Good Friday Psalm 22:1,7-8,12-18,27-28
The Kingdom of Heaven Matthew 26:31 – 27:37
“YOU SAID IT!”
As students of the Messiah, one can't miss it. It permeates the gospels and echoes throughout his parables. It's inseparable from the man and his message. It bites and it stings. It challenges our assumptions as it anticipates and whispers of crucifixion. It's as pervasive as it is offensive.
It's the unmistakeable quality known as the irony of the cross and there our crucified King.
We're no strangers to irony. We embrace it for it's ability to spice up a good novel or movie. We love the irony of how an ugly duckling becomes a beautiful swan, or how a lying, scared puppet becomes a real boy by saving his father from the belly of a whale or how a powerful wizard finds hope and encouragement in the facce of evil in the exploits of the smallest and most ordinary of people. We love a good irony in the stories we write, read and watch. We even find some irony amusing.
I giggled for example at hearing a youngster having trouble pronouncing the word, “articulate”, or hearing that some people are actually allergic to antihistamines. How does that work? I even saw someone with a bumper sticker in town that boldly declared: 'Things I Hate!' Below that was a list of hated things including: 1) Bumper stickers, 2) Irony, 3) Lists, and 4) Tailgaters.
Nothing like a little tongue in cheek to brighten your week, eh? But what about when it comes to relating to and trusting in God? Not so sure most of us are quite so wild about irony exhibited there. And yet, Jesus was a master of irony. His teachings and stories are saturated with it. As we've explored his teachings and parables of the Kingdom of Heaven, we've heard numerous examples of Jesus using irony to teach, convict and provoke. Consider the following examples:
“Blessed are those who are humble, for they will inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5)
“The kingdom of heaven is like a tiny mustard seed planted in a field.” (Matthew 13:31)
“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”
(Matthew 16:25)
“Many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.” (Matthew 19:30)
“Anyone who becomes as humble as a little child is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
(Matthew 18:4)
“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26-28)
“God blesses those who are persecuted for doing right, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”
(Matthew 5:10)
So what do you make of all of that? What was Jesus saying? What was he doing if not turning the expectations and values of the world, the expectations of us would be followers, on its head? The more he spoke, the more people shuddered at the implications of what he was saying. If we take to heart what he was getting at, we would shudder anew. He uses irony to draw us out of complacency!
Matthew, by the time he put his gospel in writing, surely got it, evident in that as he relays to us the events of Jesus' passion, the irony of it all deepens and quickens in depth and pace.
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Check it out! Note all the references, even from Jesus' many adversaries, to Jesus' identity as king. First, there's the chief priest, Ciaphas, who drills Jesus with false accusations until, out of pure exasperation to land a single hit, culminates in his asking,: “Are you the Messiah?” (Matthew 26:63)
Jesus response? “You said it!” (Matthew 26:64)
Later the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, nervous that Jesus may pose a political threat, asks: “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus offers the same response as before: “You said it!” It's as if he's saying not only to them, but to all those also seeking the truth, I am just as you say! Messiah/king!
(Matthew 27:11)
His kingship is ironically mocked and yet verified by the soldiers who dress him in a royal scarlet robe, like the one Pilate was probably wearing, fit him with a crown of thorns and stick a make shift scepter in his hand, shouting all the while: “Hail! King of the Jews!” (Matthew 27:29)
The irony is that we, with Matthew know, that he is in fact, King of the Jews and king of kings. The Jewish leaders ironically ask, “So he's king of Israel, is he?” in response to the plaque that Pilate has had posted over his head, that publicly announces: “This is Jesus, king of the Jews!”
(Matthew 27:37,42)
The biting irony of Jesus' Kingdom of Heaven message and ministy has reaches a fevered pitch as Jesus accusers mock him with words that affirm the irony of the cosmos – God begins & ends here!
The passion of Jesus presses the question for all of humanity throughout all of history ever since Jesus hung there beneath a sign declaring, “This is Jesus, king of the Jews!” So he's king, is he...?
What kind of King subjects himself to the humiliating death of a criminal, an enemy of the state as it were? In a season where many are buying into the narrative that we need to take back what we've lost, of reclaiming our positions of power and influence in government and society we risk the kingdom that Jesus demonstrated and intiated, not from a position of power but of sacrifice! How do you make sense of the provocative irony that we are presented here with – that of the suffering servant king that came not to be served, but to serve, and lay down his life as a ranson, and invited us to follow his lead?
In God's ironic game plan, what we regard as weakness and disadvantage, may well serve to further God's will, a truth that Jesus emphasized in nearly all his stories and human contacts. He held up the good Samaritan, not the Bible savy religious leaders, as a model of mercy. His first missionary was another Samaritan, a woman with five failed marriages. He pointed to a pagan soldier as the best example of faith and transformed a greedy cheat into a model of generosity. He left his ministry in the hands of uneducated Galileans, a people described as living in darkness, who were initially led by the traitor, Peter. Each choice Jesus made underscores God's ironic plan, where power is redefined.
As Bill Wilson, founder of AA put it: “How privileged we are to understand so well the divine irony that strength rises from weakness, that humiliation goes before resurrection: that pain is not the only price but the very touchsone of spiritual rebirth.” (Bill Wilson of Alcoholics Anonymous)
Years ago during my college years I applied to be a senior counselor at Green Wing Bible Camp. Here's the naked truth. I didn't seek to work there because I was hungry for God's word or because I wanted to lead young people to Christ. I wanted to work there because I knew that the camp hired college age students as counselors to lead exciting back-pack trips into the Colorado Rockies, and adventure canoe trips on the Current River in Missouri, and weeklong horse-back trips across Illinois. I was in it for the adventure and the glory! Show me the glory!
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But God had other plans. Because I was not the legal age of 21, I wound up not going on a single one of those. The only one I was allowed to go was the horseback trip and that week I got sick. Instead, I was put in charge of the staff working with handicampers and inner city kids from Chicago.
To say these were less glamorous was an understatement. I remember sitting on a bus trying to keep an angry, violent handicamper from hurting himself by putting myself between him and the bus window he was hitting his head against. I remember thinking, “What am I doing here? I should be leading the dynamic leaders of tomorrow down the Current River or up a glacier in the rockies!”
As it turns out, it was precisely through and because of my experiences working with feisty city kids, who leaned into me as a result of their fear of the woods at night, and my ability to see Christ in handicampers who loved unconditionally, that God planted the first seeds of ministry in my heart. I'll forever be thankful that God redirected me precisely thru what was initially painfully disappointing...
The Bible repeatedly celebrates God's ironic use of painful, humbling events to serve a desired result. Three-fourths of the Bible record the spectacular failure of God's covenant with the Israelites. At the end of the Old Testament, the dream of bringing light to the Gentiles dissolves as Gentile armies all but annihilate the chosen vessels of that light. Yet as the apostle Paul looks back on that history, his own ethnic history, he sees a major advance. Apart from Israel's “no”, the Christian church would have remained a minor Jewish messianic sect; rejection freed the Gospel to spread across the known world. I remember standing in the ruins of Philippi, during my sabbatical, and having a powerful, spine-tingling experience of the Holy Spirit, as I stood in the spot where Paul announced for the first time the gospel to the pagan, non-Jewish world..., precisely because of the Jewish rejection.
I stood there aware in a new way that on Roman roads built by the Caesars to subject conquered peoples to their pagan worldview, Paul carried the message of God's love across the empire. Even when he, as had Jesus and most of the twelve, had died at the hands of Roman “justice”, God's ironic pattern prevailed. Jesus' execution accomplished the salvation of the world. “Your grief will turn to joy!” he had promised. Later the martyr's blood further acclerated church growth. “The blood of Christians is the seed of Christianity”, wrote Tertuillian, one of the great early church fathers.
(John 16:20)
Ever since, attempts to eliminate the faith have, ironically, led it's greatest advances. Jesus was a man of irony – presenting thru the Beautitudes that God blesses the poor, the grieved, the persecuted. Over and over again, but particularly from the cross of calvary, we learn that a relationship with God does not promise supernatural deliverance from hardship, but rather a supernatural use of it!
A colleague of mine recently proudly told me that he and his church don't observe Good Friday because every day is Good Friday, and a red flag was hoisted inside of me. It's reminiscent of a line from a movie in which a person quips: “If every day is a holiday, then no day is really a holiday.”
Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Christian philosopher who lost his son Eric in a climbing accident, wrote both of his renewal as well as his deep struggle with pain, loss and doubt along the way.
“How do I perceive suffering as blessing while repulsing the obscene thought that God juggled the mountain to make me better? Somehow, by His grace, I came to recognize that to redeem our brok-enness and lovelessness the God who suffers with us did not strike some mighty blow of power but sent his beloved son to suffer like us, through his suffering to redeem us from suffering and evil. Instead of explaining our suffering, God shares it, achieving triumph via his ironic style of redemption.”
(from Nicholas Wolterstorff's Lament For A Son)
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So it is that songwriter could sing “on the cross of Christ I glory!” David anticipated it when he wrote Psalm 22 that contains more specific prophetic elements of Jesus' passion than any other text - of his being forsaken by God, of his being mocked and insulted by those observing his death, of his hands and feet being pierced long before crucifixion had been invented, even of the soldiers throwing dice for his clothing, and yet concludes in the ultimate expression of God's great ironic redemption plan: “All the families of the nations will bow down before him. His royal power belongs to the Lord. He rules all the nations!” (Psalm 22:27-28) This is the kind of King that rules the Kingdom of Heaven!
That's the beauty of God's irony! In the words of Jesus himself - “You said it!”
(Matthew 26:64)