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S. Good Friday.25 Mark 15:39

“So when the centurion, who stood opposite him, saw that he cried out like this and breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man is the Son of God’!”

And, in my mind, possibly inspired by the NIV 😉 the next thing he says is: “Well, I’ll be damned! Sin is a much bigger problem than I ever thought! It’s a rock not only too big for me to lift, but a rock too big for God himself to lift! If it has killed and damned God!, what the hell is it going to do to me? Like Jesus said on his way here—to the daughters of Jerusalem, “Don’t cry for me, Jerusalem, but cry for yourself. For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?”

My centurion isn’t being vulgar when he says “I’ll be damned!” He’s speaking quite literally. When Jesus cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” that is DAMNATION, literally! Being forsaken by God, having him turn his back on you, forget you, forever: “I don’t even know who you are anymore!” and be done with you—that’s hell! That’s damnation! And if God damns Himself, his own sinless Son, what do you think he’s going to do to you?!

It’s like the little boy in New Haven CT walking past the all-too familiar crime scene of two perps getting handcuffed, face down on the sidewalk, beside a police K9 van. Noticing the German Shepherd caged in the back of the van, snarling, the young (dog-loving) boy, wide-eyed, points at the dog, looks at the cop, and asks: “What did he do?”

Thinking about the Golgotha crime scene like that may, hopefully, command your full attention—if this shocking and disturbing Gospel didn’t already bring you to your knees in stunned silence.

But there’s one thing, an old heresy called Nestorianism, condemned at the 3rd ecumenical council in Ephesus 431 AD, that helps us view this whole cross and damnation thing with a cool, detached ease that was as pleasant to the ancient mind as it is to the modern.

Now, my goal with this homily, simply put, is: to remove that cool, detached ease from you in the next 7 or so minutes. To get you (quietly, in your head 😉 to exclaim with the centurion (in shock and awe 😉 “Truly this man was the Son of God!”—to leave you shaken not stirred into something like… repentance, a change of heart, mind. 😉

That’s a lot to ask in 10 minutes of talking—but we have God’s Word for our guide! And away we go!

Like all heresies, the Nestorian started with a big church bureaucrat, a pope in fact, the most powerful bishop in the early 5th century church—not the bishop of Rome, but the Patriarch, the Pope of Constantinople—a Syrian guy named Nestorius who’d moved (contrary to canon law) from his see in Antioch to Constantinople’s, the center of the Roman Empire.

After a short time in the big city, Nestorius was troubled to hear the Xns referring to the Virgin Mary as θεοτοκος “God-Bearer”, literally, “Mother of God”, colloquially. This bothered Nestorius because, to his way thinking, God cannot have a mother, cannot be born, just as he cannot die or suffer. He demanded this “God-Bearer” talk of Mary cease immediately and refer to her, if you must, as “Christ-Bearer”.

Another powerful bishop, Cyril of Alexandria, heard of this and was troubled by it. One would like to think it was the heresy that troubled him and not simply an opportunity to bring down in disgrace a more powerful rival in the bureaucracy. And the non-cynical certainly think this. Luther entertained doubts. 😉

Luther also doesn’t think the council saw the problem of Nestorius quite clearly. They condemned him for saying Christ is two persons. But Luther sees Nestorius never said anything like that. The real problem was Nestorius denied reciprocity in the genus maiestaticum, denied the 2 natures in the 1 person of Jesus Christ share all attributes, denied that, seeing Jesus walking down the street, you can simply say: “There goes God walking down the street”, insisting you must say, instead: “There goes the human nature of the Son of God walking down the street.” And when you see Jesus raise the dead you can’t say, “There he goes, raising the dead!” but “the divine nature in the man Jesus raised the dead.”

I’ll lay my cards on the table and say with Luther that I think: we’re all Nestorians, now. I certainly was brought up to think like one. I was taught in Sunday School and in Lutheran institutions of higher learning to say: “God can’t die. So, on the cross, the man, the human nature of Jesus, dies.” I’ve even heard it preached from Lutheran pulpits that: when Jesus says “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!?” that he’s not being damned by the Father, but the divine nature is leaving the building like Elvis after a show, hopefully to return on Easter Sunday.

… ;-(

Like all heresies, this one has the power to help us view disturbing events (like the death of God!) with calm equanimity and cool detachment. We can go on untroubled in our belief there is no rock too big for God to lift, no problem that he really would need to sweat. We can take this like a Passion Play designed to make us shed soft tears in lace hankies and leave… stirred.

But, what if Nietzsche (son of a Lutheran pastor 😉 was onto something with this death of God stuff? What if the death and damnation of God on Golgotha’s supposed to shake our world down to the ground?

…!

What do you think of our centurion? “I like him. I think he’s the real deal” 😉 No Nestorian he! He sees…

GOD DIED! GOD’S crushed by the rock that he made too big even for Himself to lift! Truly the universe is absurd, and Camus is not light years off from the truth! It’s a disturbing and dangerous place, this!

If the SON OF GOD, taking on our sin at the Jordan in John’s baptism, ends up killed and damned!!!! by his own Godhead, what in the world will happen to me?!

We’ll talk more about this tomorrow evening and Sunday morning. But, for now, I’d leave you with this: Jesus really means it when he says “whoever would save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life, for Christ’s sake, will ever truly find IT.” God won’t be used for my preferred ends of being cool, comfortable, easy in my mind about the Problem of Evil. He means to leave me shaken, not stirred, in shock and awe… 😉

Seeing all my sins on Jesus laid, then seeing him die horribly, get damned!—that shakes me to the core. But that God can die and get damned!—whoa! That seems awesomely cool to me, better than all the magical-realism fiction I love. Truly this world contains wonders.

So I’ll just say, with my centurion pal: “Truly this man is the Son of God!” and leave it at that. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.