"Crucified for Us" given March 30

There is much that we do not know about this man Jesus, whom we

follow and call Lord. The gospels are hardly helpful in reconstructing a full life of the historical Jesus. There are conflicts regarding the date and place of birth. We know nothing of his early, formative years. Various gospels place him in various places in Judea. Few external sources, only A turncoat Jewish Historian named “Josephus”, give us a record of him and his work.

There is only one fact however about Jesus that is undisputed, historically certain, without doubt. He was crucified. In his early thirties, after a brief career around Galilee, the Romans arrested him, tried him, then nailed him to a cross to die. Jesus was crucified.

Crucifixion was a humiliating, painful and lingering death. The person executed actually died from slow suffocation--if exposure to the elements didn't get them first. But that wasn't the end of it. It was typical to leave the body hanging there as food for birds and wild dogs - the final insult among a people for whom burial of the body was important.

The Syrian governor, Publis Quinctilius Varus, had to quell three major peasant uprisings in Judea after the death of Herod the Great four years after the beginning of our era. When he arrived at Jerusalem, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, he crucified two thousand rebels. Here is an account of another mass crucifixion:

Many of the peaceable citizens were arrested and brought before Florus, who had them first scourged and then crucified. The total number of that day's victims, including women and children, for even infancy received no quarter, amounted to about three thousand six hundred.

Four years later, in the early summer of 70 CE, The Roman General Titus' army encircled Jerusalem, crushing a Jewish rebellion.

When caught, they were . . . scourged and subjected to torture of every description, before being killed, and then crucified opposite the walls . . . five hundred or sometimes more being captured daily . . . The soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different postures on their crosses; and so great was their number, that space could not be found for the crosses."

Thousands were crucified in those early centuries-- POWs, common criminals, freedom fighters, rebellious slaves, religious insurrectionists--in particular Jews. Of course, the murder of Jewish martyrs in our own century staggers the imagination.

Yet it is a Christian claim, not only that Jesus was crucified, but that he was crucified for us. Not for any crimes or wrong-doings. Not for his people's independence, or even for the sake of their historic faith. Not for any of those reasons I mentioned a moment ago-- but for us-- for you and for me. Crucifixion itself is tragedy enough. But crucified for me? As Paul says, in Romans 5,

"Why, you might be willing to die for a good person, but he shows

his love for us in that, at the right time, Jesus died for the ungodly"

The ungodly--that is to say-- us.

An archbishop of Paris stood in the pulpit of Notre Dame Cathedral.

He was there to preach the sermon, and his whole sermon was built around a story. Thirty years before, he said, three young students had come into this cathedral.

They were rough, rude, cynical men who thought all religion was a

racket. Two of them dared a third to go into the confession box and make a bogus confession to the priest. They dared him to do it, bet him that he didn't have the nerve. But to win the bet, he did. He tried to fool the old priest, but the priest knew that what he was saying was a lie.

The old priest listened to the false confession, sensed the arrogance in the young man's attitude, and said,

"Very well, my son. Every confession requires a penance, and this will be yours. I ask you to go

into the chapel, stand before the crucifix , look into the face of the crucified Christ and say, 'all this you did for me, and I don't care a damn.'"

The young man swaggered out of the confessional to his friends to claim the bet, but they insisted that before they paid him he would have to finish the performance, complete the penance. He went into the chapel, looked into the face of Christ, and began,

"All this you did for me, and I . . . ""All this you did for me, and I . . . " He couldn't say it. He never finished the sentence. It began for him a painful experience that changed his life and finally brought him into the priesthood. The archbishop telling the story leaned over the pulpit and said, "That young man was this man who stands before you to preach."

It takes a hard heart to be unmoved by all of this.

All the Scriptures agree, whatever else there is to be said about Jesus, he was crucified, one of the millions of Jewish martyrs. He was crucified. This day, this night remember: he was crucified by us, because of us, for us. For us.