Palm Sunday

In 1943, 230 women were arrested as members of the French Resistance and sent to Birkenau concentration camp. Only 49 survived, but this in itself is remarkable. These women were as diverse a group as could be imagined—Jews and Christians, aristocrats and working class, young and old. Yet they were united by their commitment to the French Resistance and to one another. In her book A Train in Winter, Caroline Moorhead reconstructs the story of these women through the journals and memoirs of survivors. The solidarity of these women sustained them through unspeakable horror and torture.

In contrast, many Holocaust survivors hoarded whatever meager resources they could save for themselves. And how could they be blamed? Survival became the only goal—no matter what the cost, even to others. Yet, in most of the cases with these French women in Birkenau, their solidarity toward each other trumped the selfishness that engulfed so many others. As Moorhead writes, "Knowing that the fate of each depended on the others … egotism seemed to vanish and that, stripped back to the bare edge of survival, each rose to behavior few would have believed themselves capable of." Moorhead recounts that when unrelieved thirst threatened to engulf one of their members in utter madness, the women pooled together their own meager rations to get her a whole bucket of water.

This kind of love is very rare. Putting one's own needs first is as natural as breathing, and just as unconscious. Yet the women of the French Resistance provide a contemporary model of what Christ has done for us. But there are two big differences: first Jesus willingly chose to stand in solidarity with us in our suffering. Second, he stood in solidarity with his enemies. He walked among humans including the very least of these, and chose to share the horror of human death. Even after the victory of his resurrection from death, this One still bore in his body the wounds of his earthly suffering. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. This is solidarity for life.

In a sermon, John Ortberg compares submission to Jesus to driving a car:

When it was time to take our first child home from the hospital, we put her in the car seat in the back of the car, and then I got in the front seat to drive. She was so small even the baby seat was way too big. She looked so fragile to me that I drove home on the freeway going 35 miles per hour with the hazard lights flashing the whole time.

That first day, when your kid is in the car with you, is a scary day. Does anybody want to know what the next really scary day is with your kid in the car? It's when they turn 16, and now you're handing over the keys. Now they're moving from the passenger seat, from the ride-along seat, into the driver's seat. That's a scary moment.

It is a big moment in your life when you hand someone else the keys. Up until now, I've been driving. I choose the destination. I choose the route. I choose the speed. You're in the drive-along seat. But if we are to change seats, if you're going to drive, I have to trust you. It's all about control. Whoever is in this seat is the person in control.

A lot of people find Jesus handy to have in the car as long as he's in the ride-along seat, because something may come up where they require his services. Jesus, I have a health problem, and I need some help…. I want you in the car, but I'm not so sure I want you driving. If Jesus is driving, I'm not in charge of my life anymore. If he's driving, I'm not in charge of my wallet anymore. If I put him in control then it's no longer a matter of giving some money now and then when I'm feeling generous or when more of it is coming into my life. Now, it's his wallet. It's scary. If Jesus is driving, I'm not in charge of my ego anymore. I no longer have the right to satisfy every self-centered ambition. No, it's his agenda. It's his life. Now, I'm not in charge of my mouth anymore. I don't get to gossip, flatter, cajole, deceive, rage, intimidate, manipulate, exaggerate. I get out of the driver's seat and hand the keys over to him. I'm fully engaged. In fact, I'm more alive than I've ever been before, but it's not my life anymore. It's his life.

In March 2002, the former ruler of Afghanistan, the 87-year-old Mohammed Zahir Shah, returned to his homeland after 30 years of exile. Here's how an article in the Chicago Tribune described his grand and glorious welcome:

On Thursday, thousands of invited guests lined up for hours at the airport and people gathered on the streets leading to a refurbished seven-bedroom villa to see the former ruler. Delegations arrived from across Afghanistan's 32 provinces. Governors and their advisers, members of women's groups carrying posters of the king, most of the interim administration, royalists, warlords, men in turbans and others in suits all converged on the pockmarked runway where shells of bombed airplanes lay. Two red carpets were laid out. The newly trained honor guard was on hand, and young women and children in traditional embroidered dress greeted Zahir Shah with flowers and poems.

I hope you're thinking of the contrast when Israel's Messiah was born, when he came to his own people.

On the scenic foothills of the Alatoo Range in northern Kyrgyzstan there is a spot that looks up to the peaks of the towering Celestial Mountains, and down across the valley to the city of Bishkek. They have built there a great monument complex in honor of the Kyrgyz people. It's name is Ata-Beyit.

But there is something different about this place. Most monuments of such a grand scale are built to commemorate national victories and grand achievements. This place, however, was built specifically as a monument to magnificent defeat. Specifically, there are three heartbreaking defeats that the Kyrgyz people remember together on that scenic hill.

There is a soaring monument to the defeat of 1916 when the Tsar Nicholas II decreed that all Kyrgyz men be conscripted into the Russian army to fight in the First World War. On that mountaintop some 100,000 died, either massacred by soldiers or lost in the brutal winter. The second monument on that hill remembers 1938 when at the personal instruction of Joseph Stalin, 137 leading citizens—writers, teachers, artists, and politicians—were rounded up and led up those hills to be murdered. The third monument remembers 2010, when eighty-four young people were lost in a single day, murdered for protesting against yet another brutal regime, standing in the way of freedom.

Nothing but tears on that mountain … but the Kyrgyz people believe these must forever be remembered for they are magnificent defeats. Despite the oppression of their worst enemies, and the tears of these most painful tragedies, the Kyrgyz people have not only persevered, but they are today a proud and thriving people.

Sometimes there are defeats so magnificent that they simply must be memorialized—and every Christian understands this. On the foothills, just outside of another great city, there is another site remembered with many tears and a monument to unthinkable injustice. And while it would be impossible to remember that place without being moved by its terrible tragedy, we remember it because of something so magnificent in that tragedy. On that terrible hill—by his wounds, we were healed. On that terrible hill—through his cross, we are saved. On that terrible hill—death may have won the day, but life-everlasting secured an unbreakable victory.

Some people might ask why go to such trouble to memorialize a mount of such great painful sorrow. We would say that some defeats are worth remembering, precisely because they contrast the magnificence of the final victory that overcame the evil of that place.

The Kyrgyz people have a mountain, and its name is Ata-Beyit. The people of God have such a mountain. Its name is Calvary.

The magazine Vanity Fair published an article on the actress Jessica Alba, which had the following paragraph on Alba's faith and views on God:

Alba's childhood was marked by two things: illnesses … that landed her in the hospital often, and a burning desire to leave a mark on the world, which at the age of 12 meant becoming a devout born-again Christian. "I was seeking a purpose," Alba says of her years as a member of a conservative Christian youth group. "I wanted to exist for a reason." This lasted until she was 17, when, she says, she was turned off by the boundaries and labels set by fellow churchgoers. That year, she attended an acting workshop in Vermont and "fell crazy in love with a cross-dressing ballet dancer who had a baby and was bisexual. I was like, 'There's just no way he's going to hell!'" Acting opened her to a new world of creative people and a community where she belonged. "I felt like, at the end of the day, God is love and everyone is human."

Editor's Note: Alba expresses what many in our culture feel and think—that God does not and will not judge sin. But the Cross shows God's righteous judgment of sin and that he bears our sin.

On his 39th birthday, poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with an incurable form of blood cancer. He wrote frankly about the agonizing effects of his illness and the treatments.

I have had bones die and bowels fail; joints lock in my face and arms and legs, so that I could not eat, could not walk … I have passed through pain I could never have imagined, pain that seemed to incinerate all my thoughts of God and to leave me sitting there in the ashes, alone.

When the diagnosis came, Wiman was a rising star in the literary world and the editor of a prestigious poetry publication. Though Wiman confessed his Christian faith had "evaporated in the blast of modernism and secularism to which I was exposed in college," the diagnosis started a journey that ultimately led him back to God. It wasn't a particular doctrine that drew him back to the faith, but Wiman found a friend in the suffering Messiah.

I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me." … The point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering. I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ's passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolute solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion. I'm not suggesting that ministering angels are going to come down and comfort you as you die. I'm suggesting that Christ's suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering.

In the face of brutal, isolating pain we don't really want answers. We want a person. At such times there is simply no substitute for the presence of Christ.

No greater pain has ever been experienced on any level than the hell of Christ suffering in this moment. But why? Because he carried all of that pain, sin, guilt, and shame in that moment. Yet on a far deeper level he was forsaken and punished for us to reconcile us to God (2 Cor. 5:18).

Tim Keller illustrates it this way:

If after a service some Sunday morning one of the members of my church comes to me and says, "I never want to see you or talk to you again," I will feel pretty bad. But if today my wife comes up to me and says, "I never want to see you or talk to you again," that's a lot worse. The longer the love, the deeper the love, the greater the torment of its loss.

But this forsakenness, this loss, was between the Father and the Son, who had loved each other from all eternity. … Jesus, the Maker of the world, was being unmade. Why? Jesus was experiencing Judgment Day. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It wasn't a rhetorical question. And the answer is: For you, for me, for us. Jesus was forsaken by God so that we would never have to be. The judgment that should have fallen on us fell instead on Jesus.

Physician Horace Smith describes the importance of human blood:

Each drop of human blood contains over 5 million red cells … In an average lifetime, a person's red cells arranged in single file would reach from the earth to the sun and back five times!

Our bodies contain approximately 60,000 miles of blood vessels … Through this delivery system, blood provides everything our cells need to live, and they take away waste that would poison us. At the cellular level, capillaries are so small that they are about the size of a single red blood cell … To connect with all the cells in the body, capillary walls cover an area of about 70,000 square feet … The circulatory system is the epitome of consistency. Every day, the heart beats 100,000 times, and over an average lifespan, this amazing machine beats 2.5 billion times, pumping 60 million gallons of blood. During this time, the heart never takes time off. We can't afford for it to take a break—even a few minutes without blood supply causes severe brain damage or death. Virtually all other cells in the human body are stationary, but blood is mobile tissue, carrying nutrients to every part of the body … protecting us from harm and healing our wounds.

No wonder the Old Testament says that "The life of every creature is its blood" (Lev. 17:14). Today, we understand the significance of this truth even more deeply. There are no cells in the human body that can live without continual contact with life-giving blood. Every type of cell, from the ones that survive only moments to those that live for many years, owes its life to the flow of blood. All three types of cells in human blood—red cells, white cells, and platelets—perform functions that are essential to life.

Who are the real villains on Good Friday (or the story of Jesus' death)? It's kind of like the kid's TV show Scooby-Doo—that lovable morning cartoon about Shaggy, Fred, Daphne, Velma, and their dog, Scooby-Doo. "The Gang," as they were called, were always getting themselves into trouble here or there—getting robbed, scared, lost. In each adventure, their task remained the same: discover and catch the villain. Whether the villain was a ghost, a witch, or any other ghoul, every episode would end the same—the Gang would catch the villain, and in every single episode, the villain turned out to be a person you'd never expect. We'd always assume the villain would be that really mean tour guide, or the obsessive park ranger, or the mean gasoline attendant from the beginning of the episode. But as the Gang ripped off the mask of the villain, it was always quite the surprise. The villain was always the really nice janitor, the sweet teacher, or the seemingly "good guy."

Good Friday is also like a children's book titled The Monster at the End of This Book. The story is simple—page by page, furry old Grover, scared as could be, pleads with the young reader before him not to turn to the next page because, as the title aptly claims, there will be a monster at the end of the book. Grover worries whether anyone will follow his timely advice. The reader, of course, never does. Then we soon come to the end of the book and discover who the monster is—it's Grover. He's the monster at the end of the book.

Grover and Scooby-Doo teach us precisely what Christianity has been trying to teach us about Good Friday: the villain and the monster aren't who we thought they were. In the Gospel stories, everyone fails; everyone sins against Christ—even the best disciples, even the "good guys." In the end, the villain is us.