sort of genuine, organic connection with it. So he specifies, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (20:25).
I chair The Gospel Coalition. Our executive director is a chap called Ben Peays. Ben is an identical twin, and when I say identical twin, I mean identical twin. They look alike generally, but also have the same little smirks and smiles and so on—they are spitting images of each other. I’m sure that if you know them well enough you can tell them apart; I can only barely do so, unless they are side by side. So last year when we had our council meeting, Ben was around, of course, but we did not tell anybody on the council that his brother was showing up too. So at one point in the council meeting I said, “Guys, I should tell you that our executive director has been working so hard with so much work to do we decided to clone him and get two of him.” And I pointed at the other one.
Maybe Jesus has a twin. Maybe he can pretend to come out of the tomb. Maybe he can be the new Jesus. But then where are the wounds—not only the wounds from the nails but the shaft that went up under his rib cage into the pericardium and pierced the flesh such that blood and water flowed out? Where are the wounds? “Unless I put my hands in his wounds, I will not believe.” That was the test.
26A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
28Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
John 20:26–28
On first reading Thomas’s response, one wonders why he says so much. Why doesn’t he simply say, “You are alive!” or “Oops, I was wrong” or something more modest? Why does he infer so much (“My Lord and my God!”) from the fact that Jesus is now alive? After all, some chapters earlier Lazarus had been raised from the dead, and nobody said to Lazarus after he was raised from the dead, “My Lord and my God!” So why is Thomas saying this to Jesus?
What you have to do is put yourself into the very account. Put yourself—so far as it is possible—in Thomas’s place. You have a whole week between the first reports of Jesus’s resurrection and the second appearance. The fellow apostles are coming along and saying, “We actually saw him. Peter saw him on his own. Peter and John saw the empty tomb. The two on the road to Emmaus saw him. Together we saw him—ten of us all at once. And then there are the reports of the women. We have all seen him.” So now all week long Thomas is saying, in effect:
Can’t be. I just can’t believe it. I know the tomb is empty, but who knows, a grave robber might have come. Maybe we got the wrong tomb; it was dark when they put him in. But supposing he is alive, what would that mean? Oh no, it can’t be. It doesn’t make any sense. But he did do some strange things in his life. I mean, after all, he said the very night that he was going to the cross, “Have I been with you such a long time, and have you not known me? He who has seen me has seen the Father” [see John 14:9]. And there was that strange utterance from Jesus sometime back where he said, “Before Abraham was born, I am” [John 8:58]. That’s more than just bad timing. Abraham has been dead for two millennia. Why didn’t he say, “Before Abraham was born, I was”? This would have been claiming some sort of preexistence, maybe—hard enough to believe. But still, that’s just preexistence. But “Before Abraham was born, I am”? That’s taking the name of God!
What do you do with passages like that? All during the years of Jesus’s ministry, when Jesus said things that were hard to understand, doubtless his disciples scratched their heads, smiled devotedly, and thought, “More mystery. Maybe we’ll understand it someday.” They could remember that Jesus had insisted that it was the Father’s determination that all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father (see John 5:23). You do not say that about a mere human being.
Maybe Thomas during that week before the second Sunday had also thought through some Old Testament texts a bit more, in the light of the claims that Jesus had risen from the dead. And then, of course, historically speaking, the other New Testament Gospels report other instances in which he had opportunity to observe Jesus. I shall mention one.
Only the Offended Party Can Forgive
There’s a spectacular account in two other Gospels (not in John) where Jesus is preaching in a packed house—no chairs, people are just packed in. By this time Jesus has quite a reputation as a preacher and teacher but also as a healer. Four men bring along a paralyzed friend. He cannot walk, so he is brought on some sort of pallet. The four bearers try to get into the house where Jesus is preaching and simply cannot get in. People are saying, “Hush, hush, the master is preaching. Wait your turn. He’s busy. Don’t bother him.” But the four men with their litter will not be stopped. So they go up the outside stairs (many houses had outside stairs in those days because people would cool down in the evening on the flat roofs with the breezes wafting over the city of Jerusalem). Reaching the flat roof, they listen carefully for where Jesus is speaking. They find the right area and start taking off the tiles. Then they lower their friend down on ropes in front of Jesus. If the crowd will not make room for him through the doorway, they will make room for him because a bed is coming down on their heads. Then this bed and its paralyzed man is in front of Jesus, and Jesus says, “Son, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5).
Theologians who are present are indignant. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7). That’s a good observation, isn’t it?
Supposing, God forbid, that on your next trip to work you are brutally attacked by a gang of thugs. You are viciously beaten up, left half dead, maybe gang-raped. Emergency services take you to a hospital, and I go and visit you two days from now. You are bandaged up with your legs on pulleys. You can barely talk. And I say to you, “You know, you can be glad, for I found the thugs, and I have forgiven them.” What would you say to me? Wouldn’t you be outraged? “Who do you think you are? You’re not the one who was gang-raped! You’re not the one lying in the hospital! How can you possibly forgive them? The only person who can forgive is the offended party. Only the offended party can forgive.”
At the end of World War II, a Jew by the name of Simon Wiesenthal was still clinging to life in Auschwitz, even after all of his extended family had been wiped out. At this juncture he was only weeks away from the end of the terror and horror of Auschwitz: the Russians were moving in from the East. Wiesenthal was in a work party when suddenly he was pulled out by the German guards and shoved into a room. There was a young German Nazi soldier there—maybe nineteen years old. He had suffered grievous wounds and was clearly going to die. Before he died he wanted to talk to a Jew. In God’s peculiar providence, the Jew who was pulled out of the line and shoved into that room was Simon Wiesenthal. The young Nazi explained why he wanted to see him. Gasping for breath, not long to live, he acknowledged that the Nazis had treated the Jews horribly and that he himself had been engaged in horrible things. Now he wanted the Jews’ forgiveness.
Wiesenthal was quietly reasoning it out in his mind. He later wrote up his reflections in a little book called The Sunflower. Most of the pages of that short book describe what flashed through Wiesenthal’s mind. The reasoning is this: Who can forgive but those who have been offended? The most offended parties of the Holocaust are dead. In Auschwitz they have already been burned in the ovens. How can a survivor like Wiesenthal pronounce forgiveness on behalf of those who died? How can he speak for the dead? If the most brutalized victims of the Nazis are dead, then there is no one qualified to pronounce forgiveness, so there is no forgiveness for the Nazis. Without saying a single word, Wiesenthal listened to the young man, then turned and walked out of the room.
After the war was over and he had written his little book, Wiesenthal sent it to ethicists all around the world—Christian and Jewish, various backgrounds—and asked them to answer the question, “Did I do what was right?” He kicked off a furious exchange among ethicists all over the world.
Wiesenthal almost got it right. He was surely right to insist that only the offended party can forgive. That is right. But according to the Bible, the most offended party is always God. That is what David understood when he dared to write, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Ps. 51:4).[4]
Now this young paralytic is lowered before Jesus—a young man who has not offended Jesus in the flesh, not man-to-man, person-to-person—and Jesus looks at him and says, “Your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5). The theologians ask, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7).
Just so. And Thomas remembered that too. Combined with all the other memories of what Jesus had said and done, combined with all his reflections on the Old Testament Scriptures, he came to the only reasonable conclusion: Jesus is not only a resurrected man—miracle enough!—but somehow, incredibly, wonderfully, he is God, with all of God’s right to forgive sins. And he bowed before the resurrected Jesus and said, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).
That is what each of us must do: recognize that what Jesus has accomplished on the cross was suffering for the sake of his own people who put their faith in him, who recognize that what he bore was their sin. As the God-man, only he can forgive. We must have his forgiveness to be reconciled to God. We must have it. Then we bow before him and cry with joy and thankfulness, with mystery, adoration, and awe, “My Lord and my God.”
Concluding Prayer
We rejoice, heavenly Father, in the truth that Jesus rose from the dead. Yet we begin to see that this is not simply a truth in the public arena of history to be absorbed quickly and then set to one side. For if indeed your dear Son, the God-man, rose from the dead, then everything is changed. His victory over death is confirmed. The sacrifice he provided has been vindicated. Already he is the head of a new humanity that will one day share in his resurrection-likeness. And his people, heavenly Father, rejoice to bow before him and cry, “My Lord and my God.” Grant that each one who reads these pages may cry, “Forgive my sin as you forgave the sin of that paralyzed man, my Lord and my God.” In Jesus’s name, Amen.