Matthew 27.32-44
In an undated essay on homiletics entitled “The Preacher, the Text, and Certain Dogmas,” my former teacher, Robert Jenson— the theologian who lives rent free in my head, asserts that the ancient ecumenical councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon stipulated not simply the triune identity of Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim. The creeds, Jenson insists, set forth the parameters for “right preaching” and faithful biblical interpretation. Because the crucified Jesus is the risen LORD, the Son of the Father with their Spirit, every biblical text is and every sermon is to be existential address. Scripture passages and sermon proclamation are not speech about God; they are the word of God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, the scripture and the sermon are how Jesus happens to us. Just so, says Jenson, every passage of scripture functions simultaneously as both law and gospel. It is not the case that there is a distinction between testaments, New and Old, or that the Bible sets forth commands in some places and elsewhere offers promises.
Quite the opposite, every passage of scripture functions simultaneously as both law and gospel.
As Jenson writes:
“The duality of law and gospel is demanded by the content of text and sermon, as specified by Nicaea and Chalcedon. In that the content of every biblical text is Jesus, the crucified and risen one, every text as his active address both crucifies and raises, opens the future as threat and opens the future as fulfillment, is law and is gospel, command and promise both, grace and accusation. The task of sermon exegesis, that is supposed to activate the text as address, is to discover the text’s law and the text’s gospel.”
Of course, the LORD Jesus is alive not only in the scriptures and he is present in places other than a preacher’s lips. The creedal logic thus applies to our lives as well; in that, through every story— not only biblical stories— Christ has the power to accuse us but also the the power to make a promise only God can promise. Which brings me to a name you know, a story you think you know, and a prayer almost none of you remember.
On September 11, 2001 a businessman for Oracle Corporation named Todd Beamer waited at his gate at Newark Liberty International Airport. He had booked a nonstop flight to San Francisco for a work meeting followed by a return flight to New Jersey later that night. In addition to his sons, David and Drew, his wife Lisa was pregnant with their third child and Todd wanted to minimize the time he spent away from home.
A graduate of Wheaton College, a private Christian school in Chicago, Todd Beamer was an ardent evangelical. When FBI investigators later examined Beamer’s car in the airport parking lot, they discovered a stack of Bible verse memorization cards. He taught Sunday School at Princeton Alliance Church where, that fall, the pastor was in the midst of a twelve week sermon series on the LORD’s Prayer. Todd had been particularly convicted, his wife later shared, by the prayer’s fifth petition. The preacher had made the familiar fresh for Todd. Astonished by new insight, he had excitedly told his wife after worship that Sunday, “We pray for our enemies every time we say the LORD’s Prayer.”
On that Tuesday morning in September, Todd Beamer’s cross-country flight never made it past Western Pennsylvania. Delayed forty minutes, United Flight 93 took off just four minutes before an American Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. The pilots of the United flight learned of the morning’s three crashes— terrorist attacks— only moments before hijackers took over their cockpit. Huddled in the rear of the cabin with the other passengers, Todd Beamer attempted to call his wife Lisa using a Verizon Airfone but he was instead routed to a GTE supervisor in Oakbrook, Illinois named Lisa Jefferson.
Todd spoke with the operator, whose name was the same as his wife’s name, for thirteen minutes. He told her the plan upon which he and an unknown number of fellow passengers had determined: to charge United Flight 93’s cockpit and force a crash landing in a Shanksville field before the plane could be used as a weapon of mass destruction. “I have to go out on faith,” he confided to Lisa Jefferson about his fatal next steps. Lisa Jefferson promised him that she would remain on the line until the end. She later told Todd’s wife that she was able to remain calm during the phone call because Todd himself was so calm.
“He was calmed” she clarified.
Lisa Jefferson said the last words she heard from Todd Beamer before the line went dead were “Help me Jesus.” “He said it as though Jesus himself was right there with him in the midst of that dread and dying.”
Every story is both law and gospel.
In every story, Jesus has the power to hand over a promise.
For us.
In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus directly encounters the Devil or his demons on seven different occasions whereas Mark, whose Gospel is only sixteen chapters long, reports nine such confrontations. As much as he is a teacher or a prophet, Jesus is an exorcist; however, in the Gospels the exorcisms cease once the Passion commences. After he triumphantly enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Jesus no longer engages Satan in such discrete conflicts; that is, during his final week, Jesus does not perform a miracle on behalf of a possessed person. Rather Matthew reveals that demonic possession is in fact endemic, for the Enemy has the power to ensnare not just an individual person but an entire population.
Notice:
Three different groups of people taunt Jesus with the same temptation, “If you are the Son of God, save yourself! Come down from your cross.”
Immediately following his baptism by John, the Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness in order for him to fast for forty days and forty nights. The Devil breaks Christ’s fast by proffering three enticements. Satan tempts Jesus to demonstrate his power over nature, to compel the Father’s miraculous rescue of him, and to bypass suffering by seizing dominion over the very kingdoms that will crucify him. Before the cross, those who mock and revile him consolidate Satan’s three temptations into a single sentence, “Do one last miracle, Jesus. Come down from your cross!”
The purpose of Rome’s torture was terrorism, to inflict fear among those whom the empire occupied; therefore, Caesar crucified his victims along well-traveled roads. Thus does Jesus die, naked and shamed, on the shoulder of a highway amidst holiday traffic. The passersby are the first to tempt him. They wag their heads at him— just as Psalm 22 prophesied. And then they test him— just as Satan had done in the desert, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” These are just random passersby. How do they know Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple? What’s more, “If you are the Son of God…” is an exact quote from his trial in the wilderness where there were no other witnesses, where it was just Jesus versus the Devil.
Remember, Satan is a self with no substance.
These passersby so speak because an other inhabits them.
The religious leaders (the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders— all of them) are the next to tempt Jesus with the Devil’s miracle, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and then we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he said, “I am the Son of God.”” Note the irony. Those who had accused Jesus of being in league with Satan now parrot the Devil’s temptations.
Finally, those crucified with him, Matthew reports, die with Satan’s words on their lips. Three times in the desert, the Devil tempts him with a performing a miracle. Three times on the cross, the Devil tempts him with doing the very same miracle. In each case, as it was in the wilderness so is it on Calvary. Jesus does not yield.
Make no mistake. Jesus could have come down from his cross. More so than he is handed over by Judas, Jesus hands himself over in the garden. Good Friday is not his funeral as much as it is his undertaking. As Jesus says in Gethsemane upon his arrest, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” The temptation is a temptation precisely because it is within his power to perform. Jesus can disappear the nails in his hands and feet with no more trouble than he restored Malchus’ severed ear. He can, but he will not come down from his cross. Just as he refuses to turn stones into bread— that is, something other than what God has made them— Jesus will not become someone other than the one for whom all things are created.
When the Devil tempted him in the wilderness, Jesus— the God who is human— responded to each lure with his own Word.
“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
“You shall not put the LORD your God to the test.”
“You shall worship the LORD your God and him only shall you serve.”
But when Satan tempts him at his cross, Jesus is silent. He replies not at all. He does not appear to do anything because— like the Resurrection— God creating, God making to be that which was not, is not something we can see. As the fifth century Martyrology of Jerome puts it, “On March 25, Good Friday, our LORD Jesus Christ was crucified, conceived, and the world was made.”
On the one hand, I am loathe to talk about myself. On the other hand, I think Christians ought to know their preachers actually believe what they proclaim— that I personally depend upon the promises I preach. Almost a year ago, I was sitting in my oncologist’s office staring at a printout of the latest biopsy report and CT scan, which confirmed my cancer had not only returned but riddled my whole body. I bit my lip and nodded as I did not listen to whatever else he said to me. Then with his hand against the small of my back, like we were at a middle school dance, my doctor guided me to the small office occupied by his administrative nurse. After I signed all the pages she showed me, acknowledging the risks associated with the chemo I will continue to take twice a day until it stops working, she said to me— with an unthinking smile: “And after insurance, it will only cost you twelve thousand dollars a month.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “Did you say twelve hundred dollars a month?”
She nodded, still smiling. In her defense, nearly all patients with my diagnosis are more than twice my age. By some miracle, so far, it has only cost a fraction of her quote. But l did not know that at the time. So I left her office only to sit in the parking lot in my Jeep. After I wept and after I raged, I prayed. I do not remember exactly what I prayed, but I do recall that I heard Jesus say— I am charismatic enough to believe we can hear him. “Suffering has suffered me,” I heard Jesus say, “There is now no forsakenness exempt from my nearness.”
And my experience has not proven him a liar.
“Help me Jesus.”
“He said it,” Lisa Jefferson recalls, “as though Jesus himself was right there with him in the midst of that dread and dying.”
Every story is both law and gospel. In every story, Jesus has the power to raise us and to rebuke us. Just as every story can accuse us, so too every story has the power to hand over a promise to us.
In the case of Todd Beamer’s story, his dying exemplifies the promise in the Passion. The shadow in the valley of death is cast by the wounded body of Jesus as he hangs upon his cross. Jesus does not reply to the Devil’s temptations; Jesus does not appear to do anything at all. Because he is God at work creating, hallowing even suffering and abandonment and death as places where he may be found.
But every story is law too.
Every story can also accuse us.
For example—
It is to our judgment that nearly every American knows Todd Beamer’s last words, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” It reveals much about us— the impoverishment of our faith, our preference for the heroic over the holy, warriors rather than saints— that far fewer know how Todd Beamer’s penultimate words were prayer for his enemies. Before letting go of the phone and striding forward to his end, he asked Lisa Jefferson of Verizon Airfone if she would pray the prayer of Jesus with him. Two days after worship, its fifth petition still astonished him.
We pray for our enemies every time we say the LORD’s Prayer.
There is much about the story we do not actually know. We do not know how many other passengers joined Todd Beamer charge. We do not know if they struggled with the hijackers. We do not know if they wounded or killed the terrorists or if the trespassed so trespassed them. We do not know if Todd was alive the moment the plane impacted against the Pennsylvania field, or if he had held out a glimmer of hope that he and others might survive the crash. There is a lot about the story we do not know. What we do know is that in a space of enmity, Todd Beamer took the time to pray for his enemies.
Likely, you did not know that fact.
Not only does “Let’s roll” sound more like what we take to be heroic, it is easier to say than, “Forgive them for they know not what they are doing.”
Every passage of the scriptures functions as both gospel and law, promise and accusation.
On the cross, Jesus is doing more than “trampling down death by death.” By his dying, Jesus is doing more than “blotting out the charges against us.” He is doing more than “redeeming us through his blood.”
He is giving birth to his body.
As Paul writes to the Colossians, “For you have died, and your life is hidden now with Christ in God.” Paul makes plain the implications of the cross to the churches in Galatia, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live according to the faithfulness of the Son of God.” “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death,” Paul proclaims to the Romans, “so that we too might walk in newness of life.”
We want a cross by which we receive the forgiveness of our trespasses. We want a cross that makes it so that when we suffer and die we do not suffer and die alone. But a cross that makes possible for us the kind of life that landed him on Calvary in the first place? No thank you— “Let’s roll.” Is it any wonder that we so often speak of the gospel as though it is the news that Jesus has rescued us from the burden of being Christians?
At its heart, the temptation for Jesus to save himself by a miracle is a summons for him to abandon his humanity altogether. But for Jesus to stop being human is to stop being God. As Rowan Williams says, Jesus is not just one person among others, not just another thing in the room. Jesus is God precisely as this human. Just so, in his dying— in trusting the Father, in making his Mother our Mother, in forgiving his enemies— Jesus is showing us what it is like to be human. On the cross, Jesus is creating our humanity, the humanity to which we are called.
In a Good Friday sermon from 1457, Nicholas of Cusa imagines a conversation at the foot of the cross between Mary and John the Beloved Disciple. As their exchange draws to a close, John turns to the Mother of God and says that her son’s cross “enfolds all possible love.” In dying as he did, John marvels, Jesus loved God— and he loved me, he loved you, he loved every person who has ever lived and every person still to come. And he loved us with all the love that has ever been or ever will be: loving divinely and humanly at once, thereby divinizing human love and humanizing divine love. In that act, John insists, Christ opened to us a share in the uncreated love that is his very life, enabling us to love God and our neighbor with the same love by which God loves them—and by which God loves God.
On the cross, Jesus makes it so that we can love with his love.
We can walk as he walked— 1 John 2.6
We can act as he acted— John 13.15.
We can forgive as he forgave— Colossians 3.13.
We can follow his example— 1 Peter 2.21.
And we can have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus— Philippians 2.5.
This is the law of the gospel.
Jesus does not rescue us from the burden of being Christians!
On top of the stack of Bible verse cards that the FBI later found in Todd Beamer’s car at the Newark airport, the verse he had committed to memory that morning, was a short passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The verses were from chapter eleven of the epistle, the place where Paul marvels at God’s work in Christ to reconcile the hostility between Gentile and Jew— that same love God has poured into our hearts.
As my friend Chris Green says of our duty to imitate Christ, “We should because we can; and also, we can because we should.”
Near the end of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:
“To those who have heard the call to be disciples of Jesus Christ is given the incomprehensibly great promise that they are to become like Christ. They are to bear his image as the brothers and sisters of the Son of God. To become “like Christ” is what disciples are ultimately destined to become. For disciples, it is not possible to look at the image of the Son of God in aloof, detached contemplation; this image exerts a transforming power.
All those who submit themselves completely to Jesus Christ will, indeed must, bear his image…It is our unfathomable mystery as human beings that we are creatures and yet are called to be like the Creator…The life of Jesus Christ here on earth has not yet concluded. Christ continues to live it in the lives of his followers.
To describe this reality we must not speak about our Christian life but about the true life of Jesus Christ in us…Because he was as we are, we can be as he was.”
In a book written after Todd Beamer’s death, his wife, Lisa, wrote:
“What made Todd different from many other men who are merely religious was not the fact that he was willing to die for his faith; the terrorists were willing to die for their faith! Perhaps that is why they frighten us. No, Todd was willing to live for his faith. Although I’d never before heard of Todd reciting the Lord’s Prayer in pressure situations, I wasn’t surprised to hear he had prayed it. Recently our pastor had taught a twelve-week series of lessons on the Lord’s Prayer. Todd had known the prayer since childhood, but each line of it had become more special to him as he discovered how fraught with meaning it really was.
The part of the prayer that intrigued Todd was the line in which Jesus taught us to ask God to forgive our trespasses, or sins, as we forgive those who trespass against us. When Lisa Jefferson told me my husband had prayed that particular prayer, I felt certain that, in the moments before he died, Todd was forgiving the terrorists for what they were doing. That is the man Jesus made Todd to be.”
So here it is, the law of the gospel:
Jesus does not rescue you from the burden of being Christian.
He rescues you for it.
He does not save you from the cross.
He saves you to share his life: to forgive as he forgave, to pray for your enemies as he prayed for his, to trust the Father when every voice inside your head says you are abandoned, to love with the love that “enfolds all possible love,”
to become— by grace— what he is by nature.
This is both the command and the promise in every passage.
Christ is creating in you the humanity revealed in God.
And because he lives, because he refused the Devil’s final miracle, because he would not come down from the tree that bore the world, you can become what you behold.
Just as Todd Beamer prayed not only for courage but for forgiveness,
just as he whispered “Help me Jesus” as though Jesus were sitting right beside him— because Jesus was— so Christ is not merely the subject of our prayers but the life within our praying.
He is not the object of our imitation but the power by which we imitate.
He is the one in whom we already have died and in whom we now live.
This is the gospel: Christ in you.
And this is the law: Christ in you.
The same love that would not come down from the cross now will not leave you as you are.
And so the question that confronts us, the question that both accuses us and promises us, is not “Will you be heroic?” but “Will you be holy?” As Leon Bloy, the Catholic novelist, says, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”
Will you be holy?
You cannot do it on your own.
You were never meant to do it on your own.
Which is why, before he carried his cross as far as he could take it, before he was silent before Satan’s taunts, before he hallowed even death as the place where God may be found— he set this table.
On the night he handed himself over, knowing exactly what love would cost him, he broke bread and poured wine— not as a farewell gesture but as the ongoing form of his own self-giving life.
Here, in loaf and cup, he gives you what he commands of you.
Here, wine and bread contain the love that “enfolds all possible love”
You should because you can.
You can because he is here.
So come— not because you are brave enough, not because you are righteous enough, not because you have lived as he lived— but because he is here, giving you his life; so that, you can live as he lived.
He did not come down from his cross.
But he does come down to you in bread and wine.
Receive him.
And let the one who would not save himself save you for himself— that his life might be lived in you for the life of the world.
