Preached at Silverton Friends Church, November 10, 2024
Last time I was here, I talked about the Law being crucified with Jesus. I made the point that human behavior is no surprise to God, that God in the moment of creation knew that the crucifixion was necessary. I mentioned that God not only created but intervenes in creation, and not in a particularly predictable way. I also want to repeat the point that God exists outside of time; this means all times are present to God, the crucifixion is continually visible to God.
This eternal present of God helps us understand why, even though God warned Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because “in the day you eat of it you will die,” the story goes on for Adam and he dies physically much later. To God, the death is present in God’s now, as is every death of every creature. There was and is only one remedy, and Jesus is that remedy.
Likewise, in God’s now the resurrection of Jesus is always present. In this stunning event, a body entering decay was raised from the dead and united with the spirit of that person for eternity, a new body that cannot decay and is glorified in ways we can only guess from the resurrection—recognizable by scars and mannerisms and relationships, that can eat our food, but also can walk through locked doors and materialize at will. The Bible teaches us that this is our destiny as well, because we have died with Christ.
St. Paul tries to explain the cosmic proportions of the resurrection in Romans.
Adam is a prefiguring of Jesus Christ in his effect on those who came after.
And if Adam involved all humanity in sin and death, how much more does Jesus involve all humanity in the grace of God. Adam’s trespass brought a condemning judgment, but Jesus’s free gift brings many trespasses into favorable judgment.
Just as through one human, sin, error, trespass, disobedience came into the harmony of the cosmos, with sin came death, and death passed through all humans because all sinned—to repeat: if by one man, Adam, death ruled over humanity, how much more will life gain the upper hand, and people will receive abundance of grace and the gift of being set right with God and will reign in life by the one man, Jesus.
Therefore, as by the disobedience of one man all were condemned, so now by the obedience of one man all are set right with God and brought into life.
So just as sin has ruled through death, even more grace rules because grace makes people who they are meant to be even into eternal life.
So in our history, the crucifixion is a one-time miracle that redeems us from sin and death. But in God’s eternal now, Jesus is dying on the cross.
At the same time, if we can call it time, Jesus is harrowing hell, and leading the powers and principalities as captives, and rising triumphant over sin and death. Jesus is redeeming us in the eternal now. If it is possible to imagine, there is no past and present in God’s now.
So how is it that Jesus accomplished this redemption? He includes us, God includes us, in the crucifixion, and in the resurrection. Jesus didn’t only die for us, he died with us.
Rom 6:4, 5
For if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.
Paul writes the following in Galatians.
Gal 2:16-21 We are justified by the faithfulness of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faithfulness of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law.
As a Christian I want to find out what it means in my mortal body and time to be crucified with Christ so that it is no longer I who live but Christ in me. I have been a Christian since childhood, and my commitment to God has become more complete as I have increasingly understood God’s commitment to me. Significant milestones included having several experiences that made the crucifixion vivid to me; finding that my sense of who I am was almost totally wrong and allowing God to rebuild me as God sees fit; realizing that just as the glory of God is most clearly revealed through the visible wounds of the risen Jesus, so it is revealed in my own brokenness more than in my strengths; understanding that God is closer to me than the air I breathe and more necessary to my continued existence; realizing that God does the loving of God’s own free will and nature, not because I am so lovable.
I’ve had at least one spiritual experience that depends on this eternal now of God. I recovered memories of abuse and the misery of despair and grief and self-blame and aloneness that inhabits that experience came along with the flashbacks. I went to my friends, Howard and Margi Macy, and asked them to pray for healing of my memories. In this instance, they invited me to remember as vividly as I could bear, and as they prayed, I felt in my whole self that Jesus entered into my body for that experience to bear it with me. This memory is as vivid as any I recovered. I was able to know experimentally that the Jesus on the cross enters entirely into human suffering and feels it with us, whether we can see that or not. But seeing this truth personally healed the feeling of being alone and abandoned to misery. I came out of that saying to myself, “I am crucified with Christ, which also means Christ is crucified with me.” And I heard more in Jesus’s statement that what we do to the least of these we do to him. This is not a figurative statement.
Because I cannot deny the eternal redeeming work that is God’s now and also in our now, though for us sequentially, I listen for and try to obey the promptings of the Holy Spirit; this is often humbling and healing. I pray in order to get to know God. I read the Gospels to get to know Jesus better. One of the best things I ever did for my faith was to read Mark three times in three weekends and fall in love with Jesus.
Julian of Norwich lived in the 1300s, the century of Black Death, which carried away 2/3 of Europe’s population. In Norwich, she would have known about the Peasants Revolt in 1381, not least because the Bishop of Norwich led armed forces against the peasants’ army, caught and executed one of the leaders on his own authority. This makes fascinating Wikipedia reading, especially if placed in comparison to our own attempted revolt in 2021 and the ensuing unrest and now election of that party. And she would have known about the burning of followers of John Wycliffe, who translated the Bible into English. These folks were derogatorily called Lollards, and the Catholic Church considered them heretics. The Bishop of Norwich was keen to keep this heresy down, perhaps because they argued that people in positions of religious authority should not also hold positions of power in the government. And Julian, despite living alone in a two room cell off the church building, was often sought out for spiritual guidance, so would have counseled many folks whose lives were disrupted by disease, revolution, and religious persecution.
So we can listen well to her when she says that Jesus said to her, “iI is true that sin is the cause of all this pain, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” This was said so tenderly, without blame of any kind toward me or anybody else. . . .
…our Lord showed two ways of understanding his meaning. One was the bliss to which we are to be brought and how he wants us to rejoice in it. The other is the comfort of our present pain by our knowing that it will all be turned to honor and our gain by virtue of his passion; and we should know too that we never suffer alone but with him whom we should see as our ground; also when we see his own pains and his own emptying, this so far exceeds anything we might suffer as to pass beyond our understanding.
Beholding this much, we will be saved from grumbling or complaint in time of pain. And though we see truly that our sins deserve it, yet his love excuses us; and with his great courtesy, he does away with all our blame, beholding us with compassion and pity like children who are innocent whom he can never reject.” (pp. 55-57).
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