God made Jesus to be sin.
It the very end of this service we will be reading Psalm together. It begins with these words, "my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Those of you who stay to the end of these three hours will see that this Psalm written hundreds of years before Christ contains a startling number of details about the crucifixion of Jesus. Reading it on Good Friday brings us close to the experience of the early church immediately after the resurrection. Imagine yourself as one of the disciples trying to make sense of the stupendous thing that has happened to you. Wouldn't you be tempted to set the crucifixion aside as a nightmarish episode that had now been cancelled out by the resurrection? Wouldn't you want to set aside the terrible thing that had happened and concentrate on the happy ending? Human nature being what it is, we would have expected the biblical writers to say as little as possible about the crucifixion, passing right over it to the glory of Easter. Instead they made the passion narrative the centrepiece of all four gospels.
One of the first things that happened to the disciples after the resurrection was the discovery that the crucifixion was in the Old Testament. We in the church today need to recover the intimacy with the Psalms that was common in former times. Even today we have psalms in all our services because we are following ancient Jewish and Christian practice. Jesus and his friends would have prayed from the Psalms every day, several times a day. It would have been a deeply ingrained habit with them. Imagine the disciples returning to the Psalms after the resurrection and discovering that the crucifixion is right there in them. Wouldn't that blow your mind? As the early Christians prayed the Psalms in the light of the resurrection, they saw that the exposed and tortured death of Jesus was part of God's plan from the beginning. Everything that happened that day on Calvary, it seemed, was foreshadowed in the Psalms. The crucifixion had not been a horrible mistake after all. Their master hadn't been humiliated, degraded and treated like "the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things " for nothing. His suffering had a meaning, a meaning held in the mind of God as part of his purpose for salvation. It was all a fulfilment of what the prophets had said. Imagine what a thrilling discovery it must have been as they pored over the familiar words of Scripture was completely new eyes!
Psalm 22 was one of the most amazing of all the texts. Imagine yourself as one of the disciples trying to get a grip on the stupendous thing that has happened to you. How are you going to explain the fact that the Lord Jesus, now raised from the dead and ruling over your transformed life, had been a derelict on across along with the criminal scum of the land? How, in particular, are you going to live with the cry of dereliction? Did Jesus really think that God had abandoned him? If so, how could he have been the divine son of God?
The Psalms were Jesus' prayer book. Even in an extremity of pain and suffering greater than anything you or I will ever know, the words of the Psalms were on his lips. Mark's Greek indicates that he cried out on the cross with a desperate kind of scream. Still, his words were addressed to God, as though even in this further wrist reach of despair Jesus continued to place his trust in God. There is a Psalm, number 88, which I often recommend to people who are so angry at God that they cannot pray. It is one long outburst of anger and hopelessness. There is not a word of comfort or encouragement in the whole of Psalm 88. But there is one remarkable thing about it. It is addressed to God. It begins, "Oh Lord, my God, I call for help by day; I cry out in the night before thee" we all need to know of this Psalm. It teaches us that we can still pray even when we can't pray. No matter how dark and terrible your thoughts may be, you can still offer them to God. In a very real sense, God is there ahead of us. We know he is, because of what the Bible tells us about Jesus's death.
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? I have pondered these words for many years, and I have read many interpretations of them. I have often been disappointed in these interpretations. It often seems to me that they are trying to avoid what Matthew and Mark do not avoid, trying to soften what they do not soften. There are other places in the new Testament where we can check our reactions. The Epistle to the Hebrews and the letters of the apostle Paul are similar to Matthew and Mark in their insistence that Jesus drank the dregs of abandonment and despair on the cross.
In the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, there is a sentence of great importance. "For our sake God made him (Jesus) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (second Corinthians 5:21). This single verse has always been recognised as having a special significance in the interpretation of the cross. Here, we find a key to the Cry of Dereliction. For our sake God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin. Even grammatically; it is a strange formulation. There are depths upon depths here.
In order to understand the cross of Christ we need to consider the gravity of sin. In the time of the Old Testament, a guilt offering had to be weighed so that a value could be given to it. This is described in the book of Leviticus (5:15-16). We need to weigh the cross, the price that Jesus paid. The higher the price, the greater the sin. If Jesus suffered abandonment by God on the Cross, then that is an indication to us of the enormity of sin. Paul was making this connection when he wrote to the Corinthians. Looking at the cross of Jesus Christ, we see the degradation and Godforsakenness of it, we see how "he was despised and rejected by men," and we see the gravity, the weight, of sin. The price paid by the Lord is commensurate with the depth of human wickedness. I don't know if I can do justice to this or not. I feel very inadequate to the task. If Jesus was despised and rejected on the Cross it is because he took upon himself the burden of all that was despised and rejected by God. He took it for our sake. He took it so that it would be removed from us. And when he took at, he experienced something that perhaps even in the garden of Gethsemane he had not foreseen. When Jesus rose from his knees in the garden, he had overcome his fear; he had engaged in the second stage of his lifelong battle with the evil power and he had accepted the well of the Father. Surely, however, he did not fully even then know what it would be like, for he knew no sin. Jesus was not like you and me. He lived in unbroken fellowship with the Father every moment of his life. Never once had he been distracted by the selfishness that afflicts you and me. He had been the Man for God and the Man for Others all of his life. Now for the first time his communion with his Father in heaven is broken, not just broken in the sense of God being absent but all --- infinitely more dreadful than anything you or I will ever know --- it was broken as he took into himself the full weight of God's condemnation and judgement on the unholy triumvirate of Sin, Death, and the Devil.
There is a portion of another Psalm that will help us here:
There is no soundness in my flesh because of thy indignation;
there is no health in my bones because of my sin.
For my iniquities have gone over my head;
they weigh like a burden to heavy for me.
(Psalm 38:3-4)
Now perhaps we can see. The voice of the speaker in the Psalm as it was originally written and sung was the voice of a human being. It was my voice, your voice, saying as in the old general confession, "the burden of them (our sins) is intolerable." "There is no health in us," we used to say, echoing the Psalm. "There is no health in my bones because of my sin." This person who was speaking as the person whom God in Christ looks upon. He looked upon us, not from afar, but from within our midst. He did not remain above our struggle, but came down into it. He looked upon us with our sins overwhelming us, crushing us, drowning us; and he entered into our condition until he began, on the Cross, to speak along with us, indeed to speak instead of us; "my iniquities have gone over my head." Our Lord Jesus Christ loved us with such an unrivalled love that he determined to step into our place and take our unbearable burden upon himself as though it had been his own. He bowed his head and became subject to the dark powers and for that one soul-destroying, first-stopping, light-quenching moment it overwhelmed him to. "My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?" God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
- Fleming Rutledge
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