I put him there.  I know why and for what.  You put him there.  You know why, and for what.  We don’t get to Easter, we don’t get to get there, without Jesus on that hill, on the cross, rejected, crowned with cruel thorns, bleeding, dying.  He went of his own will to do the will of his Father.  He hefted that rough load down and through the streets of Jerusalem and out and up to Golgotha.  When he fell, and fell, and fell again, he got up again, took up the cross again, and continued on his way.  Under the open sky, he laid down upon the cross of his own will.  He let us hammer iron spikes through his left hand and his right, through his feet, of his own will.  Of his own will, he prayed, “Father, forgive them.”

The night before, there in the garden of betrayal, Jesus says to Peter, to them all, “Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?”  It’s as though Jesus were saying he hasn’t come so far to stop now.  Nor have we.  Like Jesus, disciples carry through on their commitment to love and serve God entirely, and to love those among whom God has placed us.  We’re all missionaries, beloved.  We’re always bringing Christ, offering grace, to those around us.  The world rejects Christ, just as it rejects God.  The world wants its own gods, gods after its own heart.  But not everyone rejects God; not everyone rejects Christ.  At the foot of the cross, among the mockers, were also those who wept, who cried out to God in their stricken hearts: must it be?  Why?  What have we done!?

Jesus instructs us to take up our cross each day and to walk with him.  We don’t walk deceived or deceiving ourselves.  By the grace of the Spirit, we walk clear-eyed.  We walk confident that Christ himself is with us, to help shoulder the weight.  The weight isn’t happy, it’s hard, but the help is holy: O, to know the touch of the strength of Christ, the smell of his garments—the earthiness of wood, the spice of heavenly incense—the glory of his sweat, the grace of his smile: I’ve got you!  Hold on to me.

It’s an awful cup Jesus has been given, an awful cup to drink dry.  Let me call your thoughts, your hearts to this: who gives this cup to Jesus?  Not the priests.  Not the Romans.  Not Satan.  The Father.  The sending, the proclaiming, the healing, the suffering, the condemnation, the cross—all from the Father, arranged before the beginning.  We walk in a deep place in the mind of God, beloved: a place of great mysteries, awful wonder, and unmeasurable love.  It has never been God’s desire to hurt or to wound: God means to save.  Salvation, as we have seen, is through the suffering sacrifice of the Son: by his wounds, we are healed.

When we drink the cup during Communion, we drink the cup of blessing, the cup of life.  We could not have that cup, we could not drink its abundant mercy and peace, without this other cup, given to Jesus to drink, given him by his Father.

Scripture tells us about this cup, we hear about it, this cup of suffering, this cup of woe—Job knew it—this cup of wrath about which the prophets cried in anguish.  Wrath—that consuming anger, righteous anger that comes because of transgression, because of disobedience, disregard for the instructions and expectations of God.  Righteousness demands righteousness, beloved.  Justice must be satisfied.  Shall we satisfy our desire for justice, but forbid God to satisfy His?  Is it justice only when we are in the right?  Is it all just cruelty and injustice against us, when we are the ones in the wrong?  Isn’t that the way of children?

God showed us, gave us the way to life.  We didn’t want it, didn’t want that, most.  That doesn’t apply only to Adam and Eve, or to those who even today walk without Christ, who want no part of him.  I was reading a pastor who wrote something like people know they are sinners; what they want to know is that there is hope.  In other words, there is no need, it is not helpful, to call attention to sin.  Other advice I have read is don’t preach judgment, preach grace.  Judgment without grace is no gospel, that’s true!  Neither is grace without judgment.  Grace is grace precisely because of judgment!  In the days when, by grace and the insistent call of the Spirit, I recommitted myself to faith in Jesus Christ, I was standing at a window, reading in the Bible, in John.  I read this: “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life” (Jn 5:24).  I felt the tears, unexpected, welling up in my eyes, tears from the treasure house of my heart, tears of sorrow and love.  Judgment has passed over me, because Christ took the death appointed for me in my sins, my disobedience and disregard: he died that I might live.  It should have been me.  It should have been you.  But that’s not what God wanted.  God does not delight in the death of anyone.  God means to save.  You are living proof of that.  That cross is a constant, blessed reminder.

People, including believers, are so confused about sin, about love, about God’s Word and God’s way.  The more I read the Bible and reflect upon what I’m reading, the more it seems to me that this confusion has been with humanity a very, very long time.  Because what people seem to want is their way, God’s blessings on their way.  They’ll brook no questions, no words of brotherly or sisterly counsel.  They don’t want to be told (who is anybody to tell them?) that the way they are pursuing is not God’s way, not the way of blessing and life.  And if God won’t bless, if the Bible says the way they’re pursuing is not God’s way, why, well, no thanks, God!  Not my God.  Not my Bible.

The cross is our testimony that we didn’t want what God had to offer, not on His terms, anyway.  And as those who now believe in Jesus Christ, we have a durable hope.  The strong assurance of our durable hope is that it is that very cross that evokes our longing for God, our ache, those tears of sorrow and love flowing, mingled, down.  We may be in this world, sisters and brothers, but that love and longing we have for God is the Spirit promising us we are not of this world.

Devon doesn’t like it when I preach what she has called ranty judgment lectures.  Sisters and brothers, it’s never my intention to rant, and certainly not to judge—the only one who stands condemned at my tribunal is me; and God has overturned me, praise to His name!  It’s true enough that I don’t make a lot of jokes or tell many stories from the pulpit.  And there are some words, some thoughts, that people hear and react to as rant, as judgment.  There are some words that immediately evoke feelings of displeasure, resentment, indignation, resistance, rejection.  To spell out the predicament humanity finds itself in arouses such response.  Speak the truth, in love.  Jesus did.  Judgment without grace is no gospel.  Neither is grace without judgment.  Grace is grace because there is judgment.  Life or wrath—there is no third option, no middle way.  Without a present, clear, and at least somewhat palpable sense of our predicament, we won’t quite be able to grasp, with head or heart, what God is doing for our sake and for His glory.  That feeling of adrenaline when we have just been snatched away from disaster—the feeling of salvation, shaking there, beholding the cross, the blood.

One of the big ranty judgment lecture words is wrath.  That’s a tune-out word.  Wrath is the sign, the power of God’s righteous judgment (Ps 7).  God’s wrath is never out of proportion, never uncontrolled or unthinking, as rage can be with us.  God’s righteous anger and judgment, His wrath, is perfectly just.  In His holy wrath He rights what was wrong, cleansing as with fire.  We handle fire with care, respect, and caution.  We know what fire can do, for blessing and for cheer, for cleansing and for purifying, for injury and destruction.  Wrath is for the destruction of sinners (Is 13:9): that’s as hellfire and brimstone as I get.

I’m here to plead, not to scare.  Those who do not turn, who do not seek the Lord and His forgiveness and His ongoing grace to sustain them in faith through all trials and temptations, those who reject what God offers, can expect one response from God: wrath.  Wrath is the opposite of mercy, the opposite of forgiveness (Pss 78, 85): no wonder it is so terrible, feels so terrible; no wonder even we faithful can barely contemplate it, barely stand to hear it mentioned!  Jesus did not come to judge the world.  That does not mean there will be no judgment.

Scripture is very clear, though: there is a way that does not end in wrath.  There is a way that leads to joy and blessing and life, a way of God’s favor, a way of light and hope stronger than the hurts and disappointments of this life: righteousness delivers from death (Pr 11:4).  Righteousness is with Jesus Christ, in and from him.  And the Father gives the cup of His holy wrath to the Son, who came among us to receive this cup, to drink it dry for us, so that we, in Christ, with Christ, through Christ, would live, always, to glorify God, to love Him as He is, for who He is, and for what He asks of us and gives us.

There is love in everything God does, and how hard it is to accept that!  No wonder those who reject Jesus find us so incomprehensible!  You and I, though, and everyone else, know that, sometimes, the only way to heal is to wound.  We’ve all seen enough films and read enough stories to know that, sometimes, the only way to save a life is to lose a life, to give a life.  The truth of all these heart-breaking, hope-filling stories is the truth of God’s Word.  It hurts, and it is healing, amazing, sacred.

In Jesus, God joined humanity and divinity in order to save those who had chosen condemnation but whom God had chosen for life.  God as God could not die.  A man or a woman, as man or woman, could not be righteous, could not live eternally.  God joined one with the other, to make the way for life, through the way of death, to His glory.  There, on the cross, Jesus drank down God’s holy wrath, all His righteous judgment.  There he died.  There we killed him.  There, God saved us, washed in the freely flowing blood of the lamb.

This is why Good Friday, the worst day yet in human history, this is why Good Friday is good.  What we could not overcome, God overcomes: that is good.  What we deserved from God, God took upon Himself: good doesn’t even begin to describe that!  What we never merited and could never merit God gives: the costly gift, freely.  And now the shadows lengthen, the body laid away, in tears; the stone is heaved in place.  Day declines to darkness.  But the Son also rises.