Reflections...

A sermon preached at Kowloon Union Church on Sunday 20th May 2007 by Rev. Kwok Nai Wang. The scripture readings that day were Isaiah 52:13-53:12 and Romans 5:12-21.


In most of the living faiths, offerings and sacrifices are essential cultic activities. One of the major functions for such activities is for the remission of sins. Most people know that human beings are finite and as such are “sinful”. Our conscience constantly reminds us that we have done the things we ought not have done and have not done the things which we ought to have done. So we turn to God for pardon. In the ancient days, people offered farm produce or material goods to God, hoping God would accept and consequently, their sins were forgiven. Leviticus, the third book in the Old Testament, basically is a book about the Jewish ritual code. Chapters 1-8 of Leviticus gave us fairly detailed explanations on the rules and regulations for various kinds of offerings, such as burnt offering, cereal offering, communion or fellowship offering, etc. But foremost is burnt offering. In the burnt offering, an animal, usually a lamb, was slain. Supposedly, the blood of this slain lamb would join the two separated parties – God, the Holy One and the sinful people together once again. In other words, this burnt offering was performed as an act of “atonement” or at-one-ment. The most famous story of this kind is the story about Abraham who was tested by God to offer his beloved son Isaac to God in an act of thanksgiving offering as recorded in Genesis 22:1-19.

Jesus came only to be sacrificed for the remission of sins for all. So John the baptizer identified Jesus as “the lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world.” (Jn. 1:29).

John the Baptizer did not only baptize Jesus, he was also the forerunner of Jesus. He pleaded people at the time to repent (Mt 3:2// Mk 1:4// Lk 3:6). So did Jesus. Jesus also asked people to repent. The key or golden verse for the whole gospel of Mark was 1:15. It says, “The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Matthew followed Mark in 4:17. So calling people, both Jews and non-Jews to repent was the major concern of Early Christianity.

What does repentance mean? If Sin is the turning away from God or the Kingdom of God. Then repentance is to turn back to the Kingdom of God which is the Absolute Sovereignty of God or the realization of the fact that God is our God and we are God’s people. We belong to God! To put it simply, sin is our turning away from God; repentance is our turning back to God!

God became flesh. Jesus came as a Jew. The Jewish people or Israel was the chosen. God had chosen Israel to be God’s servant in the world – to establish God’s justice on earth (Is 42:4) or to be a light to all nations (Is 49:6). But soon, the Israelites had turned inward. They had forgotten God. Look at how the major prophets in the Old Testament levied criticism on them:

“The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib;
Israel does not know, my people do not understand.
Disaster, sinful nation, people weighed down with guilt,
Race of wrong-doers, perverted children!
They have abandoned Yahweh, despised the Holy One of Israel,
They have turned away from him.
Where shall I strike you next, if you persist in treason?
The whole head is sick, the whole heart is diseased…”
(Is. 1:33ff, N.J.B.)

And especially criticism on their leaders:

“For, from the least to the greatest,
they are all greedy for gain;
prophet less than priest,
all of them practice fraud.
Without concern they dress by people’s wound,
saying, “Peace! Peace!”
whereas there is no peace.”
(Jer. 6:13-14, N.J.B.)

OR: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them, Shepherds, the Lord Yahweh says this: Disaster is in store for the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Are not shepherds meant to feed a flock? Yet you have fed on milk, you have dressed yourselves in wool, you have sacrificed the fattest sheep, but fail to feed the flock. You have failed to make weak sheep strong, or to care for the sick ones, or bandaged the injured ones. You have failed to bring back strays or look for the lost. On the contrary, you have ruled them cruelly and harshly….”
(Eze 34:1-6)

What these major prophets said also apply to our situations to-day. Does the Church of Jesus Christ, as God’s chosen, care for its own welfare more than the calamitous world around it? Have religions, Christianity included, become vehicles of dominance and control of the strong and the powerful?

Indeed, like what Isaiah purported, “people had gone astray like lost sheep, each taking his own way.” (53:6) Have we lost the purpose of life and a sense of direction? We no longer know and care where we came from and where we are going. The deep-seeded problem is that we are alienated from God, the God of history and all of humankind.

Jesus came to show us that no matter how terrible it is, it is not the end. In fact as the Gospel of John argued so eloquently, it was God who chose to become flesh and came to us through Jesus Christ to reveal to us that God cares.

First and foremost, Jesus showed us that he was in unity with God. Because of this, Jesus had the power to change water into wine in Cana in Galilee; and to cleanse the Temple in Jerusalem (Ch. 2).

This indeed is a main theme of John’s Gospel. Jesus was in unity with God and he prayed in his high priestly prayer as recorded in Jn. 17 that we too can be the same. Only when we are in unity with God can we be in unity with each other.

What does it mean to be in unity with God?

First, absolute obedience. This we read from the New Testament this morning. From Genesis 3, we learned that Adam, the man God first created failed to obey God. God had commanded Adam: “You may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden, except the tree that gives knowledge of everything. You must not eat the fruit of that tree; if you do, you will die the same day.” (2:16-17). But Adam did not heed God’s order. Consequently the disrelationship of Adam and God, God and all human beings began. Adam is in all of us. Thus, we are all separated from God.

We disobey God constantly. It is evident that we always attempt to escape from God or to be more precise from the God-given situations. Because we all consider the situations we have to face too tough for us to bear. But Jesus did not. Even in the darkest hour of his life, when he was about to be separated from his loved ones and being put on a cross, he prayed to God, “My father, if this cup of suffering cannot be taken away unless I drink it, your will be done.” (Mt 26:39/ Mk 15:36// Lk 22:42). Only when we take the god-given situations seriously can we see the way to go forward and gain a deeper understanding about the meaning of our life which is also a very precious gift from God.

As Adam and people are separated from God as a result of disobedience, Jesus made it possible for all of us to be reconnected with God through his absolute obedience.

Second, utter humility.

We all want to build our own Tower of Babel, so that we can climb higher and made our name known. Lina Wang, one of the richest women in Asia wanted to build the tallest twin tower in Tsuen Wan so that people would remember her and her husband. This has never materialized. The point is that this kind of mindset is in all of us. Don’t we all want to climb the social ladder so that with it, higher status, better known, more power and more wealth for us?

But Jesus showed us an alternative mindset. Instead of climbing up, Jesus went down. According to Phil 2:6-11, the most famous Christological hymn of six such hymns in the new Testament, Jesus was in the highest, with God. But he did not cling onto his position and status, instead, he came down to be a human being. He came not as a king, but as a slave-servant (dulos). He was rejected by the civil as well as political authorities and finally being put to death. He died on a cross, probably the most humiliating way as well as the most painful way to die. He was nailed and hung on a cross with two robbers for at least three hours before he breathed his last. (Mt 27:45).

The Early Church creeds all added Jesus was buried and descended into hell. Jesus was in the highest in heaven and then the lowest, in the Hades: both beyond our human comprehension. This emptying totally, without any reservation, of oneself so that the life of others may be fuller or better (in Greek it is Kenosis) is the core value of Jesus’ life style. Kenosis has since become the basis for Christian ethics. This was what Jesus said, “for the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life to redeem many people”. (Mt 20:28// Mk 10:45).

So Jesus’ life-style is absolute obedience to God; utter humility in serving the whole of humankind; and thirdly vicarious suffering.

Vicarious suffering is what we read about in the Old Testament this morning. It is the fourth servant song in II Isaiah. It is the most famous and the longest servant song. The people this song referred to were the same people in the story of the Flood as recorded in Genesis 6-9. They were wicked in their actions and their thoughts evil (6:5). In 6:12, it reads, “God looked at the world and saw that it was evil, for the people were all living evil lives”. So God sent forth the flood to destroy the people except Noah who lived in fellowship with God (6:10).

After the flood, God decided not to punish people again in this magnitude. But instead God sent his servant to suffer on behalf of the people who ought to be punished or even perished. The suffering servant as depicted by II Isaiah was chosen by God to bear the sin and suffering of the people.

“But he endured the suffering that should have been ours, the pain that we should have borne. All the while we thought that his suffering was punishment sent by God. But because of our sins he was wounded, beaten because of the evil we did. We are healed by the punishment he suffered, made whole by the blows he received.” (53:4-5)

This is the ultimate meaning of the cross. Jesus took up the cross on behalf of all human beings. Thus, the cross has become the symbol of vicarious suffering, or the most profound meaning of human suffering.

Jesus beckons all his followers to be like him, to take up the cross (Mk 10:34// Mt 16:24// Lk 14:27). What does it mean to take up the cross to-day? It means we live a life of absolute obedience, obey God and what’s been given by God; a life of utter humility, in that we are prepared to go downwards, so that we can serve some of the people in need; rather than to climb upwards, constantly fighting for our own benefits and welfare; and last but not the least, we live a life of always willing to sacrifice and to suffer on behalf of the suffering people.