Our Suffering Savior

Hebrews 2:10-13

A couple of summers ago, when Sterling was home for the summer, he and I watched all of the Marvel Universe movies together, one movie per night. You can find chronological sequencing lists on line. They differ a little, but we picked one and stuck with it and watch every Marvel movie that had been released at the time. The movies feature Marvel comic superheroes like Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Spider-Man, Deadpool, Black Panther, Ant Man, Captain Marvel, Thor, and Wolverine. And Marvel movie fans here?

The plots are simple enough. Evil exists in the universe … in both the human heart and in superhuman forces of evil. Humanity is in trouble, and is powerless to save itself. We need a rescuer and, in the Marvel universe, genetically or technologically altered individuals (with a couple of notable non-human exceptions) who can do things that normal humans can’t come along or are developed to save the day.

Evil exists. Pain and suffering happen. Humanity is in trouble. Humanity cannot save itself. A savior is needed. Sound familiar? It’s the story of human history. We’re drawn to it in movie theaters because it is our story. Unfortunately, in the deep recesses of our minds and hearts, we tend to reject our need for a savior. We are convinced that if we can just do enough good, be good enough, we can save ourselves. In the theater, we laugh at the feeble attempts of humanity to save itself. But as soon as we leave, and our eyes adjust to the light again, and we re-enter the real world, we go right back to insisting that we can do it ourselves. We can pull ourselves up by our boot straps. But the truth is … we can’t.

We need a Savior. And we’ll embrace any fictional savior, while rejecting the real one God has provided. Turn with me to Hebrews 2:10-13.

In his classic book on the subject of suffering, “Where is God When it Hurts?” author Philip Yancy says this:

After an extensive tour of the United States, the well-known German pastor and theologian Helmut Thielicke was asked what he had observed as the greatest deficiency among American Christians. He replied, “They have an inadequate view of suffering.” I have come to agree with him.

That deficiency stands out as a huge blemish to the non-Christian world. I’ve asked college students what they have against Christianity, and most of them echo variations on the theme of suffering: “I can’t believe in a God who would allow Auschwitz and Cambodia”; “My teenage sister died of leukemia despite all the Christians’ prayers”; “One-third of the world went to bed hungry last night – how can you reconcile that with Christian love?”

No other human experience provokes such an urgent response. No one sits in smoky coffeehouses late into the night debating the cosmic implications of the sense of smell or taste. Smell! Why this strange sensation? What did God intend? Why was scent apportioned so capriciously, lavished on roses but not on oxygen?  And why must humankind get by with one-eighth the sensory ability of the dog?  Oddly, I hear no one debating “the problem of pleasure,” why do we take for granted sensations of pleasure but react so violently against pain?

And that is exactly what we do. If you’ve ever experienced severe pain of any kind, physical pain, emotional pain, you know that we’ll do anything we can to get away from it, to get out from under its deadly, fear-invoking grasp. Because of that, we have a tendency to ignore the pain, the suffering, the terror of the cross of Christ and skip right ahead to the victory of Easter morning. We like empty tombs. We don’t like bloody crosses. And yet it was on the cross that Jesus paid the penalty for your sin, and mine.

This morning, let us focus on the cross, for it is only at the foot of the cross that we can truly GRASP the GREATNESS of God. We wear them around our necks. We put them on our cars. Let’s stand in wonder at the foot of the cross this morning.

The writer of Hebrews makes it clear that God, and God alone, is the author of our salvation. It is by God’s initiative that Christ’s death effectively accomplished God’s goal … our salvation. God is the one at work here.

And he is the one “for whom and by whom all things exist.” One of my favorite things to do on a warm midsummer’s night is to go outside late to bring the horses in, and then turn the barn lights off. We live out in the country, so our “neighborhood” is generally dark. We have very little light pollution. And I love to gaze up on a clear night and take in the beauty of the night sky with millions of pinpricks of light, some of those pinpricks not stars themselves but entire galaxies containing millions and millions of stars, so far away that they come to us as a single point of light in the night sky.

And God brought all of this into being, physicists tell us with explosive power, by the power of his word. But the Psalmist adds an interesting element to God’s creative effort. In Psalm 8:3, David calls the heavens “the work of God’s fingers.” In other words, God didn’t have to stress and strain to bring all that is into being. As majestic, as massive, as awesome as the cosmos is, so massive that if we could travel at the speed of light, which we can’t, for millions of years we couldn’t reach the end of it, we don’t even come close to seeing a real display of the power and might and glory of God.

To see the true might, and power, and strength, and glory of God we have to look not at the glory of creation but at the glory of the cross. Creation may be called the work of God’s fingers, but our salvation, achieved on the cross of Christ, was called by the prophet Isaiah the work of God’s strong arm. Isaiah 52:10 says, “The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.” The majesty of creation was nothing for God.

To GRASP the GREATNESS of God we look not to his first creating word, but to his final, saving word … Jesus Christ, the one St. John calls THE Word. So many modern conceptions of salvation, even within some arms of the Christian church, begin not with the wisdom and power of God but with that which makes sense to our human minds, with that which resonates with our human desires. We try to create human answers to problems only God can solve, and every answer we come up with brings with it new problems which we then try to solve. Christ’s saving death on a bloody cross was not born in the mind of human beings. It was born in the wisdom, greatness, glory and in the mighty strength of God, the one for whom and by whom all things exist.

The Creator and Lord became fully human. The limitless one existed in time and space with limits. Max Lucado, in his book God Came Near, says this:

Angels watched as Mary changed God’s diaper. The universe watched with wonder as The Almighty learned to walk. Children played in the streets with him. And had the synagogue leader in Nazareth known who was listening to his sermons …

Jesus may have had pimples. He may have been tone-deaf. Perhaps a girls down the street had a crush on him or vice-versa. It could be that his knees were bony. One thing’s for sure: He was, while completely divine, completely human.

For thirty three years he would feel everything you and I have ever felt. He felt weak. He grew weary. He was afraid of failure. He was susceptible to wooing women. He got colds, burped, and had body odor. His feelings got hurt. His feet got tired. And his head ached.

To think of Jesus in such a light is – well, it seems almost irreverent, doesn’t it. It’s not something we like to do; it’s uncomfortable. It is much easier to keep the humanity out of the incarnation. Clean the manure from around the manger. Wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Pretend he never snored or blew his nose or hit his thumb with a hammer.

As we gaze at the cross on which Jesus – fully human and yet still fully God – died, we begin to truly GRASP the GREATNESS of God.

We also PROCLAIM the PERFECTION of Christ. The writer of Hebrews, in the second part of this verse, tells us first of all that Christ is the founder of our salvation. The word translated as “founder” has been translated in many different ways. In this verse, depending on the translation, Christ has been called the leader, the author, the founder, and the hero of our salvation.

The three most common words used are captain, champion, and pioneer of our salvation. All contain within them the idea of being a trailblazer. Jesus is the divine hero in God’s salvation story, the divine pioneer of God’s salvation. In Isaiah 9, the prophet gives four names which would be true of the Messiah: wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, and prince of peace. The second of those names, mighty God literally means “mighty hero God,” and that is exactly the picture of Christ that appears here in Hebrews. He IS our mighty, hero, salvation-pioneering God.

This verse also says that God “perfected” Christ through the suffering of the cross. What does that mean? Wasn’t Christ already perfect? Yes! We aren’t talking about moral perfection here. It was his suffering that made him the perfect pioneer of our salvation. Scripture tells us that we as humans are created in the image of God. But when Christ became human, he took on the image of man. One author has said that “In Jesus the centerpiece of the human race, the wild tangent of all the frayed and decrepit flesh of this fallen old world touches perfectly the circle of eternity.”

Perfection here doesn’t mean so much morally without error, although we know that describes Christ as well, so much as it does “fully adequate” … perfectly suited to do the job. His obedience to the will of the triune God in accepting human limitation in the incarnation, and human suffering on the cross, made him the perfectly suited pioneering hero of our salvation. He is the perfect savior. No other savior is needed. No other will suffice. As we gaze at the cross, we PROCLAIM the PERFECTION of Christ, the only one suited to do what needed to be done to forgive our sin and restore us to relationship with God.

Jesus knows what it means to suffer. He knows what it means to be afraid, to feel abandoned by God. Think about that for a minute, in Jesus, God knows what it feels like to feel abandoned by God. To feel truly alone in this world, suffering unseen and unheard, like your prayers are hitting the ceiling and crashing back down to earth rather than traveling into the presence of a loving God. Jesus didn’t just suffer for us. He suffered with us. He gets it. He understands. He knows. He knows the power of temptation, and he knows what it feels like to suffer. He gets it. He gets us. He is the perfect bridge between God and us.

And lastly, as we gaze at the cross tonight, we DIVE into our DESTINY. The writer of Hebrews tells us that made perfect in suffering, perfectly fitting as the way of salvation for a great and mighty God, Jesus Christ will bring many sons and daughters to glory. This phrase pictures a long family processional winding through life and moving toward glory. Two things are promised to us here. The first is certainty.

We are all “sons.” The word “sons” was chosen here for a reason, and it has nothing to do with maleness. The concept of sonship in the ancient world was one of certain inheritance in the future. When the father passed away, all that he had and was, was passed on to his sons. Throughout the New Testament we are called sons and daughters of God, adopted into the family of God and therefore receiving all of the rights and benefits of our brother, our hero, and the pioneer of our faith – Jesus Christ. Because of Jesus Christ, we have certainty, something we can bank on, someone we know is and will always be there.

We are also promised that God will bring us to glory. Regardless of what we face in this life, our lives have a rewarding conclusion. As important as our activities in daily life are, and Scripture is clear that our lives are important, we are moving toward something even greater, something the writers of old simply called “glory.”

St. John gives us perhaps the most beautiful description of glory as that time and place when “The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” As we gaze on the cross tonight, we have the opportunity to GRASP the GREATNESS of God, to PROCLAIM the PERFECTION of Christ, and to DIVE into our DESTINY with Christ.

Author Henri Nouwen tells the story of a family he knew in Paraguay. The father, a doctor, spoke out against the military regime there and its human rights abuses. Local police took their revenge on him by arresting his teenage son and torturing him to death. Enraged townsfolk wanted to turn the boy’s funeral into a huge protest march, but the doctor chose another means of protest. At the funeral, the father displayed his son’s body as he had found it in the jail – naked, scarred from electric shocks and cigarette burns, and beatings.

All the villagers filed past the corpse, which lay not in a coffin but on the blood-soaked mattress from the prison. It was the strongest protest imaginable, for it put injustice on grotesque display.

Isn’t that what God did at Calvary? … The cross that held Jesus’ body, naked and marked with scars, exposed all the violence and injustice of this world. At once, the cross revealed what kind of world we have and what kind of God we have: a world of gross unfairness, a God of sacrificial love.

Christ, the Lord of Life, has become the suffering savior. Let’s pray.