The Heart that Broke
I direct your attention now to one final verse of Scripture: "My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death; remain here and keep watch." (Mark 14:34). These are the words of Jesus to his disciples as he goes into the garden of Gethsemane on the last night of his life. These words are very strong in the original Greek and they have been variously translated:
My soul is very soulful, even unto death.
My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.
My heart is nearly breaking.
And we might add, from the Psalms, "thy rebuke hath broken his heart" (69:20)
We need to let our imaginations work on these verses so as to approach more closely to the meaning of the sorrow of Jesus. Think of how you would feel if the person you love most in all the world were to say, "my heart is nearly breaking." I think it would make our hearts break too. But the heartbreak of Jesus is almost indescribable, for it is unique.
Was Jesus' heart breaking because he knew he was going to die? We can answer that with an unqualified NO. It has often been noted that even the most ordinary human beings frequently go to their deaths quite bravely and stoically. Why would the Son of God be more heartbroken about dying than Thomas More or Marie Antoinette or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or even criminals who go calmly to their lethal injections? The evangelists, in their accounts of Gethsemane, put a lot of emphasis on the agony of Jesus in the garden. Why?
The answer is a simple one, but simple as it is, it requires faith to understand it - faith and the imagination of faith. Every single person in this church today has been given at least a small glimmering of faith, or you would not be here. However tiny your seed of faith may be, it is enough. Your faith is a mustard seed that Jesus promised would grow into a great tree. If you are new to all this, let your seed of faith began to sprout and grow today.
Jesus' heart was breaking in the garden not because he was going to die, but because he knew that on the cross he would assume the burden of the sin of the world. Jesus had never experienced personally the weight of sin before. He had seen it, grieved over it, and forgiven it - but he had never succumbed to it, had never himself been personally overwhelmed by it, because he alone among all the human beings who ever lived was not a sinner. Now he was about to take upon himself the entire accumulated mass of the world's sin, and what that must've been like we can only imagine, for no other human being has ever been through anything like it.
It is bad enough to watch someone we love suffer. It is un-endurable to think of someone we love suffering because of what we have done. There are not words enough in the world to say what was going on when Jesus suffered on account of the sin of everybody that ever lived. The evangelists didn't even try. Matthew and Mark simply report that Jesus cried out, "my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And that Cry of Dereliction from the cross, as it is called, has run down the ages as Jesus' ow all n expression of what was happening as he voluntarily bowed his head and became accursed for our sake, and in our place. "For our sake God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2nd Corinthians 5:21).
It is important that we understand what this "rebuke" is. The "rebuke" is not the Father rebuking the Son. Rather, it is the rebuke of Sin, the sentence pronounced on Death and the condemnation of the works of the Devil, that Jesus undergoes today. The Bible makes it very clear that this Father and this Son are accomplishing this work together, that their two wills are one will. It is the will of them both that Jesus should absorb into himself the rightful wrath of God against sin. God the Father and Son together love us so much that it was their one will that we not be destroyed by it.
A few weeks ago I heard a sermon by a priest who had just returned from the 50th reunion of the veterans of the battle of Iwo Jima. He used as a Lenten illustration the example of soldiers who threw themselves on hand grenades, absorbing the explosion in their own bodies, offering themselves to certain death in order to save others. It was a very moving sermon and the illustration works, up to a point, but it is not sufficient. Jesus has done still more. The sort of death he suffered was not heroic or glorious, but shameful and degrading. The death Jesus died was not so much to save his comrades, for they all forsook him; it was to save not only his friends but also and most especially his enemies, and indeed in the end his friends became his enemies - such is the depth of our disgrace. And finally, Jesus was broken, not only by Death, but also by the consequences of Sin, as he took our place on the cross on the first Good Friday.
We do not understand value until we see what the price is. Only by looking at the price - the cross of Christ - do we learn the weight of God's judgement against Sin and the value that we have for him. It just isn't enough to say that Jesus died for us. We need to understand the many-times-repeated statements in the new Testament that he died for our sin. That is his heartbreak. That is what makes his death different from other deaths, his agony different from other agonies, his sorrow . . . . Well, let Scripture speak; "behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow" (Lamentations 1:12). The answer is, no, there isn't any other sorrow like unto are all very good adult months will will will all his sorrow. We did not know how great was the burden of Sin until we saw what Jesus had to endure in order to save us from it. Jesus bowed his head under the condemnation that went along with the captivity of Sin. That is what you and I are worth to him. Jesus did that for you. That is why you cannot go out from here today and be the same ever again.
The service last night dramatised it for us. The altar was stripped, the candles were put out, the lights were slowly extinguished, and there was a horrific crash upon the organ that made it seem as if the world was coming to an end. The underlying intention of this dramatic action (symbolises) the apparent victory of the powers of darkness and the seeming failure of the divine plan of redemption at the (time of) the crucifixion.
Put yourself in the place of the disciples. I encourage you, today, to try to imagine their situation, if we can do so, we will understand and celebrate Easter as never before. It is 3 o'clock on Good Friday. Capture this moment. This is the space between Good Friday and Easter. Jesus is dead. All is blackness and despair. Can you feel the magnitude of what he has done? Christ has descended into hell for us. Satan has had his way. There is no human hope left. The long-awaited Messiah has died the despised death of the lowest criminal class. Nothing we can do will bring him back. All the spring flowers and sunshine and Easter eggs and greeting cards and positive thinking in the world will not bring him back. We are left in the wreckage, in the darkness, in the silence. There is nothing -- nothing -- that can rebuild this wreckage, nothing that can lighten this darkness, nothing that can break this silence -- Except an Act of God.
- Fleming Rutledge
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