The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
When Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ was released in 2004, there was a lot of criticism about the depiction of Jesus’s suffering and crucifixion. It was simply too graphic, too realistic for most moviegoers. Others complained that it was emotionally too draining. It was negative and depressing, and they had hoped that for a movie that would come out during Holy Week, it would be more uplifting and encouraging to the Christian faith. Nevertheless, the movie left a mark on everybody who saw it. Film critic at the time Roger Ebert wrote, “The most violent film I’ve ever seen in my life,” end of quote. But as a former altar boy, he was also struck by the film, writing the following: “What Gibson has provided for me, for the first time in my life, is a visceral idea of what the Passion of the Christ was.”
Today the Epistle directs our attention to the suffering and death of Jesus Christ as the supreme cost for our salvation, verse 6 of our reading today, and our sufferings as Christians, verses 3 through 5. In other words, the Epistle lesson today is in essence the theology of the cross. Now most people who saw The Passion of the Christ were stunned by its graphic depiction of the brutality that was inflicted on Jesus’s body and soul. Yet this, and more, was the price that Jesus paid to redeem us from sin, death, and the power of the devil. To redeem us, you and me, who are by the description of Romans 5 the ungodly: “At the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” It’s a short and concise and extremely profound statement. Christ died for the ungodly. No truer statement can be made about our condition in relationship to our Creator, to the Lord God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are by nature ungodly creatures, though we don’t like to think of ourselves in that way.
That’s what the Lenten season is in a nutshell. The Lenten season and Holy Week is fundamentally about the fact that we are born in sin, captive to sin, original sin, and that we are ungodly creatures who sin grievously. Verse 6: “At the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” It’s the essence of the Christian faith. But we don’t understand, really, seriously. We don’t think much about the Passion of Christ. And the word passion even sort of means a different thing to us in the 21st century. But the word passion has its origin in Latin, which means suffering and pain. Later Christian theology broadly redefined the word to include the love of God that caused him to suffer and die in our stead in order to save us from sin, death, and the power of the devil.
But the message of Christ dying has been repeated to us so often it’s become little more than a formula to our ears. We’re no longer moved by the brutality of Good Friday and the sacrifice of Christ in such a way that it brings about serious reflection, a serious effort to think about and dwell on our natural state, and to confess our sins in sorrow that is appropriate for any time of confession and absolution, but especially during the season of Lent and Good Friday. Do we hear the story in its details? And when we do, do we shy away from envisioning what it was really like for our Lord to endure this kind of suffering and pain and crucifixion for our salvation? Do we even make the connection between our sin and his suffering? When it comes to the Passion of the Christ, do we commit the sin of indifference towards Christ’s suffering, dying, and rising again?
Well, the season of Lent and Holy Week is supposed to be about contrition and true Christian faith, not indifference to the Passion of the Christ. But God through Paul calls us to contrition in faith in the most amazing declaration of what that familiar yet glorious truth actually means: “At the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” It’s a profound statement, first, because we don’t understand just exactly how ungodly we really are. We don’t understand how depraved and opposed we are to God in his will and ways, in and of ourselves. We don’t understand that depth of Psalm 51, which we say in the liturgy all the time: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” We know we’re born and conceived in sin. We know it’s called Original Sin. Pretty much every denomination except a couple acknowledges original sin. We just underestimate how deep and powerful that sin is and how grievous the sins we commit are in the eyes of a perfect, righteous, and just God.
In the late 1970s, famed American psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a book called Whatever Became of Sin? It was a book about how we in the 20th century began to soften sin, to make sin unfashionable in the sense of talking about it or acknowledging its even existence. Menninger tells a funny but telling story. It goes like this: On a sunny day in September in 1972, a stern-faced, plainly dressed man could be seen standing still on a street corner in the busy downtown Chicago Loop. As pedestrians hurried on their way to go to lunch or to business, he would solemnly raise his right arm, pointing to the person nearest to him, and intone loudly a single word: “Guilty!” Then, without any change of expression, he would resume his stance for a few moments before repeating the gesture again, then again: the raising of his arm, pointing, and the solemn pronouncing of that one word, “Guilty!” The effect of this strange accusatory pantomime on passing strangers was extraordinary, almost eerie. They would stare at him, hesitate, look away. They would look at each other and then at him again, then hurriedly continue on their way. But one man passing by turned to another and exclaimed, “How in the world did he know?!”
In the contemporary mind, you see, sins are things like school shootings, even gun ownership, failing to bend the knee to wokeness, or earning too much money. These make the list of vices in the world today. But abortion, or homosexuality, or divorce, or sex changes, or laziness, or selfishness wouldn’t appear on the list at all, even though many of those are on the list in Romans. For two centuries, you see, mainline Protestant churches across the board and Roman Catholic churches taught that human beings, each person, was guilty of sin and needed to repent. In the second quarter of the 20th century, liberal Protestant and Roman Catholic churches started putting less emphasis on sin and the so-called negative doctrines of the Christian faith, and started to concentrate more on the positive attributes of doing good things, and they call that the Christian religion. Yet the divinely inspired Apostle Paul wrote in our text: “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” The ungodly: literally, those without God, those who were or are unholy, those who are unlike God. Given our difference, we would drive him from our presence and even kill him if we could.
Don’t underestimate or overlook the word “we” when Paul writes “we were still weak,” ungodly, sinners, even enemies. Maybe we’re on the perceived right side of the social issues, of abortion and transgenderism and all the other fads that come and go and destroy people’s lives. But sin lurks deep within each and every heart, each and every one of us. We were conceived ungodly, and that ungodliness still lives in us in what the New Testament calls our old sinful natures. And the season of Lent is designed to call upon each one of us to look inside ourselves and to recognize just how sinful and ungodly we can be. When we do, when we measure ourselves against the Ten Commandments, we see that sinful thoughts run throughout our mind all day long, thoughts we dare not speak out loud lest we betray our ungodly nature. Thoughts calling for patience and understanding. Discontentment with the house we’ve been given, or the car that we drive, or relatives that God has brought into our lives. Thoughts fill us with complaints and gossip against people and businesses that didn’t meet our expectations. Jealousy of friends and family that have more and do more than we can. Off-colored jokes. Or setting up idols in our hearts, hearts worried more about what other people think, and what those idols are, than about the Lord God himself.
That ungodliness was you and me. That’s all of us. Even though we now have a second nature, a new nature created in the waters of our Baptism and given in Jesus Christ, even though we have the new nature, the old nature still hangs on. Luther wrote that we are to drown the old nature daily in baptismal repentance. But he said, beware, that critter can swim.
Yet Christ died for the ungodly. And it’s a profound statement because the death of Christ is for us and beyond our comprehension. Paul wrote in the reading today: “One will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would even dare to die, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” verses 7 and 8. We hear about from time to time firemen or police who die in the line of duty, a soldier sacrificing himself for his buddies in battle, a mom laying down her life to save her child. But we aren’t innocent, adorable children and loyal brothers in arms. We are the essence of weakness, of cowardness, of ungodliness and sinfulness. And sin is a horribly messy business. One might say ugly, brutal, ungodly, like The Passion of the Christ. The one who is all glorious and needs nothing from us nevertheless paid to save us, made us perfect in his sight, because he wanted us to be in fellowship with him, and he with us. He loved us from eternity, and he took that love all the way to the Passion of the Christ on Good Friday. He carried all your sins and the sins of the whole world in his body to the cross. He is your substitute, the one that has made you innocent in the face of all the guilt. There he suffered anguish and died in your place to satisfy the wrath of an angry God, and did so in a graphic way, just like it’s portrayed in the movie. With his suffering and death, together with his resurrection from the dead, he ensures you victory over sin, death, and the power of the devil, over the grave itself. His resurrection becomes your resurrection.
Christ died for the ungodly. It’s a profound statement. It creates a new relationship that we don’t fully understand or appreciate. Christ’s dying reestablished the broken relationship between God and man. God does not want to condemn us. Rather, he calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies us unto repentance and everlasting life. The Holy Spirit with the Word causes us to have sorrow for our rebellion and to believe that our sin has been forgiven and has been obtained through Christ Jesus. That’s the Augsburg Confession on the nature of repentance.
Romans 5: “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” More than that, “we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” It’s a long paragraph, but notice that Paul grants God’s grace in Christ with two terms: justified and reconciled. The words have been: we have been justified by faith, and while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son. Those statements make Christ’s death personal. It’s for you. It justifies you. And justification always results in peace between you and God, and God in you. Peace marks the relationship between the two of you, as does reconciliation, bringing two broken parts back together again. In much the same way a citizen would be granted entrance into the presence of a monarch, you now can walk into the gracious presence of our heavenly Father on account of Christ. Justification and reconciliation are the means by which God brings you into fellowship with himself. Christ gives us the reality of grace and peace. We may not have it in the world, but we have it in him. We receive his forgiveness. We gain a desire to do better, to sin less, and to struggle more, to be of service to him and to our neighbor. We struggle against sin time and time again, though we fall into it time and time again. And when we confess our sin, he tells us he is faithful and just to forgive our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Christ, you see, is present here in this place, in the Word and Sacrament ministry, and in all the places where his Word is preached, his sacraments are administered. He is present in the Word in all of its forms. He’s present in the written Word, the Holy Scriptures. The spoken and preached Word. The expounded Word, which takes place each and every week in this house. He is present in the water of Holy Baptism, which brings us into the kingdom of God and washes us clean from all of our sin. It creates faith and sustains it. He is present in the Word of Holy Absolution, “your sins are forgiven,” which comforts us in time of need. He is present in his Word which makes the elements of bread and wine in the sacrament his true body and blood for the remission of our sins.
Finally, Christ died for the ungodly is a profound statement because it enables us to rejoice, something that we do not quite understand but still have in its fullness. We don’t need to explore our inner thoughts and feelings to discover suffering. It discovers us. Aging, illness, stress, injury, betrayal, cruelty, and the like all bring suffering with them to us. A parent who is not here anymore. Wayward children that have lost their way. Loneliness. Dead-end jobs. No job at all. Self-inflicted wounds by virtue of our own stupidity. All bring suffering to us. Yet Paul writes, verse 3, “We rejoice in our sufferings.” Why? Because Christ has died for the ungodly. Admittedly, it seems like a stretch. Even believers who know Christ died for the ungodly struggle with a statement that claims we rejoice in our suffering. But the statement is rooted in true Christian hope, as God says here in Romans 5: “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put to shame, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Hope flows out of our trust and dependence on God’s grace. Hope sustains us in difficult times because its object is the glory of God the Father. Circumstances make no difference to real hope. That’s the difference between a false hope and a real one. A real one hangs on the promise of God, and we have a God who keeps his promises. Romans 8:28: “For those who love God all things work together for the good, for those who are called according to his purposes.” It’s a promise: suffering of any kind, of every kind that comes into your life, will ultimately be used for your good. The justifying and reconciling Passion, death, resurrection of Jesus Christ enables us to place our hope in Christ Jesus and our heavenly Father. As Christ first suffered, then entered into his glory, so we too suffer and will enter into his glory as well. Romans 8:18: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present age are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Why? Because Christ died for the ungodly. Saved you from your sins. That’s the Christ who died for you. Your sins are forgiven. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.