Holy Tuesday
Sermon for Holy Tuesday Vespers–The Passion of St. Mark
The death of a man is not unique. All men die. And the death of a man on a cross is hardly unique. Thousands of men died this way. What makes the death of Jesus unique is that in His death, sin is being put to death, and the consequences of sin are heaped upon Jesus. The consequence for sin is separation from God. This is what Jesus experiences; it is why He cries, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”
This forsakenness, this separation from God, we have also experienced, although not in the full weight and totality that Jesus experienced. But that separation from God is what makes us lonely, sad, angry, envious, hungry, even though we rarely understand our own feelings. Without God, man dies; and man has a hunger, a yearning for God, that we seek to fill with so many other things that do not satisfy.
We are like our first parents-thieves and rebels; rebelling against God’s Word and will, and taking what is not ours. So Jesus is crucified between two thieves and rebels, who represent the whole human race. When Jesus dies, He dies for us but also with us.
And He also was truly buried, for us and also with us. So when we go to the cemetery to lay a loved one to rest, we should remember and be comforted that Jesus has already been there.
But there is grief for us in the cross, too. We should grieve not because we are sorry for Jesus, but because that cross declares to us, “This is what your sin means.” It is horrible and ugly, and we don’t really want to see it. We are accustomed to keeping Jesus away from the truly shameful parts of our lives; we feel we need to keep Jesus on a leash so He doesn’t follow us into the paces we want to go. We really do love our own lives, despite hearing from Jesus last evening, “Whoever loves his life will lose it.”
Jesus’ death calls us to our own – the death we call “repentance.” The life we would construct, the image we would project to the world, is prideful and needs to be not simply attenuated but obliterated. The cross condemns sin and sinners, and we must see ourselves on it, dying. That means things cannot be the same, life cannot be maintained according to that prideful image.
So observing Holy Week is us learning to say this: “As Jesus dies, I die too. Henceforth shall I know no life but that which comes from our dying together” [Nagel].
Jesus has died your death. Live each day in that death, and keep on dying, until the day comes when death shall be no more. That day is coming, and we will rejoice and be glad in it.
+INJ+
Portions adapted from the sermon for Good Friday in the book Selected Sermons of Norman Nagel.
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