The Lutheran Hour
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"Destroying Evidence"
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Text: John 12:10-11
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Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Those words, which summarize the message spoken by the angel before Jesus’ open and empty tomb, come to us down the centuries. Denied by some, denigrated by others, they remain true – the foundation of our hope, life, and salvation. God grant us faith in this truth. Amen.
In my office I have a unique book. Although I’ve never checked its value, I don’t imagine it would command a high price if I put it up for sale on e-Bay. The volume isn’t all that rare – and its binding is cloth, not gold embossed leather. Still the book, an art book, is special to me. You see, page after page of that volume is filled with beautiful color pictures of Jesus. Not that there was a hidden cameraman taking candid pictures of the Christ when He walked upon this earth. You and I both know that any painting or drawing we have of the Savior and the way He appeared physically comes from an artist’s heart and imagination.
If you were with me and were able to page through that book, you would quickly be amazed to see the many artistic variations upon the Savior’s form. There are pictures which show Jesus laughing and others which have Him crying. There are paintings which present Him as a newborn infant and others which try to capture His suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane. There are drawings of Him performing miracles and numerous renditions showing Him dying and dead. But these artful presentations do more than just show highlights taken from the life of the Savior; they also illustrate Jesus as He appears to artists living in different cultures, countries, and continents. There is a black Jesus, and one who is Asian in appearance. Here you will see the Savior looking as if He had stepped off the ski slopes in Scandinavia, and another which shows Him wrapped in the brightly colored clothes of a native from the South Seas. There is Jesus dressed in the furs of the native Americans who live in the Arctic Circle, and others where He looks like a Plains Indian or an Australian aborigine. His hair is curly or straight; His eyes blue, black, gray, or green; His skin is light, dark, and every shade in between. It’s amazing to see the multitude of ways Jesus lives in the minds of various Christian artists.
This week, as I paged through my book of art which shows the Savior, I was quite surprised to see one type of picture missing. None of those pictures – none of them – show Jesus with a target painted on His chest or back. That’s right, I said a target – the kind of target that a person might use in darts, or archery, or shooting. The kind of target that has a bull’s eye. The kind of target you use when you’re taking aim at someone. None of the pictures showed the Savior with a target upon His chest.
That absence amazes me, because, as I read through Scripture, I think Jesus almost always was being targeted by someone. No, the people who walked with the Christ probably couldn’t see that target. If you and I had been there with Him, we wouldn’t have seen it either. Even so, I’m convinced there was hardly a day in the life of the Savior when He wasn’t a target for those who hated Him, what He stood for, and what He was trying to accomplish by giving His life so we might, through His sacrifice, have eternal joy.
I think it was shortly after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, when He was still an infant, that the target can first be seen. When crazy King Herod sent His soldiers to murder the Savior, he put a target on Jesus and any Bethlehem boy who might be mistaken for the Savior. That the soldiers missed their target is due to a miracle of Divine intervention. Even so, when the soldiers had done their work and marched out of that small Judean town, they did so to the screams of mourning mothers and agonizing fathers. Yes, Jesus had a target on Him.
Years later, after Jesus had grown to manhood, He began the ministry which would lead to His suffering and win our salvation. The fourth chapter of the Gospel of Luke tells us how Jesus was wearing a target when He entered the wilderness and was tempted by the devil. Satan took dead aim at that target and did his best to get Jesus to renounce His work, reject His mission, and redirect His loyalties. That same chapter tells of how Jesus was wearing a target when He returned to His boyhood home of Nazareth. At the synagogue He told His old friends of how the Old Testament prophecies concerning the Messiah were being fulfilled in Him and the work He was doing. He had not completed His message of hope before the people’s hearts were filled with anger directed against their old friend. They targeted Him and tried to kill Him by throwing Him off a cliff (see Luke 4:29).
Yes, I’m amazed that artists don’t show Jesus with a target painted over His heart – it certainly was there. If He healed someone, He was targeted for criticism because He did His miracle on the wrong day. If He ate with a sinner and spoke of forgiveness and freedom, He was targeted for associating with the wrong kind of people. If someone gave Him a present, He was targeted by His own disciples for being a wanton wastrel. There was an invisible target on Jesus when He fed thousands with a few loaves and fish. When He told the crowds that He was the Bread of Life who gives eternal life to all who believe on Him, those words so incensed His hearers that many left Him, some were ready to arrest Him, and others were more than willing to murder Him (see John 6-7). There was a target on Jesus the day He stated His miracles showed He was the Son of God. When He said that the religious leaders were so frustrated, so infuriated, so furious at Him they picked up stones to murder Him (see John 10:31).
But, if you really want to see Jesus wearing a target, you need to take a look at the day He raised His friend Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, had come down with an unspecified malady. Jesus was summoned to his bedside. By the time the Christ arrived His follower and friend had been dead for some time. Jesus went to the gravesite, a cave cut into the rock. Overriding the objections of Lazarus’ sisters, Jesus ordered the stone which blocked the entrance to Lazarus’ tomb to be moved away. After a short prayer, Jesus called out a command that only the Son of God could give. He ordered, “Lazarus come out.” To the awe and amazement of all who were gathered, Lazarus did as he had been commanded. Lazarus – who should have been rotting, stinking, smelling – came out of his sepulcher and was released from his shrouds.
This was an impressive miracle. Today, with all of our modern medical machinery, I know of no physician who would attempt to revive and resuscitate someone who has been dead for four hours, let alone four days. Still, that is what Jesus did. Nobody could argue against what had happened; no one could deny that Lazarus had been dead and now he was alive. It was the kind of earth-shaking event which could have, should have, set the world on its ear: here is a man who can defeat death with a word. The news of a living Lazarus should have been rushed from one end of the Roman Empire to the other. But that’s not what happened.
What did happen was this: quite a few people, seeing this undeniable miracle, came to faith in Jesus as the Messiah. This unexpected and unprecedented shift in the popularity polls worried the Pharisees, the powerful power-brokers in the Jewish community. These Pharisees quickly summoned the Jewish Supreme Court – the Sanhedrin – together for an emergency meeting. If this keeps up, everybody is soon going to believe on Jesus, they whined. If somebody doesn’t do something, the Romans are going to get upset and remove us from office, they complained. If action isn’t taken quickly, this could lead to the end of our nation, they worried.
Caiaphas, the high priest at the time, listened to all the fearful, tearful talk. Finally he stood, gathered together his dignity about him, and made this pronouncement: You guys don’t get it, do you? Let me explain: it is better for us to get rid of Jesus than to allow Him to get rid of us. With those words Caiaphas painted a big, red target on Jesus. With that statement Jesus’ church leaders, the community’s respected businessmen, the Jewish political authorities, came together in one common cause. They committed themselves to killing the Christ. They put out an APB – an all-points-bulletin – which said: Anyone who knows the whereabouts of Jesus of Nazareth shall turn Him in so He may be arrested. Even worse, since Lazarus was an undeniable, incontestable, irrefutable living witness to what Jesus had done and could do, they decided to get rid of Him as well. Jesus might have called Lazarus out of his tomb, but they were going to put him back where he belonged. Because Jesus counted Lazarus as His friend; because Jesus had called Lazarus from death to life; both the Savior and the saved were marked for death. Jesus had always worn an invisible target, but now His follower wore one, too.
Now I wish I could tell you more about Lazarus, but I can’t. I don’t know if he was happy or sad to be called out of his grave. I don’t know if he remembered anything of what he had experienced after he died, or whether those four days were a complete and comprehensive blank. I can’t tell you if the Jews managed to have him murdered, or whether he and his sisters lived on and died having reached a ripe old age. I can’t tell you anything more about Lazarus because he, along with the rest of his life, fades from the pages of Scripture.
That is certainly not the case when it comes to the Christ. The rest of the Gospels tell how Jesus’ enemies worked with united purpose and absolute dedication to arranging those events which brought about Christ’s murder. Read through those chapters and you will see how they successfully bribed one of Jesus’ disciples to betray his Master and how they successfully conducted a series of illegal and immoral trials which found Jesus guilty of trumped-up charges. Read for yourself and you will see how Jesus’ enemies managed to intimidate the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, into rubber-stamping Jesus’ death by crucifixion.
Jesus had worn an invisible target all of His life, and finally, after years of taking aim, the forces of sin and Satan, death and devil, finally figured they had hit the mark. They smiled when the Sanhedrin’s soldiers struck the Savior’s mouth which had spoken words of love to those who felt forsaken; they smirked when a crown of thorns was smashed down upon the brow of Him who thought of nothing other than saving them from their sins. They sneered when hands which had been used to heal the leper, the blind, the deaf; which had picked up little children and blessed them; were nailed to the crossbeam of a great cross. They laughed when the Christ was hung up to die. Relishing every moment of the Savior’s agony – those enemies of humankind who had enslaved us, watched as Jesus died. They thought they had managed to hit their mark.
What a sad saga, what a distressing Sunday this would be if those smiles, smirks, and sneers of humankind’s enemies were the Savior’s epitaph. What a terrible tragedy if a borrowed tomb were to be the Christ’s final resting place. If that were the case, there would never, could never, be a cause for us to rejoice. What a dark day it would be if death, and not the Christ, was the great and final conqueror; if eternal death in the flames of hell were to remain our ultimate end.
But death and devil were not the masters, nor were they the final victors. Three days after Jesus was laid in an empty grave, a living Lord arose. Three days after mourning friends walked away, their hearts filled with grief, they were transformed by the appearance of a real, living Lord and Savior. Unbelievably, unexpectedly, death and devil had missed the mark. In life, Jesus had resisted temptation and fulfilled the law; in death, He managed to break the hold of hell. His cry from the cross, “It is finished,” does not mean He is dead and done. It means His work has been successfully completed and now all who acknowledge Him as their heaven-sent substitute, their victorious Redeemer, are washed of their sins and are given eternal life. Because Christ’s work was successfully done, all who believe on Him know the day will come when the returning Redeemer will call into their graves, “Come out!” and they will. They will emerge from their tombs restored and ready to join their Savior in a never-ending celebration of victory.
This, my friends, you can believe. If you are mourning the passing of a loved one, you can believe it; if you are facing the onslaught of an unrelenting and debilitating disease, you can believe it. If your personal calendar seems to be coming to a quick conclusion, you can rely on this: Jesus Christ is the Victor and not the vanquished. Because this is true you can be convinced as Saint Paul was convinced, and with him you can confidently proclaim: “…in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:37-39).
Or – or – you can do what Satan, along with the world’s skeptics and cynics, have tried to do for the last 2,000 years: you can ignore the living Lord and pretend that He remains defeated and dead. You will not be alone in doing so. History shows there have been a great many governments who have dedicated a great deal of time, energy, and money into targeting Jesus and making sure He stays in His sepulcher. A few hundred years after Jesus rose from the grave, the Roman emperor Diocletian murdered Christ’s followers, confiscated their property, and destroyed their churches. So dedicated was this emperor in making sure Jesus remained dead, so sure was he of his programs to snuff out the Savior’s memory, that he set up a stone pillar into which were carved the words, “For Having Exterminated The Name Christian From the Earth.” You can go to the British Museum and see a bronze medal struck with these words, “To Diocletian, who destroyed Christianity.” The worldwide Christian church shows how miserably the emperor failed. Diocletian failed as has every other persecuting power and potentate. As will all those who, this day, consider it their sacred duty to target the Savior.
Yes, Jesus still has a target on Him. Go to the library and you will find many books filled with the thoughts of men who wished to ignore the living Lord and stuff the Savior back into His sepulcher. In the 1800s there was an infamous atheist by the name of Robert Ingersoll. One day, as he rode a train, he spoke with another unbeliever, a Civil War Veteran, General Lew Wallace. Ingersoll challenged Wallace to write a novel on the life of Christ. Ingersoll said he thought a best-selling book could be written about Jesus which would expose the Savior as a fake and charlatan.
Wallace accepted the challenge, and during the time he served as Governor of New Mexico, Wallace wrote his book. But a strange thing happened as he worked. During his studies of the Gospel’s account of Jesus’ life, Wallace came to the conclusion that Jesus had not only lived and died, He had also risen from the grave. In short, Governor Lew Wallace was saved, and his book begun in unbelief, his book, Ben Hur, has touched millions. Yes, books are still being written which target Jesus. They are acclaimed and applauded, celebrated and commended, and they are also soon forgotten, and Jesus lives on.
Today, there are still many who are targeting Christ. College professors laugh at the naiveté of students who profess faith in the risen Lord. Comedians have no hesitation in making fun of the foolish faith held by the Savior’s followers. News reporters talk about Christian believers as if acceptance of Scripture and reliance upon the Savior is some kind of social disease. What a great deal of time, money, and work the unbelieving world invests in their attempts to prove Jesus is inconsequential, insignificant, and irrelevant.
And I wonder: why? Why don’t they let Him alone? Why don’t they let believers believe? Why are they so driven to try and talk others into denying their Lord? It’s not because they have anything better than Jesus; it’s not because they have anything to take His place; and it’s certainly not because they can offer anything to disprove the resurrection. Why do they do what they do? They do it because they think Jesus is an easy target for their fast tongues, nimble minds, and unbelieving hearts. And so He is. But when the dust ultimately settles, the result will be the same: they will have missed their mark and a risen Savior will still be standing. No matter what others may say, God’s truth remains and Jesus can be believed when He says, “Because I live, you shall live also.” To that end, The Lutheran Hour extends hope in the risen Christ. If you wish to know more about this Savior who gave His life so you might live forever, please call us at The Lutheran Hour. Amen.
LUTHERAN HOUR MAILBOX (Questions & Answers) for March 9, 2008
TOPIC: Does God Negotiate?ANNOUNCER: Now, Pastor Ken Klaus answers questions from listeners. I’m Mark Eischer.
KLAUS: Hello, Mark. I see you’ve got a book with you.
ANNOUNCER: Well, this is a book on how to negotiate. I’m studying up for my annual review.
KLAUS: Good luck with that. Now, what is our question?
ANNOUNCER: Pastor, a listener wants to know if it’s all right to play Let’s Make a Deal with God.
KLAUS: Please, explain.
ANNOUNCER: Well, in this book here, it says that in business, you don’t necessarily get what you deserve – you get what you negotiate.
KLAUS: In business, probably so. That’s often the way the world operates.
ANNOUNCER: Suppose a person wants something from God. Is it all right to carry that idea a step forward and try to negotiate with God?
KLAUS: You mean, if you want a new car, can you say, “Lord, I want a new car. Tell you what – You give me a new car, and I will drive it to church every Sunday – and I won’t go above the speed limit”?
ANNOUNCER: You might even put one of those little fish stickers on the back.
KLAUS: OK – Deal! Anyway, when people try to negotiate with God, it’s pretty much the same thing as trying to bribe God into doing something or giving them something that they want…
ANNOUNCER: …by trying to hold out something we think God wants.
KLAUS: Yes – and what does God want?
ANNOUNCER: God wants all people to be saved.
KLAUS: So, might someone then say, “God, I’ll believe in you, I’ll worship you – if you give me what I want. Help me out of whatever jam I’ve gotten myself into.”
ANNOUNCER: Well, God certainly wants us to be faithful in worship and in prayer. So we might promise to give Him that, too.
KLAUS: And we can call that negotiations…
ANNOUNCER: …Or we could call it a bribe.
KLAUS: I agree. Now, that’s the setup. Now, let’s try to answer the question. First, let me ask, “Mark, what does God own?”
ANNOUNCER: God is the Creator of the universe, so ultimately He owns everything.
KLAUS: So, let’s see here – what can you negotiate with someone who, quite literally, already has everything?
ANNOUNCER: We really can’t give or offer Him anything, because He’s the One who has first given to us.
KLAUS: Exactly – and God tells us the same thing in the book of Job. God says, “Who has first given to Me, that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is Mine”(Job 41:11).
ANNOUNCER: That’s pretty clear that God is the giver, we are the takers. He is the owner, we are the borrowers.
KLAUS: Exactly. That means we are not in the best of bargaining positions, are we?
ANNOUNCER: Not really. But in the Bible, Abraham haggled with God to keep Sodom and Gomorrah from being destroyed.
KLAUS: He was certainly trying to negotiate – but it didn’t work out, did it?
ANNOUNCER: Not really. I think he was banking on Sodom and Gomorrah not being as bad as their reputation made them out to be. Turns out, they were worse.
KLAUS: Mark, it’s wonderful when people come to the Lord in prayer. It’s great that they know and believe the Lord is listening to them. But anyone who comes to the Lord must realize God is in control and He retains control at all times. God isn’t someone who can be talked into doing something that isn’t right or best for us, or goes against His will, that isn’t part of His big picture, that isn’t part of His love.
ANNOUNCER: Is that the final word?
KLAUS: No, not yet. There’s something else God’s people need to realize.
ANNOUNCER: And what’s that?
KLAUS: God’s people need to realize what God has already given them.
ANNOUNCER: Explain that.
KLAUS: Let’s go back to Luther’s Small Catechism. You’ve got your little book there, I’ve got mine. In his explanation of the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed, Luther wrote, “I believe God has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, all my members, my reason and all my senses; and still takes care of them. He also gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all I have. He richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life. He defends me against all danger and guards and protects me from all evil. All this He does only out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me. For all this it is my duty to thank and praise, serve and obey Him. This is most certainly true.” And Mark, I should add that, most of all, in Jesus He has given us the Savior we need – but didn’t deserve.
ANNOUNCER: There wasn’t any talk about negotiating there, was there?
KLAUS: How can you negotiate with someone who has given you everything? No, the best way to pray is by following the example of the Savior who said, “Not My will, but Thy will be done.”
ANNOUNCER: This has been a presentation of Lutheran Hour Ministries.
Music selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by John Leavitt. Concordia Publishing House/SESAC
“We Sing the Praise of Him Who Died” arr. by Henry Gerike. Used by permission
“God Loved the World So That He Gave” by John Behnke. From For All Seasons, vol. 1 by John Behnke (© 1996 John A. Behnke) Concordia Publishing House/SESAC
“Preludio” by Arcangelo Corelli. From Charles Callahan Plays the Organ of the Church of the Holy Family by Charles Callahan (© 1997 Charles Callahan)