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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Christ our Lord took his twelve apostles to himself, and he talked to them about his impending passion.
See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles, and he will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. and after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.” The apostles did not understand at the time, for these things were hidden from them.
Beloved in the Lord, today, three days before Ash Wednesday, in the onset of the Lenten season, you find yourselves in a place similar to the disciples. For the Lord’s passion is imminent for you. As his disciples, you are to follow him into Jerusalem, through his suffering, through Holy Week, and to the cross. But you have a distinct advantage over the apostles in our gospel, for these things are not hidden from you. You were not like the blind man of Jericho, who symbolizes the disciples before the cross. You are like the blind man who has been healed.
You have received your spiritual sight. Your faith has made you well. In a few days, you will begin Lent as Christians who already know that the crucified Christ is the source and summit of the Christian life.
Now, the season of Lent has many benefits. It fosters repentance. It helps us to train and chasten our flesh. But I want to focus this morning on the chief benefit, the thing Christ wants to talk about over and over again with His disciples, the thing Christians need to occupy themselves with.
Today, I want to prepare for Lent by talking about the important spiritual discipline of meditating on the Lord’s Passion. How should Christians, those who have received their sight, how should they contemplate the Lord’s Passion? There is actually a distinctive Lutheran way to do so, a way set forth by Luther and the Reformers, a way that’s different than how other Christians do it.
And there are, actually, many wrong ways to meditate upon Christ’s passion. Ways where the passion is external to us, where we are mere innocent bystanders watching a story unfold. We should not think of the passion, for example, as a chance to be angry at the Jews for crucifying Jesus. As though we are any better than the murderous crowds that yelled out, crucify Him. Nor should you view yourselves as better than the Gentiles in the story. The Romans who laughed, lashed, mocked, and spat upon the Lord.
We also shouldn’t view the cross and passion superstitiously. Many think of making the sign of the cross or carrying around a physical crucifix as a good luck charm, a way to ward off what is bad, as though Christ wished by his cross for us to magically keep away all our own crosses. This again keeps the cross at arm’s length to us.
We also shouldn’t meditate on the cross in such a way as where we’re trying to work up ourselves into some kind of emotional frenzy as though we’re summoning forth tears for Christ out of sorrow for him, without that fundamental realization that we are the ones inflicting the wounds upon Christ.
When Jesus dragged His cross, leaving a trail of His blood through the streets of Jerusalem, there were women, Luke reports, who were standing there, and at such a pitiable sight, they wept. But Jesus turned to them and said, Do not weep for me, weep for yourselves. What Jesus says here is the key to understanding how to rightly meditate on the Lord’s passion.
The correct way to view Christ’s suffering and death is when you look at it in such a way that you are frightened over your sins and your conscience is seized with despair. For in every wound and pain of Christ, there is a clear picture of God’s attitude toward your sins. To drag the heavy instrument of your own torture and death upon your flogged, mangled back, that is the just penalty not for Christ, but for you.
If God would inflict this upon His own beloved Son, what does God have in store for sinners who don’t repent? The passion of Christ is a mirror of God’s wrath against sin. The more you reflect on Christ’s suffering in this way, the more frightened you should become. You are not innocent bystanders.
When you see Jesus suffering, bleeding, sighing, and agony, you should have no doubt this is your fault. This is your doing. It is your spit that lands upon the Lord’s face, for you have spoken much that is sinful and shameful. You should look at your hands and think, the sins of my hands are the strikes and blows to my Lord’s face. The greed, the envy, the covetousness of your heart is the lot casting of the Romans for our Lord’s clothes.
Your sharp words of anger are the mockings that ring in God’s ears and the nails that pierce his hands and feet. Every sinful thought in your mind is a razor-sharp thorn that cuts into the Lord’s brow. Because of your sinfulness, Peter can preach to the crowds at Pentecost, to some of those who were not there on Good Friday.
He can say, correctly, you are the Lord, crucified Jesus. You must come to this realization to benefit from Christ’s crucifixion. As Christ was tortured in his body, your consciences need to feel the weight of your sins. This does not happen just by reading the words of the Passion or saying the right prayers in the book.
This happens with deep, thoughtful meditation about the seriousness of your sins. Imagine yourself, Christ is dying, and you look at him in his eyes, as blood drips down his face, and you know when he’s looking at you, he sees the sins you’ve committed, and that that’s the cause of his suffering. You are the ones for whose sins God slaughtered and crucified his Son.
Every person must come to this realization, either now by grace, so that you can benefit from his passion, or for those hardened to Christ’s suffering, God will work this realization in hell. God needs to frighten our hearts and soften them by his grace so that Christ’s suffering sinks deep within.
This meditation is, in fact, God’s gracious work in your hearts when you meditate on the passion in prayer and faith. This is a gift we should pray for. We should pray for God’s grace to be terrified of God, over the fruit, over the consequences, over the debt of our sins.
And this will teach us never to think of sin lightly. Such meditation for only 15 minutes, like we’re doing in this sermon, Luther says, is more powerful than praying the Psalter every single day or reading the Passion account a hundred times. This kind of reflection Luther compares to baptismal regeneration.
For in this kind of meditation, the suffering of Christ does a similar work. It slays our old Adam. It drives away any delight, joy, and confidence we would have in ourselves, in our own works. If it were up to ourselves, we would be like Christ on the cross, forsaken by all.
Now this is the first part of true meditation, to be frightened over your sins. This is a useful discipline. It’s a medicine to keep ourselves from becoming secure and confident in our own worthiness. But this is not the end. We’re not to remain frightened, or we would perish in despair. Rather, as our meditation on Christ’s crucifixion drives us to despair over ourselves, we must set our consciences free by casting our sins upon Christ and letting them die with Him.
When you realize your sins did inflict agony upon Christ, in a profound way, you can now take heart and firmly believe that Christ indeed suffered for your sins. What God said through the prophet Isaiah is true. God laid upon him the iniquity of us all. Or what God said through St. Peter, he himself bore our sins.
The only way we can deal with our sins in our hurting consciences are these passages of Scripture that tell us that Christ bore our sins for us. Our sins were placed upon him, and he overcame them through his resurrection. Now to have faith in this is also a gift of God, just as a recognition of our sin is a gift from God.
So we should pray for comfort, and we should try to look and meditate and ponder all the ways God shows his gracious, loving, and fatherly heart toward us on account of Christ’s crucifixion. Meditate on the fact that Christ willingly suffered all of this for you and your salvation.
God loved the world in such a way that he sent his son to die for it. God knew the great price it would cost him, and he wanted to do it anyways. He wanted to slay his son and give him all agony to give you joy.
Now, this is just a brief admonition to truly meditate on Christ’s passion. Such meditation, it’s not a pretense. It’s not a motion to go through on Good Friday. It’s not a prescription to just read these certain words on Lent during Lent.
Note, Christ talks about it regularly with his disciples to show that this is something we need to think about and talk about regularly. And this is a great blessing for your whole lives, and you can practice it this Lent.
So this is what to pray for in meditation and what to keep in mind. For God to work a knowledge of sin in your hearts, and to take comfort that those sins have been suffered for. How you go about this is up to you, but I have a few suggestions.
1. You could read through the passion accounts. This is what we’ll be doing in our midweek services. You can come to those and meditate on those words. And you can read them again at home. You can follow Christ’s suffering for you from the upper room till he breathes his last breath. And you can pause and let each of those words sink into your hearts, reflecting on your sin and on Christ paying the price for it in your place.
Second, you could specifically meditate on the seven words of Christ from the cross. What does it mean when Christ says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Or Father, forgive them. Think about your sin and your comfort in those words.
Third, you could meditate on Christ’s holy body in the wounds he endured on it. You can look at his head beaten and crowned, his face covered in spit and strikes, his hands pierced in pain, his arms stretched out to embrace, his back covered with lashes to bear your burdens, his side cut open in judgment with healing and forgiveness poured out, his legs that carried the weight of the cross to bear your souls into heaven unbroken, and his precious pierced feet that stood in solidarity with all mankind and died in its place.
This is fruitful to imagine and see those sins and those marks of his love for you on his body, from his head to his feet. Christian artwork may especially be useful here, or you can imagine it in your minds. You can look for it in our church, on our bulletins, crucifixes. You can find art in many places.
Final suggestion is you can go through the hymns in our hymnal from the Lent and Holy Week sections. You’ll find many helpful meditations on Christ’s passion.
I want to close with one such hymn, one stanza from Sigmund von Berken. Jesus, I will ponder now on your holy passion. With your spirit, me and Tao, for such meditation, grant that I, in love and faith, may the image cherish of your suffering, pain, and death, that I may not perish.
May these words be your own, dear saints. May God grant us his grace and spirit for such faithful meditation on his son, to our salvation, and to the Father’s eternal glory.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.