John 3:13-21; Galatians 3:10-14; Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12; Psalm 103
Christ’s Suffering as Payment and Sacrifice for Sin
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
There is truly only one commandment, the First Commandment: You shall have no other gods. To obey this commandment, to have the LORD as your first and only God, is to be blessed. To disobey this commandment is to be cursed. And to be cursed is to die, temporally and eternally. There is no other possibility, and no other possible outcome. You are either with the LORD and so are blessed, or you are against the LORD and so are cursed. When our First Parents rebelled against the LORD and disobeyed, they became cursed, just as the LORD had said, and their progeny and all creation along with them. There was no other possibility. The curse is death. The wages of sin is always and only death, spiritual death now, physical death still to come, and it would have been forever if not for Jesus.
Make no mistake, Jesus became a man because of the curse; Jesus became the curse for us, in our place. The wages of sin is always and only death, and cursed is everyone who hangs upon a tree. He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. In Christ crucified we see both the will of the Father and the love and obedience of the Son. “It was the will of the LORD to crush him.” When God the Father commanded his Son to humble himself to become a man, to suffer mockery, ridicule, spitting, scourging, crucifixion, and death at the hands of men, and the wrath and forsakenness of the Father, he wasn’t kidding. That is what it would take, and nothing less, the death of the Son of God, the death of God himself. Man, humankind, had committed the sin, had made himself subject to death; for man to die would merely pay the debt that was owed and would gain nothing. No, if man was to live, then God must die. God cannot die, but God become man can suffer and die, and that was the will of the Father for his Son. “It was the will of the LORD to crush him.”
In the catechism, concerning the second article of the Apostles’ Creed, we speak of Jesus’ humiliation: “He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” “It was the will of the LORD to crush him.” All this Jesus did willingly and obediently out of love for his Father. But it was humiliation, and it was suffering of the greatest intensity physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The cost of our redemption was impossibly high. Nothing less than the death of God himself could satisfy it. “It was the will of the LORD to crush him.”
“But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” “For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.”
Yes, becoming man was part of Jesus’ humiliation. Everything about his conception, birth, life, suffering, death, even his resurrection, was scandalous to our fallen reason, our misconceptions about virtue and glory, our denial of the seriousness of our sin and God’s wrath against it. And so, men rejected him. There was nothing special about the carpenter’s son from backwater Nazareth. Nothing to see here, move along. And when he was arrested, tried, scourged, mocked, and crucified, they concluded that he was only getting what he deserved from God and from men. They accused God of being a sinner. They accused God of being a blasphemer, when it was for they, when it was for we and our sins for which this happened, for which he was born, for which he suffered and died. Christ became cursed for us. Christ became our curse. “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us - for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.”
It was by a tree in the Garden that our Enemy first overcame us. So, it was by the tree of Jesus’ suffering, shame, and death that our Enemy was overcome. This is how God so loved the world: He gave his only Son over to suffering, shame, and death upon the cross. St. John compares this to Moses lifting up the bronze serpent in the wilderness. There, as in the Garden, and still today, there is truly only one commandment, the First Commandment: You shall have no other gods. In the wilderness, the children of Israel feared the Edomites more than they feared, loved, and trusted in the LORD and his promise to provide for them and protect them. Therefore, the LORD sent poisonous serpents to bite them, and many of the Israelites died. They cried out to the LORD that he should take away the snakes. The LORD did not take away the snakes, but he commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent and raise it up on a pole that anyone bitten might look upon the snake and live. The snakes still bit, but the LORD provided a way that those bitten need not die. No one wanted to look at a snake on a pole; it seemed absurd, ridiculous, pointless, offensive. But it wasn’t about the snake, or the pole, but it was about the Word of the LORD, his promise, his command, and their fear, love, trust, and obedience. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so was the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, lifted up on the tree of the cross “that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” “It was the will of the LORD to crush him.” Jesus became the curse for us that has set us free.
After their forty years wandering in the wilderness because of the rebellion, disobedience, and sins of their fathers, the children of Israel stood on the banks of the Jordan about to enter the promised land of Canaan. Moses set before the people once again the First Commandment: “Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you today; and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside from the way which I command you today, to go after other gods which you have not known.” Truly there is only one commandment: You shall have no other gods. To obey this commandment is to have the LORD as your first and only God and to be blessed. To disobey this commandment is to be cursed. Jesus became the curse for us, in our place. God has poured out all his wrath against our sin upon him. It is finished; there is nothing left.
In the + Name of Jesus. Amen.
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