Good Friday

When you drive north toward Ordos City in China’s Inner Mongolia province, you can’t miss the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan. The massive complex, rebuilt in the 1950s in the traditional Mongol style, houses genuine relics and is an important sanctuary for the shamanic worship of the legendary Mongol leader. But the Khan’s tomb is properly called a cenotaph—a monument to someone buried elsewhere—because it is empty.

While we can be certain his mortal remains are not there, we’re completely uncertain as to where they might be. And that’s odd. In life, he was the most powerful person on Earth. He was the Universal Ruler (“Genghis Khan”) of an empire that would eventually stretch from the Pacific Ocean into Eastern Europe, encompassing large swaths of present-day China, Russia, and the Middle East. Yet his grave is unmarked and remains undiscovered.

This is by design. Despite his exalted status, Genghis Khan retained the frugal, itinerant lifestyle of his youth, and indeed of most Mongols. So, it makes sense that he would want a humble, anonymous burial in his homeland. “Let my body die, but let my nation live,” he is supposed to have said.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1. Christ, Lordship of; King Jesus; Lordship of Christ – Many powerful kings have ruled over large parts of the earth. Many came from humble backgrounds and rose to greatness. Jesus, the true “universal ruler” also had a humble childhood and became the most powerful person on earth. He was also buried in a grave whose exact location is debated today. But the defining difference is that the King of Kings and Lord of Lords rose from the dead and reigns forever seated at the right hand of God.
2. Moses – The burial place of Moses is also unknown, but he was buried by God himself. (Deut. 34:5-6; Jude 1:9)
3. Final Judgment; Resurrection – Although the grave of Genghis Khan is unknown, hidden in the mists of history, God will still raise him up to stand at the final judgment. (Rev. 20:13)

Imagine the awful inconvenience of being declared dead by the United States Government. Consider this true story:

Susan and Darby Nye of Arlington, Virginia, have been married for 30 years and were looking forward to many more in retirement when Susan started receiving condolences from various federal agencies regarding the death of her husband. But there was one big problem: Darby was alive and well.

It started when Darby’s purchase at a pharmacy was declined. He called to find out why. “Well, they said the Social Security Administration has informed us that you are dead,” he said.

When someone dies, they’re supposed to be put on the Death Master File. The Social Security Administration uses the death data to terminate benefit payments and report deaths to other agencies. But one typo can mistakenly declare someone dead, digging a grave that buries them along with their finances.

Darby’s plight as a categorized deceased person is not singular: it is estimated that every year, some 12,200 U.S. citizens are declared dead by the Social Security Administration due to "keystroke errors." Those affected become like the walking dead, unable to secure a job, make financial transactions, file taxes, or visit the doctor, and for months on end, must endure the nightmare of convincing a large bureaucracy that they haven't yet bit the dust.

Possible Preaching Angle:
Being declared legally dead is a terrible inconvenience for people in our society. But being declared legally dead to sin is a tremendous blessing for believers that promises incredible freedom and hope.

The ex-head of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Masao Yoshida, 58, died at a Tokyo hospital of esophageal cancer on July 9, 2013.

When the tsunami devastated Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011, Masao Yoshida worked to control the damage caused by the failing reactors. He disobeyed a company order and secretly continued using seawater, a decision that experts say almost certainly prevented a more serious meltdown and has made him an unlikely hero. He chose to place himself in danger, exposing himself to extreme radiation. And his story is just one of many at the plant.

Remembering the disaster, he said "The level of radioactivity on the ground was terrible…but the workers of the plant leaped at the chance to go trying to fix the situation with the reactors…. My colleagues went out there again and again."

Possible Preaching Angle:

What a beautiful picture of sacrificial, Christ-like love.

In an article for The Atlantic, David Graham wonders, “Who Still Buys Wite-Out, and Why?”:

Christmastime is when the pens in my house get their biggest workout of the year. I seldom write by hand anymore. But the end of the year brings out a slew of opportunities for penmanship: adding notes to holiday cards to old friends, addressing them, and then doing the same with thank-you notes after Christmas. And given how little I write in the other 11 months of the year, that means there are a lot of errors, which in turn spur a new connection with another old friend: Wite-Out.

The sticky, white correction fluid was designed to help workers correct errors they made on typewriters without having to retype documents from the start. But typewriters have disappeared from the modern office, relegated to attics and museums. But correction fluids are not only surviving—they appear to be thriving. It’s a mystery of the digital age.

But today, even printer sales are down, casualties of an era when more and more writing is executed on-screen and never printed or written out at all. Yet correction fluid remains remarkably resilient. As early as 2005, The New York Times pondered the product’s fate with trepidation. Yet somehow, more than (two decades) on, it has kept its ground. Who’s still buying these things? Even as paper sales dip, upmarket stationery is one subsegment that is expected to grow, thanks to a Millennial affection for personalized stationery.

For Millennials…the attraction to Wite-Out is the same as any other handmade or small-batch product: The physical act of covering up a mistake is imperfect but more satisfying than simply hitting backspace. There’s also a poignancy to a (messed up) generation gravitating toward Wite-Out.

You can’t erase the past any more than you can erase a printed typo or a written error—but you can paper it over and pretend it didn’t happen.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Isn’t it a relief to know that God doesn’t cover up our mistakes and sins and “pretend they didn’t happen.” At the cross He permanently and completely removed them from our record. “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow” (Isa. 1:18); “He forgave us all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross!” (Col. 2:13-14)

According to a French story, a drowned girl's body was recovered from France's Seine River sometime in the late 1800s. Her body, displayed in a Parisian mortuary in an attempt to identify her, captured the imagination of one of the mortuary's pathologists. So, he had a sculptor take a plaster cast of her face. The beautiful, enigmatic mask—named "L'Inconnue de la Seine" ("The unknown woman of the Seine")—was soon for sale among artists and writers who found it a muse for their work. In fact, no fashionable European living room of the late 1800s was complete without a mask of the Inconnue on the wall.

But her image didn't stop there. And this is where the story gets really interesting: In 1955 Asmund Laerdal saved the life of his drowning young son, grabbing the boy's motionless body from the water just in time and clearing his airways.

Laerdal at that time was a successful Norwegian toy manufacturer, specializing in making children's dolls and model cars from the new generation of soft plastics. When he was approached to make a training aid for the newly-invented technique of CPR, his son's brush with death a few years earlier made him very receptive.

He developed a mannequin which simulates an unconscious patient requiring CPR. Remembering the mask on the wall of his grandparents' house many years earlier, he decided that "The unknown woman of the Seine" would become the face of Resusci Anne. She has a pleasant, attractive face, with the hint of a smile playing on her lips. Her eyes are closed but they look as if they might spring open at any moment.

So, if you're one of the 300 million people who's been trained in CPR, you've almost certainly had your lips pressed to the Inconnue's.

Possible Preaching Angle:

How like God's work of redemption this is: to take the very worst things imaginable—like the horror of death—and make something new that would save countless lives. This is what God did for us on the cross, which we remember each Easter and Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:26). The difference between the cross and the “unknown lady” is that our Lord was raised triumphantly from the grave and we serve a risen Lord (1 Cor. 15:1-58).

On the Cross, Jesus was both our substitute and a representative. Here are two analogies to unpack what that means.

A substitute is someone who takes the place of another person but does not represent that person. For example, a pinch hitter in baseball enters the lineup to bat in the place of another player. He is a substitute for that player, but in no sense represents the other player.

On the other hand, a simple representative acts on behalf of another person, and serves as his spokesman but he’s not a substitute for that person. For example, a baseball player has an agent who represents him in contract negotiations with the team. The representative does not replace the player but merely advocates for him.

These roles can be combined. Here’s an illustration of both.

If you’re a shareholder for the company, and you can’t attend the shareholders meeting, you can sign an agreement authorizing someone else to serve as your proxy at the meeting. That person will vote for you, and because they have been authorized to do so, their votes are your votes. You have voted via proxy at the meeting of shareholders. The proxy is a substitute in that they attend the meeting in our place, but they are also a representative in that they do not vote instead of us, but on our behalf, so that we vote.

In bearing our punishment, Jesus was both our substitute and a representative before God. He was punished in our place and bore the suffering we deserved. But he also represented us before God, so that his punishment was our punishment.

In the fall of 1937, Ed Keefer was a senior in the school of engineering at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Tall, slender, and bespectacled, Keefer was the president of the calculus club, the vice-president of the engineering club, and a member of the school’s exclusive all-male honor society. He also invented the Cupidoscope.

The electrical device could not have been more perfectly designed to bring campus-wide fame to its creators, Keefer and his less sociable classmate John Hawley. It promised to reveal, with scientific precision, if a couple was truly in love. As the inventors explained to a United Press reporter as news of their innovation spread, the Cupidoscope delivered on its promise “in terms called ‘amorcycles,’ the affection that the college girl has for her boyfriend.”

Built in the school’s physics laboratory, the Cupidoscope was fashioned from an old radio cabinet, a motor spark coil, and an electrical resistor. To test their bond, a man and a woman would grip electrodes on either side of the Cupidoscope and move them toward one another until the woman felt a spark—not of attraction, but of electricity. The higher her tolerance for this mild current, the more of a love signal the meter registered. A needle decorated with hearts purported to show her devotion on a scale that ranged from “No hope” to “See preacher!”

It all sounds like a slightly painful party game—but the Cupidoscope was one experiment in a serious, decades-long quest to quantify love. This undertaking garnered the attention of leading scientists across the United States and in Europe in the early years of the 20th century, and it is memorialized most prominently in the penny arcade mainstay known as the Love Tester.

Possible Preaching Angle:

“How do you measure love?” The Bible gives an answer to this important question: It is measured by the self-sacrifice of the Cross—“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16); “Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:17-19).

The United States recorded its one millionth organ transplant in September of 2022, a historic milestone for the medical procedure that has saved thousands of lives. It's unclear which organ was the record one millionth and details about the patient are unknown at this time.

The very first successful organ transplant occurred in 1954 at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. That was when doctors transplanted a kidney from 23-year-old Ronald Herrick into his identical twin brother, Richard, who was suffering from chronic kidney failure. The lead surgeon, Dr. Joseph Murray, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his role in the procedure.

Up until the early 1980s, the number of transplants every year remained low. However, success in transplants organs other than kidneys—such as hearts, livers, and pancreases—and the advent of anti-rejection medication led to a rise in transplants. Since then, transplants have become a far more common procedure. In 2021, more than 41,000 transplants occurred, which is the highest number ever recorded.

Sadly, approximately 5,000 people die waiting on transplant lists ever year. And a study published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology in October 2020 found that many donor kidneys in the U.S. are unnecessarily discarded. But organ donors and recipients hope that by sharing their stories, they will inspire people will sign up to donate and help reduce those long waiting lists.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Heart; New Life - God has also given millions of new hearts (Ezek. 11:19) through the work of the Great Physician. However, just as the article states, many die while waiting for a new organ, so also many die without taking advantage of God’s gracious offer of salvation (“why will you die?” Ezek. 33:11; Luke 13:34). 2) Christ, substitute for humanity – There is joy for the patients receiving a new heart. Yet, the joy is bittersweet because the cost of that new heart was someone's life. For one to live another had to die.

Many funerals today are not about mourning death but a “celebration of life.” As our culture discards all-black attire and other formalities of a traditional funeral, families create more personalized—and often more up-beat—experiences to honor the deceased.

The BBC has reported on the trend of “happy funerals,” noting that Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” had become the UK’s most popular song played at memorial services—replacing Verdi’s Requiem.

After celebratory memorial services, we are encouraged to “move on,” comforted by memories and knowing that the person we’ve lost is no longer in pain. But this positive focus can afflict and baffle people deep in grief.

As Daily Mail columnist Bel Mooney wrote, “Even though modern, cheerful funerals can be hugely touching and beautiful, a part of me wonders whether they show how petrified people are of death, and of the long agony of bereavement.”

Jesus, the One who sustains every life, was not immune to the ravages of death. In John 11, Jesus learns that his friend Lazarus has died. He goes to his grieving friends and does what anyone would do: he cries.

Jesus knew that while death is not the final word for the deceased believer, it brings a full range of heartache to those left behind. Jesus’ response shows us that the gospel promise does not exempt us from sadness over death. Death is real, it is sad, and Jesus himself felt it.

We can grieve over this, while also recognizing the hope of a resurrected body for all of us who cling to the Jesus who perfectly did both. This same Jesus who wept over the reality of death sent blood rushing back through the cold veins of his dead friend—and promises to give us new life too. Death is imminent, but Sunday is coming.

In the opening scene of the 2016 film Collateral Beauty, advertising CEO Howard Inlet explains that his strategy is driven by three things. At the end of the day, (1) we long for love. (2) We wish we had more time. And (3) we fear death. These three things, Howard claims, drive every human act.

But then we see him three years later. His six-year-old daughter has died of cancer. It has destroyed him. In his lament at life, he writes letters to love and time and death. To death he writes: “You’re just pathetic and powerless middle management. You don’t even have the authority to make a simple trade.”

Later, he explains what he meant: “When we realized our daughter was dying, I prayed. Not to God or the universe. But to death. Take me. Leave my daughter.”

Like Howard, Jesus volunteered to make the trade for us. But unlike death in Howard’s mind, Jesus wasn’t middle-management. He was completely in control. He is the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. Jesus really did die for us.

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks visited John Hopkins Hospital complaining of bleeding. Doctors discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix. Lacks began undergoing radium treatment for cervical cancer and later underwent a biopsy to determine the progress of the treatment. Doctors were shocked to find that Lacks’ cells were unlike any others they had ever seen. Whereas other cells that they used for research would die, Lacks’ cells doubled every 20-24 hours.

Today, these cells, nicknamed “HeLa” cells, are replicated worldwide and have been used to study the human genome; the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones, and viruses on the growth of cancer cells; and played a crucial role in the development of polio and COVID-19 vaccines. Lacks’ cells were the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cells in medical research.

Henrietta Lacks died more than seventy years ago at the age of thirty-one. History would have long since forgotten her if not for that special something drawn from her blood. Today, scores of polio survivors and the billions who've been vaccinated for COVID-19 owe a great debt to this woman of whom most people have never heard. Only as her story is retold each February as part of Black History Month is she remembered.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus' story bears many similarities to Henrietta's. He, too, died around the age of thirty. He, too, might have long since been forgotten if his story wasn't regularly retold and at Easter especially. Like Lacks, Jesus is honored for that special something about his blood. As Isaiah puts it, "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed."

When twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong in June of 2013 with a plethora of top-secret NSA and CIA documents, he created a firestorm of controversy that still rages. He has many on his side who are convinced that what he did was heroic and much needed. Others have charged him with being a traitor. In fact, the United States government has charged him with three counts under the Espionage Act. He currently resides with his wife in Moscow where he has been given asylum.

What is of profound interest is Snowden's disclosure that virtually every digital communication made by US citizens—including text messages, Skype calls, emails, Facebook posts, phone calls, Google searches, credit card pur­chases, or the like—is part of what he calls a permanent record. Snowden brought to the attention of the American public that there was little in their lives that they might reasonably regard as private. This permanent record of their movements, purchases, internet activity, and virtually all forms of communication and digital interaction with other people will likely never disappear, at least not in our lifetime. It will always be there for the NSA and the CIA to see and make use of, if they so choose. It is frighten­ing, to say the least.

But I worry far less about any record the government might permanently possess than I do about the fact that God has made a permanent record of my wicked choices, thoughts, fantasies, and failures. The mere thought that my sins are forever registered in the mind of God or written down in some celestial volume is far more unsettling and disturbing to me than knowing that my government knows as much as it does.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Here is the good news: God has erased every last trace of the condemning guilt of our transgressions if you know and trust Christ. This did not happen because God sovereignly destroyed the heavenly server on which this record was stored. Instead, he took the guilt of our sin and imputed it to Jesus. In the death of our Savior for our sins, all trace of anything that might otherwise be held against us is gone.

When police officer Cpl. Annette L. Goodyear holds up her hand to direct traffic in front of the local middle school, drivers usually stop. But when one driver didn’t, Goodyear didn’t have time to get angry or offended--she was instead focused on the girl crossing the street.

Cameras caught Goodyear as she pushed the child out of the way and was instead struck by the car herself, landing hard on the pavement. Goodyear said, “It was strange. As I’m lying there, I’m thinking to myself ‘this actually did happen.’ It didn’t seem real as it was happening.”

Authorities cited the driver for multiple infractions including negligent driving, failure to stop for a pedestrian in the crosswalk, and an expired registration.

Despite her hard landing, Goodyear was not significantly injured. She was in good enough spirits when she left the hospital that she immediately went to check on the student, who while not injured, was too shaken up to go to school.

Goodyear said, “She saw me standing there and as she was walking toward the door, she was getting teary-eyed. And when she got teary-eyed, then her dad started getting teary-eyed, and we all started at that point. I was just so thankful she was standing there and that she was OK.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

When you put your safety on the line for the benefit of others, you embody the sacrificial love that God has for all humanity which he showed in his Son on the Cross.

How are we to understand Jesus’ cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” along with his desperate prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading with God “if possible, let this cup pass from me?

Here’s the (question): Many mere mortals have managed to face death with more (composure) than Jesus did—Stephen, for example, just months later. Jesus knew he would rise from the dead, so why all the anguish?

In his ordeal on the cross … Christ mind-reads the mental states found in all the evil human acts human beings have ever committed. Every vile, shocking, disgusting, revulsive psychic state accompanying every human evil act will miraculously, be at once, in the human psyche of Christ … without yielding an evil configuration in either Christ’s intellect or will.

Such psychic agony “would greatly eclipse all other human psychological su­ffering … Flooded with such horror, Christ might well lose entirely his ability to find the mind of God the Father.” This drives home the suffering of Christ, a suffering so comprehensively horrible that it surpasses even the physical abuse of crucifixion.

David rejoices in the fact that God's steadfast love toward those who fear him can be illustrated by the height of the heavens above the earth (Ps. 103:11). David was not an astronomer. He had no grasp on the unimaginable magnitude of the height to which he refers. But we do today.

A good way to help us fathom the unfathomable is the light-year. A light-year is how far light travels in one calendar year. Light moves at 186,000 miles in one second. Multiply 186,000 times 60 seconds, and you have a light-minute. Mul­tiply that figure by 60 minutes, and you have a light-hour. Multiply that figure by 24, and you have a light-day, and that by 365, and you have a light-year. So, light can travel almost six trillion miles (the number six followed by 12 zeroes) in a 365-day period. That's the equivalent of about 12,000,000 round trips to the moon.

Let's assume we are speeding in a jet airplane at 500 miles per hour on a trip to the moon. If we traveled non-stop, 24 hours a day, it would take us just about 3 weeks to arrive at our destination. If we wanted to visit our sun, 93 million miles from earth, it would take us a bit more than 21 years to get there. And if we wanted to reach Pluto, the dwarf planet farthest away in our solar system, our non-stop trip would last slightly longer than 900 years.

Now, try to get your mind around this: The Hubble Telescope has given us breathtaking pictures of a galaxy some 13 billion light-years from earth. That would put this galaxy 78 sextillion miles from earth (the number 78 followed by 21 zeroes).

If we are traveling at 500 miles per hour nonstop, literally 52 weeks in every year, with not a moment's pause, we would reach this galaxy in 20 quadrillion years (The number 20 followed by 15 zeroes)! And that would get us just to the farthest point that our best telescopes have yet been able to detect. This would be the mere fringe of what lies beyond. It is currently estimated that there are around two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Pause for a moment and let this sink in. Are you beginning to get a feel for what it means to know that God's love for you, is greater than the distance between the heavens and the earth?

In China, the extremely wealthy can avoid prison terms by hiring body doubles. Incredibly, this is true! Slate.com originally broke the story of how the super-rich in China get away with pretty much everything, including murder.

According to Slate, a wealthy 20-year-old named Hu was drag racing his friends, when he struck and killed a pedestrian. Although Hu received a three-year prison sentence, allegations arose that the man appearing in court and serving the three-year sentence wasn’t Hu at all, but a hired body double!

In another case, the owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home hired a destitute man and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so common that there is even a term for it: “substitute criminal.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This may seem scandalous, but 2000 years ago Someone became our substitute and took the punishment we deserve. He took the penalty of all our sins in his own body on the Cross. Justice is not met by the wealthy getting off scot-free. However, the death of Christ was “The just for the unjust – so that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18).

In a sermon on the Atonement, Will Anderson used the following illustration:

Food demonstrates how everyone benefits from a form of atonement, whether they acknowledge it or not. Everything we eat—whether plant or animal—was once alive. It had to be plucked from the tree, pulled from the earth, or slaughtered in order to sustain you. Every meal is a testament to the fact that other things must die, if you are to live.

Most people who regularly enjoy a juicy burger or steak have never looked into the eyes of the animal that gave its life for their sustenance. The realities of the slaughterhouse are unseen and unthought of by most consumers—we reap the benefits without considering the cost. It’s hypocritical to caricature the Cross as needlessly cruel while benefiting from atonement at the dinner table every day.

Some may object: It’s one thing to kill an animal, but another entirely for God to (sacrifice) his Son. Yes, it’s true that the Cross is horrific. And yet Christ willingly embraced it, which should fill us with trembling and humility, not disgust.

Something stirs our souls when we watch someone willingly die for another—it moves and breaks us simultaneously. Why? It’s because our souls were formed by a Creator who sacrificed himself for us. We may deny atonement with our heads, but our hearts can’t be fooled.