February 27, 2005

The Judgment of Grace

Text: Romans 5:1-11

The 2002 film The Pianist tells the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman’s years spent in hiding during World War II. Szpilman is a young, celebrated, Jewish pianist living in a newly occupied Poland at the outset of the war. Relocated from ghetto to ghetto as the Nazis begin their reign of terror, Szpilman and his family spend the better part of three years struggling to survive and remain together. After a long period of slow decline, and finally, outright suffering, Szpilman is separated from his family, and spends the next years of the war trying to keep himself alive with the help of his admirers, and even his enemies. As he becomes ravaged by the effects of hunger and increasingly paranoid of the foes surrounding him, Szpilman finds solace in his piano accomplishments, which give him the drive to keep going, even in the face of the horrific forces that seek to annihilate him at every step.

In the last months of the war Szpilman found refuge in a deserted and burnt out section of Warsaw. Looking like a wild man – dirty, unshaven, with long hair – a German captain by the name of Wilm Hosenfeld discovered Szpilman looking for food in the ruins of someone’s kitchen. When the captain discovered him, he asked Szpilman what on earth was he doing there? Szpilman told him that he was a pianist who was returning to his home to see what was left. In order to convince him that he was indeed a pianist Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor on a battered, out-of-tune piano.

In an amazing moment of truth and transformation, as Szpilman plays the Chopin piece the film viewer is able to see an amazing realization take place on the face of this leader in the SS military. Confronted with the truth contained in the beauty of the music and the skill of the musician, the lie of the Nazi regime is horrifically revealed to this captain in a way he had never seen it before. The guilt of the soldier confronted by the gracefulness of the musician brings about an amazing transformation. Immediately Captain Hosenfeld found Szpilman a better hiding place in a tiny attic. Together, they made sure he could climb into it, and pull the ladder afterwards. Over the subsequent weeks, the German officer regularly brought bread to the Jewish musician, and encouraged him to persevere, revealing to him his belief that the war would be over by the spring.

When the truth of our lives is confronted by the beauty of grace our only choice is to continue on in what we know now to be a lie, or to allow our lives to be transformed forever.

Lent begins with an act of confession – Ash Wednesday – and continues in that attitude throughout its forty days. This is the season that we deal with the judgment of grace. The shadow of the cross is a very difficult place to be, but it is a necessary place to go for transformation to take place.

I. The Shadow of the Cross

The shadow of the cross reveals all that is wrong with us. In the shadow of the cross the ugliness of our violent and broken lives is powerfully demonstrated. As we behold the beaten, bleeding, vulnerable Son of God upon the cross we are reminded of the ways that we hurt and destroy one another. There is little about the broken relationships of our world that reflect the glory of God.

The shadow of the cross reminds us of the vast amount of suffering with which the creation is corrupted. The intolerable grief and pain experienced by Jesus is the embodiment of the anguish of history’s long list of victims. Lent painfully reminds us that our hands are filled with the blood of slaves, of enemies, of the abandoned, of the ignored, and of the oppressed. The blood of others is truly “on our heads and on our children.”

The shadow of the cross exposes humankind’s continual rebellion against God. In some of the most painful words in the scripture, John reminds us that Jesus ”came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11). Human history is unfortunately one rebellious act after another.

In the shadow of the cross we realize that all is hopelessly lost. Humankind has no ability to stand before a holy God, let alone have any reason to boast.

Several years ago I was singing in a large Easter production. Like most Easter cantatas, this production had the scene from the life of Jesus when he stood with Pontius Pilate who after finding no fault with Christ asks the angry mob, “What do you want me to do with this man?” The choir, garbed in first century outfits was to emphatically respond, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” The first night of the musical most of us were very nervous and when Pilate asked his question we responded with the correct lines but devoid of the appropriate passion. As the choir director critiqued afterwards, “That was the wimpiest mob I’ve ever seen.”

The second night we overcame our stage fright and really got into it. That night when Pilate asked what we wanted to do with this man we were ready. We shouted, screamed, spat, and generally went crazy as we shouted at the top of our voices, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him! His blood be upon us and upon our children!” In that moment of faux mob mentality a penetrating theological reality hit me more deeply than it ever had before. The truth of my life is that if I had been there that day the mob is where I would have found myself. The rebelliousness of all of our lives embodies the very same rejection of God’s lordship in our lives that the mob cried out with that day. Until we can place ourselves in the mob, until we recognize our sin as the same sin that crucified Christ, we will be unable to see or speak the truth about who we are.

It is often said by preachers and teachers that, “If you were the only person in time and space Christ would have died for you.” I have always preferred to restate that idea this way. “If I were the only person in time and space, I would have put Christ to death, and he would have let me.”

II. The Judgment of Grace

Coming to grips with who we are revealed to be in the shadow of the cross is critical to salvation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanted Christians to be constantly reminded that grace is not cheap. In the cross we find what can only be described as the costly “judgment of grace.”

When we look at the cross the first time we see only our sin that crucified the ultimate revelation of the heart and nature of God. Yet, when we look at the cross again – especially in the light of the resurrection – we see not only our shame and guilt, but we also see the amazing grace of God in Christ embodying an unending love and mercy that goes the second mile, that turns the other cheek, that loves us “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8). In Christ, we see God’s offer of peace and the extension of “the grace in which we stand.” The justification with God we could not obtain on our own, God has powerfully demonstrated and accomplished in Christ.

If there was ever a time in which God would have been justified to bring final destruction upon his creation it would have been while his only Son was mocked, flogged, and crucified. And yet we worship Christ not because he could have come down off of the cross, but because instead of calling down ten thousand angels, he remained on the cross. Instead of returning our violence with violence of his own, he responded to our ultimate rejection with his ultimate grace.

III. A Reason to Boast

It is this grace of Christ demonstrated on the cross that allows us to respond in faith. And it is the grace of Christ, Paul exclaims, that gives us a reason for confidence before God. In the transforming grace of Christ we can boast in this hope: that we can be transformed by the grace of God to be reflections of his glory. In the sustaining grace of Christ we can boast in our sufferings because in our struggles we find the very presence of Christ redeeming our trials and pain by producing through them his character in our lives. And in the reconciling grace of Christ we can boast in the confidence we have that we are his dearly loved children.

In the shadow of the cross all that we hold in our hands turns to dust. But in the shadow of his grace we find our hope, our help, and our confidence in all that God is toward his creation.

For Paul, the purpose of the law was to reveal the depth of human sin and brokenness. Especially when we recognize our culpability in the rejection of God embodied in the crucifixion of Christ, we realize that there is no righteousness of our own to which we can cling. Even the most upright law-keeper has no ground before God to boast.

So on this third Sunday of Lent as we walk beneath the shadow of the cross we hold two amazing truths in tension: the sinfulness of humankind confronted and overcome by God’s glorious grace in Christ Jesus.

If the law had the final word in human existence, then before God, the entire race of humankind would be utterly and hopelessly lost. If the death of Christ was the last word on the human condition, then again we would be hopelessly lost because violence and death would be demonstrated as the ultimate victor. But our hope is this, Christ – the one who extends grace, participates in our sufferings, and returns violence with reconciliation – has been raised from the dead. We who have no reason to be confident in the flesh, can not only be confident but we can boast in the grace of God demonstrated in Christ Jesus.