These warm spring afternoons with sunsets coming later and later remind me of playing in my backyard with my childhood friends.  We squeezed every ounce out of the daylight, going home only after it was too dark to play anymore.  There was one kid whose big brother always got him to come home a little earlier than the rest of us by warning his little brother, “You’d better come on home now before the ghosts come out!  You don’t want to be walking home alone after dark, when the ghosts and goblins will get you!”  Lee would always cave in to that pressure and run home.  The rest of us would stay out longer, not because we were braver or unafraid of ghosts but because we lived next door to each other and that offered us some protection from the goblins.  I guess it wasn’t such a good idea to play our favorite game, “Ain’t No Boogers Out Tonight,” as darkness fell.  As we got older and wiser, we came to believe that there were no such things as ghosts, and the truth will set you free!  After that, the threat from Lee’s big brother to come home now or face the ghosts lost its bite.  “There are no such things as ghosts” became our affirmation of faith!

Most things that our ancestors thought were ghostly have found other explanations in modern science, and I tend to be very skeptical about ghost stories.  But if that is so, then why do I still have trouble going to sleep after a very scary movie?  Why do I jump when my eyes play a trick on me and I think I see movement out of the corner of my eye?  And why, when I am home alone, do I jump in fear at everything that goes bump in the night?  Why is the radio show “Coast to Coast AM” with George Noory and Art Bell so popular?  All they talk about is angels, ESP, ghosts, UFO’s, aliens, Big Foot, and time travelers, and there are many people who take that stuff very seriously.  From time to time I hear about a major college or university doing research in these areas, and so I have to acknowledge that even in this new millennium there is still much interest in mystery and unexplainable things.  Apparently, there are plenty of very smart, well-educated folks who still entertain the possibility that ghosts are real.

I find it fascinating that, according to the very well-educated Dr. Luke, when Jesus appeared to the Disciples on Easter evening, they thought they were seeing a ghost.  Even more fascinating is the fact that Jesus explained His sudden appearing out of thin air and His resurrection body in ghostly terms.  Specifically, he wanted them to see that He was not a ghost.  Ghosts aren’t solid and you can’t touch them; but Jesus invited their touch so that they could see that He had flesh and bones.  He was solid.

I have asked a bunch of folks this question this week:  Does Jesus’ statement prove that Jesus actually believed in ghosts or was He just drawing upon our common human experience or superstition regarding ghosts as a starting point for talking with His Disciples?  He, like others of His century, did believe in spirits and demons that could take possession of human beings, and, therefore, it is very likely that He also believed in spirits or ghosts.  But my purpose today is not to answer the question of whether on not ghosts are real but rather to see what Jesus was trying to teach His Disciples by comparing His resurrection body to ghosts, whether they are real or imaginary.  This is important to us because we are promised that Jesus’ experience will also be our experience in life, death, and the life immortal.

It seems that Luke’s primary intention is to tell us that the Disciples based their belief in Jesus’ resurrection, not upon seeing a shadowy figure out of the corner of their eyes but rather seeing Jesus up close and very personally.  They got to make a thorough examination of Jesus in His resurrection form.  If you read the sermons of the early church as recorded in Luke’s other book, Acts, you will see that the Christian message wasn’t a series of commandments or “love thy neighbor” talks.  The message was that Jesus had been killed, buried, and then raised again to life.  Jesus wasn’t resuscitated, like we would do to a victim of drowning or like doctors do for patients whose hearts stop beating.  He was totally dead and buried.  Then His body was resurrected.  His resurrection body looked just like His earthly body, even down to scars on His hands, feet, and side.  But it wasn’t the same as His earthly body.  That was their message, and Luke wants us to know why that seemingly impossible story was their main message.  They had touched Jesus after His resurrection.  He was not an apparition!  He had flesh and bones.

When the Disciples still couldn’t believe their eyes, Jesus asked if they had anything to eat.  Now, wait a minute!  Was He hungry?  I don’t think so.  This was further evidence that Jesus was not a ghost.  He still had the capacity for pleasure and fellowship even if He no longer needed nourishment.  The Disciples gave Jesus some broiled fish and He ate it to assure them that He was not an apparition.  He had flesh, bones, and an appetite!  This brief encounter with Jesus was enough to sustain them for the rest of their lives.  It is what energized their mission to the world.

We are told that after He finished His snack, Jesus opened their minds so that they could understand everything.  I love that phrase, “He opened their minds.”  Their minds had been closed to the possibility of Jesus’ bodily resurrection.  Their minds had been closed to understanding the scriptures and interpreting them as predictions about Jesus life, death, and resurrection.  Now everything in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms had to be reinterpreted in light of Who Jesus is.  All scripture pointed to this truth: “The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all nations.”  We do well to remember this when we are reading the Bible.  It will keep us from getting hung up on insignificant details or from trying to force the Bible to be a history or science book.  Jesus is the focal point of all scripture.

As the early church continued to grow, God kept surprising them and opening their minds!  It wasn’t long before the Spirit was given to some Gentiles and the Apostles had to open their minds to the possibility that Jesus was the Savior of all people of all races and nationalities.  Their minds had to become open to the possibility that old religious customs and old national geographic boundaries no longer mattered. What now mattered was trusting in Jesus Christ.  Jesus opened their minds!

Jesus can still open our minds.  Faith is a gift from God, an opening of our minds to the truth.  If you don’t have faith, ask God to give you some!  Ask Him to open your mind.  Our minds can be open to the meaning of scriptures if we will read the Bible prayerfully, asking the Holy Spirit to guide us.  We can come to see that old cultural customs and divisions don’t matter anymore. All people of all races are my brothers and sisters.  What now matters is trusting in Jesus Christ!

Well, as I said, Jesus’ experience of life, death, and resurrection is also going to be our experience.  I find great comfort in the story of this resurrection appearance as I think about its implication toward my family members who have died and as I face my own mortality.  I don’t think we are supposed to have all the answers, but I think we can be comforted by these things.

First, in the resurrection, we will be healed of all injuries and illnesses.  Jesus invited His friends to look at and touch the scars in His hands, feet, and side.  A scar forms only when a wound heals!  He didn’t invite them to touch His fresh wounds; it was His scars that He showed them.  Those awful wounds that had caused His death just a few days earlier were now totally scarred over and healed!  Whatever takes us out of this world will only be a scar in the world to come because we are immediately healed and made whole.

Secondly, I believe that another implication of this story is that we will recognize our friends when we get to heaven.  People ask me that all the time: “Will we know each other?”  Based upon the resurrection appearances of Jesus, I always say “yes.”  The Disciples recognized Jesus.  He looked the same, only better.  I’m counting on looking better!  And I am counting on knowing the ones I have loved who have died in the faith!

Thirdly, we won’t be ghosts, nor will we lose our personal identity.  We, too, will have a new resurrection body.  As Jesus ate with His friends, so we are told that there will be a great banquet feast in heaven.  That feast will put our southern buffets to shame!  We might not need to eat in order to live, but we will enjoy it nevertheless, and the fellowship will be heavenly.

When Jesus finished explaining everything, He simply said, “You are witnesses of all this.”  You Disciples have seen it all, Jesus’ death for our sins and Jesus’ resurrection.  He didn’t demand that they be successful.  They were just to go tell what they had witnessed.  Some who heard were happy to believe; others rejected their eye witness reports.  Jesus says to us today that in our own ways we are also witnesses, not of the empty tomb itself but rather witnesses of the power of faith in His name.  We can testify to the difference that faith in Christ has made in our lives.  We don’t always have to succeed; we just have to be faithful.  Some will doubt us but others will believe and want what we’ve got.  Let us be faithful witnesses in our day!  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

Sometimes I meet ministerial colleagues for coffee, not just for fun and fellowship but to seek their wise counsel.  Last year, at a coffee meeting with Rev. Doug Bowling, something happened that I still get teased about.  The story seems to get embellished with each retelling.  There we were, sitting in a coffee shop where they roast and grind their own coffee beans.  From where I was sitting, I could see a little smoke begin to collect around the ceiling near the roaster, where a stove-pipe went up through the ceiling, but nobody seemed to notice or to be at all concerned.  So we kept on talking as the smoke got thicker and thicker.  Finally, I decided that something was wrong and that some type of warning needed to be sounded, but I didn’t want to overreact and cause a stampede!  So I stood up and shouted, “Something’s happening!”  When my friends hear this story, they tell me, “Arthur, if I am choking, drowning, or having a heart attack, please don’t just say, ‘Something’s happening.’  Please issue a clearer call to action.”

When I read the stories in Acts 4 and John 20, my immediate reaction was that the very unusual circumstances relayed in those stories testify that “something’s happening.”  The attitudes and actions of the disciples seem to yell out loud that something had changed the way they thought about everything!  That something was the resurrection of Jesus, and their actions are a tremendous witness to their absolute belief in Jesus.

Writer Luke first tells us that the believers were unified in heart and mind. Someone has said that the only automobile ever mentioned in the Bible is a Honda because it was said that the disciples were in one accord.  Do you know how difficult it is to get people to agree about anything, much less to be in one heart and mind about everything in life?  That’s just not natural!  You give Penny and me five minutes to talk about anything and we will find 10 things we don’t agree on!  Union United Methodist Church in Irmo sent Penny with me to our Annual Conference as one of their delegates one year, and we spent the entire week canceling out each other’s votes.  A well-known lay delegate, Rhett Jackson, sat behind us and he would say, “There they go again!  They are going to divorce before the week is over.”  Now, I am sure that the first Christians didn’t agree on everything, but they set aside their many differences because they agreed on the most important thing: Jesus was alive, and He is the Savior of the world.  When it came to spreading the Good News, they lived to do this and were willing to make any sacrifice in order to do this.  Something’s happening!

“No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own.”  They shared all of their possessions with one another.  Again, that’s just not natural!  My things are my things.  I don’t like sharing food off of my plate, and don’t you touch my computer without asking me!  What could have come along that was of such importance and life-changing magnitude that these people would turn loose of their possessions with the attitude, “If you need it, it is now yours”?  Something else was now much more important and that something else was the resurrection of Jesus.  Nothing was as important as streamlining life to allow time to experience the life of Christ in their midst and to tell others about Him.

“There were no needy persons among them.”  In a time of poverty and hardship, the members of the early church lived in relative comfort and plenty.  Don’t you know that both the unselfishness and the generosity were terrific witnesses to the general population that Jesus was alive?  Land both then and now ties us to our parents and grandparents, and land represents security and prosperity.  As someone has said, “Buy land!  They aren’t making any more.”  And yet we read that people willingly sold their land and brought the money from the sales to the Apostles for their use.  Clearly, something’s happening here!  There is a new source of security and something more important than prosperity, and that was the living Lord Jesus!

The Gospel story about Jesus appearing to His disciples also shouts that something is happening.  The tomb had been empty for over twelve hours, during which time the disciples had been trying to understand what the women had told them.  Mary Magdalene claimed to have seen Jesus, as did two men traveling on a country road.  But if Jesus was alive, He sure didn’t seem to be in any hurry to reveal Himself to His closest friends.  The doors were locked to keep everyone out, especially the authorities.  Jesus, who had already been there in spirit because they were gathered in His name, quite suddenly made His presence known.  He showed them His scars.  The scripture makes this understatement: “The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.”  I guess words just couldn’t express the ecstasy, the wonder, and the unrestrained joy that they felt.  Twice Jesus tries to calm their frenzy: “Be at peace. Calm down.  There are things to do and places to go.”

Then Jesus explained that they were to continue His work as sent by the Father.  He imparted the Holy Spirit, that same abiding presence of God that had sustained Jesus’ life.  Specifically, they were to take the message of God’s forgiveness everywhere.  In fact, forgiveness of sins would come through their preaching or it would not come at all.  It was all up to them.

Something’s happening!  Jesus is alive and in their midst, whether or not they could see Him, and He had empowered them to continue His work of forgiving people.  Their preaching still is heard in our day and many of us have found forgiveness through the grace of God that they preached.  We, too, experience the presence of the living Christ in our midst, even when we don’t see Him.  His presence transformed their fellowship from a place of fear to a place where you could catch faith.

You heard about the little boy who missed Palm Sunday because he was sick.  He asked his older sister to tell him what he had missed.  “We re-enacted the first Palm Sunday,” she said.  The boy wanted to know what the first Palm Sunday had been like.  “Well, there was a parade,” she explained.  “Children walked down the road waving palm branches, and at the end of the parade was Jesus riding on a donkey.”  “Oh, great!” cried the little boy.  “The one Sunday I miss church, Jesus shows up.”

The one Sunday that Thomas missed church, Jesus appeared to the disciples.  But as I said, that fellowship had been transformed.  Thomas could tell that the fear was gone and that in its place was excitement and wonder.  He was mad at himself, it seems, and very disappointed that he hadn’t gotten to see his friend Jesus.  I am not sure if he really doubted or if he thought he could force Jesus to appear again by insisting, “I won’t believe unless I see and touch.  Did you hear me, God?  I won’t believe unless I see!”  Then he stayed with his friends because he knew that here was where Jesus could be found.

Here Thomas was, still stuck in grief, still paralyzed over the loss of His friend Jesus.  He was looking back and feeling lost.  Meanwhile, the other Disciples were over their grief.  There was nothing to grieve about!  They were looking to the future, making plans to spread the Good News, working on sermons, planning an exciting future.  Poor Thomas couldn’t begin to understand all this, but you know he had to admit that something was happening!

Isn’t it amazing that Jesus let this drama go on for seven whole days?  For seven days the other disciples showed their joy and their faith and for seven days Thomas got to watch them and ask them tough questions.  If I had been Thomas, I would have wanted to interrogate each one of them separately to compare their stories.  The living Lord was invisibly in their midst all week, and finally He became visible to Thomas, and Thomas believed.

God gives us plenty of slack, allowing us to squirm on the end of His line before He finally reels us in!  I’ve gotten to where I really enjoy seeing people squirm because I know they are about to come to faith.  There is nothing more exciting than to be in a fellowship of Christians who are so aware of the risen Christ in their midst that their fellowship becomes transformational. Sermons don’t have to be preached.  No strong-arm tactics have to be employed.  No arguments have to be won.  Their fellowship is just alive with Christ’s presence.  If Doubting Thomases will just tag along with such groups, they just might find themselves believing in Christ.

I’ve been a part of such lively groups several times: my church youth group during high school, a college fellowship, a seminary fellowship, and groups within several churches.  I am so thankful that my parents dropped me off in a nursery where Jesus was present and carried me to a church where Jesus could be found.  I am still convinced that at any church, if a small group of members will pray and read their Bibles and attend worship, they will begin to experience the presence of Christ in their lives to such a degree that the entire church becomes transformed, making the church a place where others become caught up in our hope, our excitement, our love, and our faith.  When you attend a group or a church like that, you come away with the feeling, “Something’s happening here.”  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

One Sunday night in the spring of 1973, we were attending evening worship at Lyman United Methodist Church where I was the youth director.  It was a normal spring day except that it had been unusually hot and humid.  It might have been a bit hazy but there were no clouds in the sky, and so we didn’t suspect a thing.

The choir director sang a beautiful solo.  He sang about the leaves rustling in the breeze, and we heard the wind howling outside, blowing leaves against the windows.  Then the song said something about how our eyes grow dim as we age, and the lights went out!  I was thinking, “Wow!  That is excellent staging for this song!  I wonder who turned out the lights?”

The solo ended and the minister got up to begin his sermon when a lady came rushing into the sanctuary, practically bursting the doors down as she entered while yelling to the pastor, “George, your wife says for you to get out of here!”  Just as I was wondering what he had done to make his wife so mad, the pastor calmly said, “I believe we’d better get downstairs to the basement.”  As we made our way to the stairs, we noticed that the accordion door in the hall was hanging horizontally instead of vertically now, and the sound of a freight train could be heard.  A tornado!  We were in the middle of a tornado!

There was utter confusion among the forty of us in that church basement as we wondered what was going to happen to us.  When we finally ventured out, we saw huge trees snapped in two or totally uprooted!  Cars had been smashed by the falling trees, and most of the houses in Lyman had lost roofs or had huge trees lying in their living rooms.  Businesses had been demolished; plates from a local restaurant were found miles away in Wellford.  Driving was impossible, and so we went on foot to check on our homes and our neighbors.  Soon the utter confusion turned into thankful expressions of praise to God!  No one had been killed, and only one person had been slightly injured.  Many lives were probably saved because so many people were at their churches when the tornado hit.  Within a few hours, we were all busily involved in the cleanup, our confusion and fear now replaced by confessions of thanks to God.  You could almost feel the exact moment when confusion turned into confession.

One early morning in the First Century A.D., some women made their way to the grave of a beloved friend.  It, too, was a usual morning with the sun coming up.  Just as you and I take flowers to a grave to express our love and sorrow, so these women were taking spices to a grave, hoping to complete the unfinished task of preparing the body for burial.  “Who will help us open the tomb?” they wondered.  They expected nothing out of the ordinary.  As they approached the tomb, they were surprised to find that the stone had already been moved.  Perhaps other friends of the deceased had also come to the tomb with spices.  So they went into the tomb to join the others, still expecting nothing.

Inside the tomb they saw what appeared to be a young man dressed in a white robe.  But where was the body of Jesus?  The absence of the body filled them with alarm!  According to John’s gospel, they thought that the body had been stolen.  The young man, the angel, said, “Don’t be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here. He has risen! See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples.”

So the women left the tomb.  But according to Mark, they didn’t go tell the disciples or anyone else.  They were too afraid, too confused.  What did it mean that Jesus had risen?  The oldest copies of Mark end right here – in wonder and confusion.  Someone later added verses 9 through 20.  Perhaps Mark wanted to leave us for a while right where the women were, in confusion, so that we could make our own journey to confession, as these women later did.

And if the women had gone straight to the Disciples to tell their news, who would have believed them anyway?  After all, they were just… WOMEN!  Women were on the lowest rung in the ancient world.  Their testimony wasn’t accepted in a court of law, and so who would believe them anyway?  Orthodox Jewish males prayed every day, “I thank thee, O Lord, that I was not born a woman!”  You’ve come a long way, baby!

There was a story about a big, husky man who was found passed out on the street.  A little old lady was there, and she complained that the man was drunk and had been bothering her, and then he just passed out.  The busted lip and black eyes were results of his fall, she said. The police woke him up, but he didn’t say anything in his own defense.  Only after they got him to the jail did he begin talking and the truth finally came out. He was not drunk!  He had been beaten and robbed by that little old lady.  The police asked him, “Why didn’t you tell us about this when we picked you up?”  He replied, “Who would have believed me if I had told you that I had been mugged by her?”  And who would believe the ladies from Jesus’ tomb?

I wonder why God selected these women to be the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus?  Perhaps God chose them because only they had the courage to come to the tomb.  Their love for Jesus was stronger than their fear of the soldiers.  Perhaps their faithfulness to God, even in the darkest of times, was being rewarded. Perhaps it is because God always chooses the lowly and the weak to confound the strong.  But maybe it was the fact that they could live with confusion as they worked out their faith.  Perhaps it was precisely because they would not be believed that God had chosen them so that the others could join them in this time of confusion and perplexity before they came to believe.  Perhaps real faith can only be the offspring of questions, confusion, and doubt.  There must be something to this because Jesus seemed to be in no hurry to appear to them and remove their doubts.  It was evening that first Easter before Jesus appeared to the Disciples.  I wonder why Jesus let them question and doubt for so long, unless that is what it takes to have strong faith.

After a time of confusion and bewilderment, the women do finally go to tell the disciples, and just as they expected, they were not believed.  Neither were the two disciples who had been walking on a country road when they met the risen Lord.  According to John, only two of the disciples, Peter and John, even bothered to go to the tomb to check out the women’s story.  After all, the dead stay dead and buried.  Perhaps it was the women’s grief that caused them to imagine that they had seen an angel.  No one expected Jesus to really come back from the dead. The ancient world had myths to explain the changing of the seasons in terms of the death and resurrection of a deity, but those myths came from paganism. These followers of Jesus were not pagans!  Clearly they didn’t expect a thing.  Matthew wrote that even after Jesus had appeared to them in Galilee when He was giving them the great commission, some of them just couldn’t believe it.  And when the others tried to convince a doubting Thomas that they had seen the Lord, Thomas would not believe even the word of his closest friends!

See, the Bible is very honest in reporting the difficulty of Jesus’ closest friends to believe.  The Biblical writers knew that you would have a hard time believing it and so they shared the struggles of Jesus’ peers to believe.  The women found it hard to believe.  The disciples found it hard to believe. Thomas couldn’t believe it.  Paul found it hard to believe.  But they all did finally move from confusion to confession of faith and we can, too.

When I was in seminary, I told one of my professors that one of my church members was really having a tough time believing in Virgin Birth.  The professor replied, “Tell him that Mary had trouble believing this, too!  When she was told that she would conceive a child, she asked the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?’” If Mary had trouble believing it, I guess it is OK for us to question it also.  And if the 11 remaining Disciples found the resurrection difficult to believe and yet they came to believe in it so deeply that all but one of them suffered martyrdom as a result, then maybe we can also come to believe.  We can even embrace confusion, doubt, and questioning if these will lead us to faith in the same way they led the women and the Disciples to faith.

It is also fascinating that the angel at the tomb told the women to tell the Disciples and Peter about the empty tomb.  I thought Peter was a Disciple.  He was, but he didn’t think that he was any longer.  He thought he had lost his place among the Apostles because he had three times denied knowing Jesus.  Not just anybody would know that Peter had cut himself off from the others, but an angel at God’s side would know this.  “Go tell the Disciples, and make sure you include Peter.”

Is there anybody here who has distanced himself or herself from Jesus?  In your own way you have said, “I do not know that man Jesus.”  Today the world rejoices over the empty tomb as we hear the angel say, “He is not here. He has risen.”  But you don’t rejoice because you think you have been left out of the proclamation.  Now hear that angel calling your name, making sure you know you are included: “Go tell my disciples and Arthur, and Jim, and Tom, and Jane, and Susan, and insert your name here, that He has risen.”  And when you have grown from fear to faith and from confusion to confession, go into all the world with the Good News that Jesus lives!  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt

You can ask any child who has been to Sunday School for a year or two why Jesus died on a cross and they will tell you, “Jesus died for our sins.”  They know the answer, even if they don’t know exactly what it means.  I heard about one three-year-old who came home and said, “Mama, Jesus took away my sins and I want them back.”

We know that God created all that is, but still I enjoy hearing scientists as they try to unravel the mystery of just how God did this!  We know that God foreordained that Jesus would be the atonement for our sins, but it is still fascinating to see how God used the various factors in everyday life to bring about His purpose for Jesus.  What were some of those factors that led Jesus to the cross?  If CNN or FOX News had been around back then, what would they have reported as the reasons for Jesus’ execution?

One reason Jesus was crucified is that He was considered a criminal, a lawbreaker.  He broke the Sabbath Law by healing on that day.  He traveled on foot on the Sabbath.  He didn’t wash His hands before eating like the Law demanded.  He would pick grain from a field as He walked, and He was accused to harvesting on the Sabbath.  He ate with outcasts and sinners.  He forgave sinners.  He made close friends with a turncoat like Matthew Levi who had gone to work for the Romans, and some of His closest female friends were former prostitutes.  In the minds of religious people, this meant that Jesus Himself was a sinner.  If you and I had been raising our families back in those days, would we have wanted our children to associate with the kinds of people Jesus always had hanging around Him?

The society of that day had clearly marked boundaries between saint and sinner, Jew and Roman, men and women, friends and enemies, and Jesus spent His life tearing down all of these boundaries.  We have seen in our day what can happen when leaders come along who tear down the walls of society.  Recently I saw a documentary which has been produced about the “Orangeburg Massacre,” the day in February 1968 when SC Highway Patrol officers thought they were being fired upon, and so they fired their weapons at a group of African-American students at SC State University, killing three and wounding 27.  The students had gathered to protest the fact that they had not been allowed into the segregated bowling alley in downtown Orangeburg. The only person who was ever convicted of any crime in this sad chapter in SC history was Cleveland Sellers, who was convicted of inciting a riot.  By the way, Dr. Sellers is today the president of  Voorhees College.  Lest we forget, the 1960′s and 70′s were decades during which many walls in our society were under attack, and sometimes we acted just like Jesus’ enemies when we tried to maintain the walls that Jesus was determined to knock down.

Jesus was considered dangerous because He tampered with the customs of society, and as such He was considered a lawbreaker.  Along those same lines, a second factor that led Jesus to the cross was what He said.  His words came back to haunt Him!  He taunted King Herod, disrespectfully referring to the King as “that fox.”  He often spoke very harsh words of criticism against the scribes and Pharisees, the leaders of the religious community, undermining their authority and respect.  Jesus put His own words on equal par with scripture when He said, “You have heard it said of old…” and then He would quote the Bible, and then He would contradict the Bible by saying, “but I say unto you…”  “You have heard it said of old, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ but I say unto you ‘Turn the other cheek.”  Jesus told people that they were forgiven, and His enemies cried, “Blasphemy!  Only God can forgive sins.” John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus openly claimed to be God’s Son, God in the flesh, and, indeed, this is what led the religious leaders to charge Jesus with the crime of blasphemy.  His words came back to haunt Him.

He was considered a sinner who was tampering with the fabric of human society.  His words came back to haunt Him.  But to me, the saddest factor that led to the cross was the treachery of His friends: the treason reason.  We have been trying unsuccessfully for eight years to get a friend of terrorist Osama Bin Laden to betray him for 25 million dollars; Judas betrayed the Prince of Peace for about $25.  But Judas wasn’t the only disciple to fail Jesus.  Peter denied even knowing “that man.”  The others were asleep when they should have been on guard.  There was no serious attempt to protect or rescue the Son of God from His enemies.

If you look carefully at Judas, you will become very uncomfortable.  Of all the Disciples, Judas was one of the most trusted, the most servant-like.  Jesus made Judas the first church treasurer because of his good business sense!  Judas went long distances to town to buy food and supplies for the Disciples.  He was one of Jesus’ closest friends, a person Jesus believed in and trusted.  He had tremendous possibilities.  The Interpreter’s Bible Commentary calls Judas “a man of gallant hope, daring, and adventure, ready to sacrifice.”  When Jesus told the Disciples that one of them would betray Him, they all asked, “Is it I?” but none of them said, “Oh!  He is talking about Judas.”  No, Judas would never betray Jesus, they thought.  Not Judas!  As uncomfortable as it makes us to realize it, Judas was just like one of us.  It could have been one of us.

There has been much speculation as to why Judas betrayed Jesus.  The New Testament writers believed that it was Judas’ love of money that caused Judas’ treachery.  Perhaps he had an addiction, like gambling.  Theologian DeQuincy believed that Judas thought he could force Jesus to take action.  Time was wasting.  Opposition was consolidating.  Now was the time to act.  Perhaps by putting Jesus in a place where He had to act decisively to scatter His enemies, Judas thought He was helping Jesus achieve His goals.  That is a kind interpretation of betrayal, but Judas’ remorse as shown by his suicide does seem to support this theory.  Yet another, perhaps more realistic, motive for the betrayal is “enlightened self-interest.”  Judas could see that it was too late.  Jesus had not succeeded in becoming the Messiah King.  Any day now the Romans and the religious leaders would arrest Jesus and the Disciples, and so Judas decided to cash in his chips and join the winning team before it was too late.  By betraying Jesus, Judas was insuring his own safety.

Did you hear the words that you prayed this morning in our prayer of confession?  We prayed, “Grant us grace to feel and to lament our share of the evil that made it necessary for him to suffer and to die for our salvation.”  It was not just the failure of Judas, Peter, and the others that caused Jesus’ death.  We, too, had a part in the crucifixion because we share in the evil that made the cross necessary.  We have human weaknesses that have caused us to sell Jesus out for $25 or less.  We have tried to force God’s hand to act in our lives, asking God to do our will rather than telling God that we will do His will.  We, too, have changed sides in public when it became a bit uncomfortable for us to be known as a follower of Christ.

Yet another factor that led to the cross was the political climate of that day.  Jesus was done in by politics!  Every four years when our Presidential election comes around, I feel a bit done in by our politics, but Jesus really got caught in the various political streams that were flowing in those days.  First, there was King Herod, son of Herod the Great who was king at the time of Jesus’ birth.  This Herod was a cruel king, killing his real or imagined enemies, even if they were in his own house.  After he killed his own son, the Greek-speaking locals came up with a pun to express their disdain for Herod:  “It is better to be Herod’s ‘os than his ‘ios – It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son.”  A second political force was represented by Roman Governor Pontius Pilate who was expected to keep the peace at all cost.  The third and fourth political forces were within Judaism, the party of the Zealots who advocated taking up arms to overthrow Rome and the party of the high priests who feared that any public disturbance would result in the destruction of the temple and the loss of their country.  That is why the high priest said this in plotting Jesus’ death: “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

These political forces came together in a tumultuous way during the Passover Festival in Jesus’ 33^rd year of life.  A million people crowded into Jerusalem, an emotional crowd, making Jerusalem a tinderbox ready to explode.  When the high priest’s plan to capture Jesus succeeded, He was interrogated by the supreme court of Israel, the Sanhedrin. They determined that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy and deserving the death sentence, but since they were not allowed to carry out this sentence while under Roman occupation, they took Him to Pilate to ask him to execute Jesus for them.  Pilate didn’t see any reason to crucify Jesus and so he began looking for a way of escape.  Politics gave him a way out!  Jesus was from Galilee, and that meant that he could extradite Jesus to Herod.  And since Pilate didn’t like Herod, I am sure he took great pleasure in dumping this problem on the king!  However, Herod was also a shrewd politician.  He saw that Pilate was setting a trap for him.  Herod had already executed one popular  religious leader – John the Baptizer – and he was determined not to get trapped again.  So he refused the extradition order, sending Jesus back to Pilate.

It appears that Pilate continued to try to find a way out of this political firestorm.  He ordered Jesus to be flogged, perhaps hoping that this would be sufficient punishment and everyone would just go away happy.  That is when the temple leaders played their trump card, using the political power that they had by saying the one thing that could make Pilate’s resolve crumble: “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar’s.”

In the end, the death of Jesus satisfied all of the political factions, and so there was a sense of political expediency in the cross of Jesus.  The Zealots got Barabbas released, the Romans kept the peace, and the temple and Jewish independence lived for another 40 years.  Jesus was used by the politicians of His day, just as He is often used by politicians in our day, for their own political ends.

That leaves just one more factor to be considered today and that is Jesus’ decision.  Even though God had decided on a plan, Jesus still had a choice in the matter.  If Jesus had no power to accept or reject God’s will, then neither do we!  Without a choice, His death is meaningless and tragic.

Jesus had decided on the direction of His ministry during the wilderness temptation.  He had decided against playing it safe, a path that would have led Him to climb the ladder of rabbinical success and living to a ripe old age.  He decided with whom He would associate; the sick need a doctor and sinners need salvation.  He chose to criticize the religious leaders and to take on the customs of His day.  He chose to go to Jerusalem for the Passover, even though His Disciples warned Him not to, even though He knew it would mean His rejection and death.  In the garden on the night of His arrest, He prayed and asked God to allow Him a way out of His death if that would be possible; if not, then He had already decided to go through with God’s plan.  His anxiety was very real; sweat poured off of Him in such volumes that it was as if the sweat was pouring out of His arteries.  There would have been no death on a cross for Jesus if He hadn’t made that choice out of love for us sinners and love for His Heavenly Father.  It was His choice!

Why did Jesus die on a cross?  It was God’s will for Him to die for our sins, to be sure.  But He died because He was considered a lawbreaker whose words came back to haunt Him.  He died because of the treachery of His friends, Judas, you and me. He was done in by the politics of His day.  He chose to give His life for us!  Thanks be unto God for so great a salvation.  Amen.

Arthur H. Holt