Isaiah 52.13-53.12; Hebrews 9.15-28
In the middle of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus sizes up the state of God’s covenant people with a parable. According to Jesus, it’s really an allegory.
“Living in the Kingdom, living with me,” Jesus says, “it’s like this…”
A farmer sowed good seed in his field, wheat. Every which way you look over his acreage its amber waves of grain. But then one night, while his farmhands are fast asleep in the bunkhouse, the farmer’s enemy slips through the barbed-wire fence and scatters bad seed. The enemy sowed weeds among the wheat.
And the word Jesus uses for weeds is zizania.
It’s scientific name is Lolium temulentum.
In English, it’s darnel, an annual grass that, with its long, slender awns, or bristles, looks so much like wheat you could scarcely distinguish between the two.
When the plants come up and mature and the farmhands discover the fields aren’t as pure and unsullied as they had assumed, they go to the boss and say, “Sir, did you purchase, did we plant, bad seed? How come your fields are covered in weeds?”
“An enemy hath done this,” the boss answers rather cryptically.
“Alright then,” the farmer’s hired hands respond, “I suppose it’s our job now to go and pull up the weeds in your fields.”
“No, no, no,” the farmer replies, “Don’t you dare lift a finger where the weeds are concerned. You boys don’t have nearly the eyes you think you do. You start in there trying to pull up the weeds you’ll tear out the wheat too without realizing it and before long the whole farm will be ruined. You just leave the weeds alone. Leave the bad seeds to me. Let the wheat and the weeds grow up together. I’ll take care of it at the harvest when I give the reapers a ring.”
As soon as Jesus pulls Lazarus up from corruption in the earth, like a dormant tulip bulb, the high priest Caiaphas sees the threat Christ’s resurrection power will pose to the Principalities and Powers. Worried about his people’s fragile peace with Rome, Caiaphas reasons, “It is better that one man should die rather than the whole nation should perish.” So to speak, he’s simply looking out for all the plants in the field. Therefore, while Martha and Mary plug their noses and embrace their previously dead brother and while the astonished Lazarus pulls off his burial clothes, Caiaphas sets in motion the plot to make Mary’s boy Pilate’s victim.
Caiaphas, along with the other priests who rend their garments, weeping over his apparent blasphemy— they thought they were simply tearing away a weed that threatened the wheat. As it turns out, they crucified the LORD of the Harvest. They thought they were weeding when in fact they killed the Farmer. Taking the field into their own hands, they picked up a hammer and nailed him to a tree.
Just as Jesus prophesied his death with parables, after his death the apostles retold it by way of Israel’s story. And so the Gospels tell every detail of his passion in such a fashion that it refers back to their scriptures.
Those who bear witness against Jesus are false. This is the precise lament of those who suffer unjustly in the psalms.
Jesus remains silent under accusation; he suffers smiting and spitting. In this way, he resembles Isaiah’s suffering servant.
Soldiers throw dice for his clothes and passersby mock his naked shame. In so doing, they all unwittingly reenact the psalms.
He reenacts the psalms as well.
The cry of dereliction in Psalm 22.
The cry of thirst in Psalm 69.
The cry that is the commendation of the spirit in Psalm 31.
On his cross, Christ recapitulates them all.
We tend to use the language of fulfillment. The Gospels litter his path to Golgotha with Old Testament citations because his passion consummates these scripture passages— we suppose. Jesus even appears to speak as though he achieves their fulfillment. “Tetelestai,” he announces from his cross. “It is finished.” Of course, seldom do we probe to what precisely Jesus referred with that word it.
The language of fulfillment is perhaps too strong. We hear it as laudatory. As though, finally, everything was accomplished according to plan. But by making all their exegetical connections between his cross and their scriptures, the evangelists do not intend to praise Christ so much as to indict the covenant people.
Fulfill is the wrong word.
Denouement is the better word.
In Greek tragedy, the denouement is the moment when the plot’s villainy is finally exposed. His path to Calvary is strewn with the scriptures because this where the vocation of God’s elect people has led: to the death of God. This is why Gospel of John’s final plain allusion to the Old Testament (“Not one of his bones will be broken.”) hearkens to the terrible words from the prophet Zechariah: “Awake, O sword, against my shepherd…, that my sheep may be scattered. I will turn my hand against the little ones…When they look on the one whom they have pierced, they shall mourn.”
The passion story is the denouement of Israel’s story. The storyline of God’s set apart people leads to the murder of the LORD of the Harvest. Christ’s path to the cross is littered with Old Testament references because the death of Jesus is the death of Israel. He contains in himself the multitudes of dry bones the LORD unveiled to the prophet Ezekiel. “Son of man,” God says to Ezekiel, “these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.””
In rooting out what they took to be a threatening weed, God’s people reap nothing but the ultimate ruination of their vocation.
The death of Jesus is the death of Israel.
The death of Israel is the death of the covenant.
The covenant is the it in “It is finished.”
Just so—
The crucifixion is not a sacrifice.
In Cormac McCarthy’s greatest novel Blood Meridian, the antagonist called only the Judge is a malevolent, violent character who unleashes his appetites upon the world. At one point in the macabre story, the Judge asks with malicious wit:
“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?”
The only good in Good Friday is the audacious claim that God in the Son through their Spirit has done to the degeneracy of mankind exactly so.
“He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace…”
The verbs in the fourth and final Servant Song (pierced, crushed, oppressed, afflicted, slaughter) are not cultic terms; that is, they do not refer to a Mosaic sacrifice. Moreover, the song compares the Servant to a sheep prepared for shearing, but sheep prepared for sacrifice in the temple were not sheared. For that matter, animals presented to God in the temple were not to be altered, abused, or disfigured in any way as this would make them unfit gifts to offer to God. And nowhere does scripture posit the animals sacrificed to the LORD in the temple as objects of divine wrath.
The one animal scripture does stipulate as an object of God’s anger, the one animal that does have the people’s sins and guilt imputed onto it, is the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement. Critically, the scapegoat is not sacrificed. The scapegoat cannot be sacrificed. The scapegoat bears the sins and guilt of all the people. Therefore, it cannot be sacrificed because a sacrifice can only be offered in the presence of God in the tabernacle, the place where neither sin nor guilt can go. The whole purpose of the scapegoat is to bear the sins and guilt of the people far away from God’s presence. Only then may the high priest enter into the holy of holies and offer an atoning sacrifice.
The Servant Song does not sing about a sacrifice.
If so, what are we to make of the promise unveiled to the prophet Isaiah? What do we do with those verbs— pierced and crushed, afflicted and oppressed? Slaughtered? If the commandments forbid the abuse of sacrificial animals, what are we to make of the lamb, beaten and spat upon and nailed to a tree? If Golgotha is not a sacrifice, then what is it? If Mary’s boy is more than Pilate’s victim— if he is not merely the passive object of divine or human wrath, then what work does Jesus do between noon and three on a Friday afternoon?
Nearly six centuries before Christmas, the LORD exiled his elect people from Israel to Babylon. Like Jesus in the Garden the evening before Good Friday, God handed them over. The LORD even allows his “servant,” the pagan King Nebuchadnezzar, to destroy God’s dwelling place on earth, the temple in Jerusalem.
For his people’s idolatry and unfaithfulness, disobedient greed and contempt for the poor, God exiles them to a pagan land. The LORD says to them, You want to live like a pagan? Go live with the pagans. There by the rivers of Babylon, under the curses of the covenant they did not keep, the LORD refuses to accept the sacrifices his people attempt to offer to him.
A generation into their exile, the Word of the LORD comes to the prophet Isaiah and promises a divinely-ordained turn from anger to mercy. Isaiah prophesies a Servant, an Israelite for all of Israel, whose suffering and death will have a special extra-sacrificial role in the dynamics of God’s covenantal relationship with his people. This Servant’s vicarious suffering and death will reboot the covenant relationship when it is so broken no sacrifices can be offered. After all, biblically speaking, the purpose of sacrifice is to maintain the people’s relationship with God, and there is no surer sign of that relationship’s brokenness than the people’s high priest declaring to Pontius Pilate on Good Friday, “We have no king but Caesar!”
The Suffering Servant is not a sacrificial offering.
The Servant is the substitute necessary to restore the covenantal sacrifice.
He is not a guilt offering.
He is guilty— he carries in himself all our sins.
And he bears them away.
Just as the mob screams at him, “Take him away!”
He is not a sacrifice.
He is a substitute.
The Servant bears our sins away.
So far away from the presence the Father that he descends even to the grave.
He drags our guilt and trespass, all of it, to the depths of the very opposite of God: Death. When the Son cries out with Psalm 22 “My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me?” by their own triune decision, Jesus has traveled further from the Father than any scapegoat could ever venture.
With the Father, through their Spirit, God the Son submits to the degeneracy of mankind to take it away, to reverse the curse, and restore the covenant, making it possible once again for a high priest to offer sacrifice on his people’s behalf.
Only now, God’s people have a different high priest in heaven.
That selfsame Servant.
Jesus the Friend of Sinners.
As New Testament scholar David Moffitt writes:
“Jesus’ first appearance on earth was for the purpose of bearing sins away, which required being away from his Father. His appearance before the Father in the heavenly tabernacle allows him, as the great high priest, to offer himself to God as the sacrifice that makes atonement and to intercede on behalf of his siblings.
The Son, then, died on earth bearing sins. By his resurrection and ascension, he returned to his Father to offer himself as the perpetual sacrifice that purifies, perfects, and sanctifies his people while they wait to enter their inheritance.”
The crucifixion is not a sacrifice.
The cross is the substitution when sacrifices no longer work, when anyone else might look upon God’s people’s performance of their covenant obligations and declare, “It is finished.”
When Jesus prophesies his death, he does so with parables.
Like the story he spins just before he predicts the destruction of the temple:
“Once upon a time, there was a fat cat who bought a vineyard up in Napa. When it came time for harvesting the grapes, the vineyard owner sent some of his interns up north with a message, and dammit if the fruit pickers didn’t beat one, kill another, and stone still another. The rich guy, though, he’s an odd one. The owner of the vineyard doesn’t react the way you might expect.
He doesn’t call the police, disappear them to El Salvador, or take his helicopter up to Napa to take matters into his own hands. No, he hands over another message and sends another company car full of overachieving interns to the vineyard.
But the fruit pickers do the same to them too. They zip tie them to the grapevines and beat the life out of them. Fool me once, fool me twice— would you believe this fat cat didn’t learn his lesson with these rotten, no-good workers? Seriously, he tells himself, “If I give the message to my son, if I send my son up there, surely, they’ll listen to him.” As soon as they hear the kid’s car coming up the gravel drive, the fruit pickers look to each other and say, “This awol vineyard owner is never going to come around here. If we off his son, we can have this place to ourselves.” So they take him across the property line and kill him.” “Now,” Jesus says to his listeners, “What do you reckon this father will do when he learns they’ve murdered his son in a shameful fashion and left his body in the brush, forsaken like trash? Messenger after messenger, what do you guess this father will do after they’ve killed his ultimate message-bearer?”
“Surely, he will put those wretches to a miserable death!” they answer so fast not a one even raised their hand.”
Surely, that is what we would do.
But that is not what the triune God does to his wretched humanity.
On Good Friday, God in Christ does what we would never guess.
The Vineyard Owner becomes a Servant and bears it all away.
He reverses the curse. He takes away all our trespasses into the outer darkness so that what was broken can be mended and what is mended can be maintained.
Ever since my battery of tests came back in December, life has reacquainted me with my mortality. Twice a day I self-administer chemotherapy and a fist-full of pills. No one gets out of life alive, but when you choke down the fact of it four times every day you realize the truth about yourself.
I need more than a Substitute for my guilt.
I need more than a Savior from my sins.
And so do you.
You need a Priest whose prayers you can be damn sure get heard.
Because even on my best day, I am not who the Word worded me to be.
So hear the good news.
We have no bread and wine tonight. We have no water. But we need neither since the gospel itself is the word in which Christ gives himself to us.
Hear his good news:
Good Friday is not the dead center of the gospel.
Good Friday is only one part of Jesus Christ’s work.
For you.
Good Friday simply inaugurates the new age of Atonement.
Because of Good Friday, Christ Jesus is today and tomorrow and the next day until the end of days interceding for you with the Father, working on you in the Spirit, and through the Word he is fashioning you as though a new creation. One day, even his wicked tenants and foolhardy laborers will be transformed into the likeness of the LORD of the Harvest. Surely, Mary’s boy will settle at nothing less before he finally declares, “It is finished.”
“You are finished.”
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