FORGIVE OUR MISPLACED SORROWS!

[Steven S. Billings]

Rev. Steven S. Billings
Lent 5 Mid-Week
Sermon
4-1-2009

St. Luke 23:26-31

²⁶ And as they led him away, they seized one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it behind Jesus. ²⁷ And there followed him a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him. ²⁸ But turning to them Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. ²⁹ For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ ³⁰ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ ³¹ For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

On the day that Jesus died, there weren't too many sympathetic faces in the crowd. You could practically count them on one hand. But there was no shortage of haters, that's for sure!

So you might wonder why, when we're doing a series that focuses on Jesus' enemies, we would include some of the very few people who actually felt sorry for Him as He struggled with His cross to the place of the skull.

Well, of course we don't lump them in with Jesus' enemies! But we do count them among the many people who stood that day in need of the forgiveness Jesus was in the very process of earning for us. Their sorrow for Him was sweet and admirable, no doubt about it, especially compared with the shouts of the mob crying for His crucifixion. The angels themselves may have been weeping that day!

Yet it was this very man for whom they were crying such heartrending sobs who told them that they were weeping for the wrong reasons. Their sympathy for Jesus - heartfelt and genuine as it was - still missed the mark. There were other tears to be shed, tears that these good women had no idea they should be shedding. Can it happen that we, too, sometimes cry the wrong tears? I think so, and when it happens, we must pray: "Father, forgive our misplaced sorrow!"

The sentiment of the women was truly heartfelt. They felt genuine sorrow for Jesus as He struggled under the weight of that cross. And it wasn't a sudden jolt of pity like you might feel passing an accident on the highway. This was a deep sorrow. How deep? Luke tells us that they mourned and cried, which means they made gestures of woe common to people of the Middle East: beating their chests, throwing their hands up in despair, crying out in misery, loudly and pitifully, as Jesus passed them on the Way of Sorrows.

In spite of all that, Jesus told them: "Do not weep for me; weep for yourselves." In saying this, He was making it clear that what He wants from us is not mere sentimentality, but true repentance of the heart.

Why? Because He sees the bigger picture. He knew what was going to happen to the city that finally and irrevocably rejected its God. He spoke of the terror and despair that would overtake all the inhabitants of Jerusalem:

The time will come when you will say, "Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!" Then "they will say to the mountains, 'Fall on us!' and to the hills, 'Cover us!'" For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?

Jesus Himself was the green tree, the very picture of spiritual health and vigor, the one in whom God was well-pleased. Israel, on the other hand, was the dry tree, spiritually lifeless. Israel had proven to be a nation that was pretending to be religious, all the while denying the very God who alone gives life. And if Christ, who is perfect, had to suffer as He did in this dark world, what in the world could the sinful people of Jerusalem expect?

The sin of rejecting their Messiah would have horrible consequences for the people of Jerusalem. The earthly consequence included great suffering at the hands of Rome. Not 40 years in the future, the legions of the great general Titus would sack the city and burn the temple to the ground. An eyewitness account of that siege reads like a horror story. How much happier the people of Jerusalem would've been to be swallowed up by the hills!

Yet even worse than that would be the eternal consequences suffered by those who rejected their Messiah. They had every opportunity to repent and believe in Christ who had walked among them for three years preaching and teaching and performing signs and wonders. But they refused and in the end demanded His blood. On the day of judgment, when, as Scripture says, they have to look upon Him whom they have pierced as He comes in the clouds of heaven, what excuse can they offer? How can they escape the eternal flames, torments and regrets of hell?

You'd have to be made of stone, I think, if the image of Christ's suffering didn't bring out some sense of pity for the one who had to undergo such torment. If it didn't, we could hardly even call ourselves human. But, as we've seen, that's not the reaction Jesus is looking for. He wants a deeper sorrow, a godly sorrow over our sins. This doesn't mean you can't feel sympathy for your suffering Savior, but sympathy must never be all you have.

Our Lord would tell us, just like He told those women: He doesn't need our compassion; He wants our repentance. It was our sins, after all, that He was suffering for in the first place, right? If your sins hadn't been as scarlet, it wouldn't have taken the blood of Jesus to make you white as snow, you know what I mean? Do you give that fact the amount of thought it deserves? We're so permeated by sin that the only thing in all of creation that could keep us from an eternity in hell was the sacrifice of the Son of God.

So what God wants from us is a true and godly sorrow over our sins, a sorrow that confesses with the psalmist, "Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge" (Ps 51:4). My friends, when the Scriptures condemn all people as sinners against the commandments of God, we have to understand that that includes us. We too have done what is evil in God's sight, and we need to be moved by the suffering of Christ to admit that and repent of it.

But, as you may have discovered, repentance is a hard thing, and not many of us are very good at it. It's a sorrow that's often more than we want to deal with. We'd rather make it seem like our sins aren't all that serious. We'd rather compare them to the supposedly "greater" sins of others. We'd rather distract ourselves with worldly pleasures so that we don't have to think about our guilt. We'd rather try to convince ourselves that somehow we've done more good than bad, so things should balance out pretty well in the end.

But none of that is what our Lord calls for. "Weep for yourselves," he told the women of Jerusalem. And He says to us, "Repent of your sins. Don't hide them. Don't ignore them. Don't try to make them less serious than they are. But confess them, and then come to me for full and free forgiveness." That's the path He sets before us, and that's what we're asking for when we pray, "Father, make us truly repentant!"

The sight of Jesus on the cross should drive home to us the deadly nature of our sins so that we would come to terms with how serious they are before God. How could our guilt not be that big a deal when it cost so much to atone for it? And how could we think that Jesus' suffering wasn't that big a deal when the night before, He prayed almost desperately for His Father to find some other way?

Beloved, an unrepentant attitude is an insult to Christ. The cost of our salvation was greater than we can even begin to imagine. But Jesus selflessly paid that cost out of love for us. In return, the first thing we need to do is confess our sins, showing honor to Him who took all our sins onto His own back and paid for them with His innocent suffering and death. Don't try to excuse them or rationalize them away. Just confess that you too are one of the sinners for whom our Savior suffered and died.

But don't stop there. Confession is only the first part. Jesus is the Lamb of God who took away the sin of the world. He didn't offer up His life just to make us feel guilty; He did it to make us holy! "God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him!" Forgiveness was the ultimate goal, and our forgiveness is guaranteed, as Paul tells us in Romans 8: "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

Salvation is yours through faith in His promise. Through faith you lay hold of the forgiveness Jesus won for you. His Word has promised it to us, and we know His Word is true. And we honor Him when we place all our hope and confidence in His Word of promise.

"Do not weep for me," Jesus told the women of Jerusalem, "weep for yourselves." May we take these words to heart, but in the right way. Let's pray to our Father in heaven that He would fill our hearts with truly repentant sorrow over our sins so that we would then honor Christ's death all the more. Pray that you would trust in Him with all your heart. And pray that He would help you to live a life filled with the fruits of repentance that prove to everyone that His love is real and vibrant and living and makes a difference in the lives of those He loves. Let this be your prayer: "Lord, let this holy season of Lent bring the right kind of tears to my eyes, the tears that lead to eternal life in your Son. In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen"