March 2, 2008 Sermon

One Man for All the People
John 18:1-14

Addition by subtraction.  Somebody in a position of power decides to get rid of a troublemaker.  It happens on sports teams.  Casey Stengel managed the New York Yankees to five straight World Series titles in the 1950’s.  When asked for the secret of his success he answered, “On every team there’s five guys that love me and five guys that hate me.  My secret is I keep the guys who love me away from the guys who hate me.”  Stengel meant this.  He traded players away if their attitudes threatened his team.  More than once he got rid even of stars.  Addition by subtraction happens in the business world when bad apples get fired despite solid performance on the technical aspects of their jobs.  It happens in the President’s cabinet, families, college administrations and street gangs. 

Addition by subtraction is what the chief priests and Pharisees thought they were doing with Jesus.  They had identified him as a troublemaker.  He went out of his way to stir up the masses.  He publicly denounced the religious authorities even in Jerusalem, their home court.  His rhetoric sounded like a call to the people to overthrow, well, them.  And mobs followed him, hanging on his every word.  Just a couple of days before the events of our passage took place, Jesus had made a disturbingly odd yet strangely triumphant entrance into the city.  They decided the time had come to kill him.  As Caiaphas, that year’s High Priest, put it, it was better for one man to die for the people. 

Of course, Jesus had every intention of dying for the people.  But his purpose in doing so could not have differed from theirs more completely.  They feared his power to sway the people.  He meant to relinquish his power completely.  They saw him as a rebel who might cause their nation to rise up and bring the wrath of their Roman masters down on their heads.  He counseled the people to pay their taxes.  They believed they were his primary target.  He had no use for them, but his “target” was far higher and more eternal: the salvation of humanity.  Ironically, all agreed on the means by which they could achieve their disparate goals: his death.

In a word, Jesus’ death was an act of atonement.  His death restored the relationship between us and God, a relationship scarred by our sin.  Our sin, our disobedience to the will of God, distances us from God.  But Jesus died to bridge that distance.  He put us at one with God again.  Jesus died for all.  Because he did, we can have abundant life.  Jesus atoned.  We live. 

Understanding Jesus’ atonement comes easier when we know more of his story.  His great sacrificial death came not at the start, but someplace in the middle, of God’s planned plot for the history of creation.  The Gospel of John takes two chapters to tell the story of Jesus arrest, conviction and execution.  A feeling of inevitability, a mood of doom, pervades these pages.  Jesus’ every move seems preordained.  He knows who will do what, when and why.  He knows the excruciating pain he will endure, yet he keeps walking toward the cross.  (And excruciating is precisely the right word.  It literally means pain caused by crucifixion.) 

Our chapter opens with Jesus and his followers walking out of the Old City of Jerusalem, down the steep slopes of the Temple Mount, across a dry streambed, and up the equally steep Mount of Olives.  They enter a park.  Night has fallen.  The hours blend from Thursday to Friday.  Judas reappears (earlier he had slunk away from the little group) at the head of a motley crew.  John makes it clear that Romans and Jews make up this posse.  They approach with “lanterns, torches and weapons.”  Can you see them advancing through the darkness?

Jesus plays his mandatory part.  He asks whom these night raiders seek.  They name him, and he claims his name.  Twice he identifies himself, the second time John alone among the four Gospel authors tells us, after his would-be captors have fallen in terror on the ground.  He must urge them to have the guts to do what they came to do, as though if he did not take care of every detail himself the job would never get done.  He asks that his followers be permitted to go.  He cites this as evidence of the truth of his previous predictions that he would not lose a single soul that God the Father had placed in his care.  Simon Peter tries to defend his master.  He draws his one sword against the many that entered the garden with the arresting party and cuts off the high priest’s slave’s ear.  But Jesus nips this fight in the bud.

John gives us repeated clues to the preordained nature of these events.  Judas knew where to find them.  Jesus is depicted as “knowing all that was to happen to him.”  He repeats his own prophecy that he would not lose a single soul entrusted to his care.  And he concludes this macabre dance with the question, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”  In other words, “Am I not destined to follow the script that God wrote for me before time began?”

Our verses conclude with Jesus bound and forced into the presence of Annas, the father-in-law of the high priest.  His son-in-law was Caiaphas, the one and the same man who had “advised the Jews that it was better to have one man die for the people.”  Now, finally, we come to the point of the whole exercise.  Jesus must indeed die for the people.  He must atone for them.  He must take their sins upon himself and carry them into the grave.  He must voluntarily forfeit his godly power and die for people who do not deserve it: people like Peter, James, John and maybe even Judas; people like you and me.

Atonement is enjoying a brief little boom.  A well-regarded current movie carries that single word as its title.  But atonement is something of a foreign concept to us.  The idea that an innocent person might willingly pay a penalty to restore broken relationships does not seem realistic to our jaded minds.  Quite the opposite: the sentencing hearing, when the family of a victim gets to make an appeal for revenge on the criminal convicted of harming their loved one, has become popular public theater.  We want somebody to pay for every wrong.  And we want that somebody not to be us.  But the Gospel, the Good News, depends on atonement.  Without it, the story of Jesus would remain incomplete and we would have no hope for life: abundant life in this world, and eternal life in the world to come.

Atonement means being put at one, having a broken relationship restored through an act of sacrificial love.  We can atone, partially, for our sins.  We start by confessing them.  We continue by praying for repentance, for the power to turn our lives away from our sins and into new, more Christlike, directions.

But ultimately our relationship with God relies on the atonement Jesus Christ made for us, once and for all, on the cross.  As we approach Easter it would deepen our joy in the resurrection of Christ if we took an honest look at why he had to die in the first place.  Jesus died so we might live.  Jesus atoned for our sins. 

People will say that they cannot understand how a God of love could set up such a bloody and brutal system.  Why would Jesus have to atone on the cross?  I do not pretend to know the whole answer, but this much I do know: Jesus’ love, as proven by his willingness to die for me, is sometimes about the only thing that keeps my faith alive.  I praise God for his love.  I thank God for his mercy.  I ask God to forgive my sins.  I rejoice in my belief that he already has, in Christ.