Last Sunday's Sermon - The Broken Wall

THE BROKEN WALL
ROCKLAND DR. UNITED BAPTIST CHURCH
Mar. 25, 2007


The Big Language Barrier and the Death of Jesus

It can be tricky to find yourself hungry in a foreign country. If you’ve ever been somewhere the people don’t speak English and had a desire to stop and get a bite to eat, you’ll also know you had to come up with a way to communicate. It’s frustrating sometimes (and sometimes helps bring very interesting menu selections!) to have to work through a barrier like that when you’re hungry and know that the very thing you want and need is right at your fingertips… if only you understood the language.

I’m afraid the same problem faces us with the death of Jesus. The New Testament of course was written almost two thousand years ago, half the way around the world, but by the wonder of translation we are able to have reasonably good versions of the Bible that can help us understand fairly clearly what’s going on most of the time. We are good with straightforward language, a little worse with the more poetic parts.

When the writers talk about Jesus’ death, though, we find a whole host of metaphors waiting for us, ready to fill out a vast picture of the importance of that world-shaking event. We find all kinds of technical terms, words like sacrifice, propitiation, atonement, redemption, reconciliation, and so on. These words and ideas seem far away from the language of our everyday life, far away from our circumstances. We hear these words and think, “Uh-oh – I’m listening to a foreign language – Christian-ese – and I don’t really know what it might mean…but I should, right?”

Again we find ourselves with the sense of being so close to something so vital to our well-being, like the food in the foreign restaurant, but with a huge barrier of words obstructing our access.

We needn’t lose hope that we can at least get some grasp on some of these metaphors, and I hope that today we can get a grip on one of
them especially, one expression of what happened when Jesus died and what it meant for us as a people.

Israel’s Part

It’s important for us to remember before looking at our passage that the whole story of Jesus and its significance for us can’t be cut off from God’s original plan to bless the world through Israel. The promise to Abraham in Genesis 12 is the foundation for this, and remained in people’s minds down through the years. God’s promises to Abraham meant he had a mission for Israel to the whole world, which was unable to be faithfully completed (Romans 3:1-3, 7:7-10), and which came to fulfillment in Jesus the Messiah.

(By the way, this doesn’t at all mean God had one plan for Israel, and then when it failed He came up with another plan. Jesus is not Plan B after Israel was set on the back burner, the interim way of life before God puts Israel back front and center. Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of Plan A. He is the one everything was always pointing towards.)

The Scripture Text

The idea we’re going to look into a little bit is reconciliation, and for this we turn to Ephesians chapter 2, verses 11-18:

Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called "uncircumcised" by those who call themselves "the circumcision" (which is done in the body by human hands)— remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

The Wall Then and Now

There was a wall of hostility, Paul says, between Jew and Gentile.

In light of everything we’ve talked about, we can see how that wall would be built up. The Jews, confident in the promises made to Abraham, know themselves to be the people of God, the chosen ones, called to be a blessing to the whole world. When you have that kind of an identity as a people it can easily become more attractive to just lop off the part about blessing the whole world for God. You can start to focus on the part that says, “We are the people of God, we are the chosen ones.” We could look in the book of Amos and see there that the people had to be corrected regarding their view of God’s favoritism toward them and their thinking of themselves as indestructible (Amos 9:7-10).

Sometimes we’re good, too, at picking out the things that sound good to us and lopping off the rest. When I think back to being a child at Christmas time, as shopping season wound down, being told by my mother, “I’d love to give you everything you asked for, you know, if I could.” I might choose to hear that as simply, “I’d love to give you
everything you asked for,” but that wouldn’t change the reality of the situation.

That’s what the Jewish people occasionally would do. The promise of God that “You are my people, chosen to become a great nation and to bless the world” got turned around to, “You are my favorites, chosen to become a powerful nation.”

So there we have the beginnings of this wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile.

In our world there are walls of hostility built up between people all over the place. Last summer when we were in Berlin we took a bus tour and got to see some of the remains of the Berlin wall, one of the world’s great demonstrations of a literal wall of hostility keeping people apart.

But there are smaller walls built up everywhere we look. There are walls between family members, little feuds that turn into rifts, carried on because one person thinks another was unfair or in the wrong. There are walls between neighbours, so that like Wilson on the television show Home Improvement, we don’t even see each other face to face anymore, so insulated have we become inside our own little worlds.

There are walls between races and between the sexes. Men don’t understand women; women are frustrated by men. White people have mistreated black people; black people are suspicious and mistrusting of white people. These are the bigger walls we see in North America, the walls of racism, sexism, and other inequalities and injustices. We might even think of the superiority some Christians feel towards those who are not followers of Jesus.

The Broken Wall

Well, Paul says that the death of Jesus has done something to this dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile. Like the Berlin Wall coming down, the death of Jesus becomes a wrecking ball that is able to destroy all the animosity that exists between people.

When we stand underneath the cross of Jesus, whether Jews or Gentiles, we stand there united in our plight of being sinners. We have all looked elsewhere than God to try to figure out life on our own, have looked proudly for fulfillment in other places; we stand in exactly the same need when we stand together under the cross. The Jew cannot look at the Gentile and say, “I am God’s favorite,” because both are in need of God’s grace. The Gentile cannot look upon the Jew with suspicion and mistrust, because both are in need of God’s grace.

A man we met while traveling told us a story about a very special night in Berlin. He was a musician playing in an orchestra at a concert hall. The audience was staid and serious as the concert progressed, when suddenly the doors opened up and people just started flooding in to hear the music. This was not the crowd that would normally populate this type of a concert hall, not the people you might immediately identify as lovers of classical music, with its tendency toward stuffy suits, black ties, and evening gowns. But their faces betrayed overwhelming joy as they walked in and heard the music. The conductor turned around, and realizing what he was seeing, led the orchestra with even more vigour than he had before. The orchestra, realizing what they were seeing, played stronger, louder, and with more energy. What had happened while that concert was taking place, you see, was that the Berlin wall had just come down. East Berliners, never before able to cross this barrier out of communist East Germany, were finally free to join with the rest of their city-dwellers in enjoying this beautiful music. The breakdown of the wall was truly a cause for celebration.

The breakdown of walls between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, man and woman, that happens beneath the cross of Jesus is also a cause for celebration. Sharing together in our sinful condition, we also share together in our salvation. Jesus’ death for all of us means we cannot in good conscience hold anything against one another.

Paul goes on to tell us that “through Jesus both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father” and that he did it “to create one new humanity out of the two.”

Bringing it all Back

And that’s where it comes back to the very beginning. Through Abraham God promised he would bless all the nations. Over the years of Israel’s history, with its little glimpses of hope, moments when she seemed to understand her mission to the world, through the death and resurrection of exile and return, the full impact of God’s promises to Abraham was never fully felt. In Jesus everything came to a head, to its ultimate destination.

In Jesus’ death and resurrection God’s blessing, promised so long ago to Abraham, finally is realized, as we stand as sinners in need of God’s love as shown us in Jesus. The wall that sin puts up between others and us, between God and us, is broken down in Jesus’ death. What looks like defeat is revealed to be victory. The resurrection will be the ultimate conclusion to this story, that tells us what was really happening all along, but we may turn helpfully now to Colossians chapter 2 and close with another of Paul’s interpretations of the impact of the cross:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

In Jesus all the hostilities are broken, between other people and us, and most importantly between all of us and God. The patterns of evil that seem to rule this world are shown to be nothing more than shallow tricks trying to sell us an alternative life that is really the way of death. The way of Jesus’ death is shown to be the gateway into true life.

Why Did Jesus Have to Die? sermon series

We'll be starting a short sermon series this Sunday, leading up to Palm Sunday, called, "Why did Jesus Have to Die?" In preparation for that, some thoughts:

Usually we are accustomed to thinking of Jesus' death mainly in terms of "sacrifice" and "substitution," and maybe "reconciliation" (I am thinking of the giant chasm separating us from God in the Billy Graham organization's literature). These are very important (perhaps sacrifice is even the central one), but they are not the only ways the Bible has of explaining Jesus' death to us.

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As our sacrifice, Jesus was also dying as our representative, as humanity itself. He took our weakness and sin upon himself, but not just in a substitutionary way - in a representative way as well. That means that Jesus didn't just die so that we could avoid death. "It is rather that Christ's sharing (our) death makes it possible for (us) to share his death" (James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle). We don't avoid dying, but we experience Christ's death, which also means we experience resurrection!

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Another little-discussed (in our circles anyway!) biblical metaphor for Jesus' death is "conquest of the powers." Colossians 2:15 says: "He stripped off the rulers and the authorities, exposing them to public disgrace, leading them in triumph in him." Paul here pictures the cross itself mocking the powers that used to control our lives: sinfulness, worldliness, etc. Upon becoming Christians, and throughout the Christian life, we can sense this release from these powers: we no longer have to live the way we've been accustomed to living, constantly making self-destructive choices about our lives! We should remind ourselves of Col. 2:15 from time to time.

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p.s. I haven't been keeping up with the "weekly devotional thoughts" I mentioned in one of the first posts, but we'll see if I can get settled into a little more consistency as spring quickly approaches...