Dennis Tuuri

steadfast covenant love surrounds us. Praise God. For the sermon text today, I’m going to begin reading at John chapter 18 verse 18 and read through chapter 19 verse 50. So a long piece of scripture and what we have here is the description of our savior’s crucifixion. Please stand for the reading of God’s word and the sermon title is “The Suffering of the Father.”

Now the servants and officers who had made a fire of coal stood there for it was cold and they warmed themselves and Peter stood with them and warmed himself.

The high priest then asked Jesus about his disciples and his doctrine. Jesus answered him, “I spoke openly to the world. I always taught in synagogues and in the temple where the Jews always meet and in secret I have said nothing. Why do you ask me? Ask those who have heard me. When I said to them, indeed they know what I said.” And when he had said these things, one of the officers who stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, “Do you answer the high priest like that?” Jesus answered him, “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil. But if well, why you strike me.”

Then Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest. Now Simon Peter stood and warmed himself. Therefore they said to him, “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.” One of the servants of the high priest, a relative of him, whose ear Peter cut off, said, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” Peter then denied again and immediately a rooster crowed.

Then they led Jesus from Caiaphas to the Praetorium, and it was early morning, but they themselves did not go into the Praetorium, lest they should be defiled, but that they might eat the Passover. Pilate then went out to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” They answered and said to him, “If he were not an evildoer, we would not have delivered him up to you.” Then Pilate said to them, “You take him and judge according to your law.”

Therefore, the Jews said to him, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death, that the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled, which he spoke, signifying by what death he would die.” Then Pilate entered the Praetorium again, called Jesus, and said to him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus answered him, “Are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you this concerning me?” Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you to me. What have you done?”

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight so that I should not be delivered to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate therefore said to him, “Are you a king then?” Jesus answered, “You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.”

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews and said to them, “I find no fault in him at all. But you have a custom that I should release someone to you at the Passover. Do you therefore want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” Then they all cried again, saying, “Not this man, but Barabbas.” Now, Barabbas was a robber.

So then Pilate took Jesus and scourged him. And the soldiers twisted a crown of thorns and put it on his head. And they put on him a purple robe. And then they said, “Hail, King of the Jews.” And they struck him with their hands. Pilate then went out again and said to them, “Behold, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no fault in him.” Then Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe.

And Pilate said to them, “Behold the man.” Therefore, when the chief priests and officers saw him, they cried out, saying, “Crucify him. Crucify him.” Pilate said to them, “You take him and crucify him, for I find no fault in him.” The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to our law, he ought to die because he made himself the son of God.” Therefore, when Pilate heard that saying, he was the more afraid. And went again into the Praetorium and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer.

Then Pilate said to him, “Are you not speaking to me? Do you not know that I have power to crucify you and power to release you?” Jesus answered, “You could have no power at all against me unless it had been given you from above. Therefore, the one who delivered me to you has the greatest sin.”

From then on, Pilate sought to release him, but the Jews cried out, saying, “If you let this man go, you are not Caesar’s friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.” When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus out and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called the Pavement, but in Hebrew, Gabbatha. Now it was the preparation day of the Passover in about the sixth hour. And he said to the Jews, “Behold your king.” But they cried out, “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him.”

Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your king?” The chief priest answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” Then he delivered him to them to be crucified. And then they took Jesus and led him away. And he bearing his cross went out to a place called the place of a skull, which is called in Hebrew Golgotha, where they crucified him, and two others with him, one on either side, and Jesus in the center.

Now Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross and the writing was Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Then many of the Jews read this title, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city. And it was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Therefore, the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write the king of the Jews, but he said, I am the king of the Jews.” Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.”

Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to each soldier a part, and also the tunic. Now the tunic was without seam, woven from the top in one piece. They said therefore unto themselves, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be, that the scriptures may be fulfilled, which say, they divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” Therefore the soldiers did these things.

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother, and his mother’s sister Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing by, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son.” And then he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you, Father, for this account and the rest of the gospel accounts of that suffering. We do pray that you would help us today to understand the meaning of this suffering so that our suffering may be transformed in Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. We’re in that portion of the church year that is referred to as Lent. All that means is lengthening. And the idea is that it comes in the springtime and the days are getting longer. So we use these old words that we don’t know what they mean, but really they’re not so mysterious if we just think about them. The days are getting longer. Lent happens in the context of this period of time.

We don’t observe the church calendar very closely here but we do sort of mark the events. The church calendar is divided into two parts: the life of Jesus and then the life of the church. So the first six months beginning with Advent is all about the life of Christ and of course it begins with his Advent, his birth, and it ends with his death and resurrection. And so that’s the first half of the church year and the second half of the church year is about the life of the church.

So in this we’re kind of reaching the end of the first half. The church for 2,000 years or so has thought about the movement of time and the seasons in relationship to the life of Jesus Christ. So you got Christmas and Easter, of course. These are the two big Christian holidays that we all are familiar with—Christmas and Resurrection Day. And Christmas is preceded by a sequence of days called Advent. So there’s four Sundays of Advent that lead up to Christmas and Easter is preceded in like fashion by a period called Lent or lengthening of days, and this begins with Ash Wednesday.

There’s a sense in which it begins actually with Fat Tuesday. Those of you who are familiar with the Mardi Gras know that Fat Tuesday happened last Tuesday and this is always the wild and crazy time of Mardi Gras down in Louisiana. And what you may not know—some of you do, a lot of you do I think by now—but what you may not know is its origins in church history.

In the church calendar, Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of the Lenten season leading up to Easter, which is a time of meditation on the sufferings of Christ and our sufferings as a result. And but before that, the church had a day called Shrove Tuesday. So on Tuesday, you would be shrove—which means to confess sin and receive absolution, or you’d be shriven. Shrove is the past tense.

So Shrove Tuesday. And it was typical in the more modern world for churches to have pancake dinners on Shrove Tuesday because the idea is you’re gonna give up some nice foods for Lent perhaps. And so you kind of have this feast of sweet, good, high carb dinner the night before. So it’s fat kind of food. You eat the fat, you know, it’s fat, sweet stuff, good stuff, tasty stuff—grape pancakes, crepe suzettes with blueberries, whatever it might be. It’s really a nice feast. So it’s Fat Tuesday to prepare yourself for Ash Wednesday.

When the idea of ashes, of course, is identification with our sufferings and our death ultimately. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And so Fat Tuesday is really the beginning.

At Veritas Academy, we got some pictures on the Schlafly Press list this last week. And at in Lancaster, which is sort of the poem of Veritas Press and one of the churches of the CRC, there’s located there. Some of you know about this school. They’re the ones also who have this internet correspondent school or whatever it is—virtual classroom I guess for classical education that people in our church use as well as around the country. I think even around the world. Anyway, they had Shrove Tuesday and they had like a big day of celebration on Tuesday in preparation for the season of Lent and they had like a—the pictures indicated there was outside on their athletic field they had a relay race with frying skillets with pancakes, you know, and they’d have to flip them over to the other person. It appeared to be that kind of thing.

So the season sort of starts with those two days and as we move toward Easter it sort of ends with Maundy Thursday, which means commandment Thursday. That’s a commemoration of the last supper where Jesus gives his disciples this new commandment to love one another. And then Good Friday, a specific meditation, very deliberate on the sufferings of Christ.

And when we do a Good Friday service—for since we’ve been doing it, we focus on the seven words of Christ from the cross. So that’s sort of what we’re doing in terms of Lent. We don’t observe it in the sense of penance or of gaining merit with God or anything like that. We want to be careful we don’t fall into those sort of misunderstandings of it. But I do think it is a good thing for our church and not necessarily at all times in history, but at our particular time in history to think about Lent, to think about suffering.

You know, we’re a postmillennial church and everything’s victory, victory, victory, and we hear this all the time and then we go away and we don’t have all that victory we think we should have. And so as a counterbalance to the ditch of falling into this idea of what’s called triumphalism—that everything’s great now and that the world would just be straight line conquered with the gospel—and counterweight to that, to help us to understand how that gospel works, is this meditation on suffering.

Now you know we try to sublimate it I think but suffering is all over the place in ordinary lives, particularly in our day and age when we know about the suffering that’s going on in Africa, for instance. Whose heart cannot be moved and consideration of the horrific suffering of people in different parts of the world or even sometimes in our own country? You know, there’s this kind of understanding that the world has a tremendous amount of suffering in it and of course it’s very personal for us as well.

You know, many members of RCC gave up good health for the first week of Lent. You know, a lot of colds, fevers—I mean it’s really something else—and we seem to be going into a period where we’re going to give up a lot more than good health if the economy continues to do what it does. So there it’s suffering—bad health, suffering because of the economic situation we’re in the midst of. More and more people at RCC are impacted by the financial downturn. This will continue to happen.

So suffering, it’s a real deal. And even in the best of times, suffering is real. You know, how typical is it for suffering to happen even in the best of families, in the best of times? Misunderstandings of one another, not being sure and affirmed of the love of one or the other, being misunderstood, being unjustly accused of things, being disrespected, sinning against one another. You see, all this stuff produces real suffering. Sin breaks relationship.

And as we live in this kind of world in which we live and as we engage in sin or as we receive the results of others sinning against us, suffering—real deep traumatic suffering—you know, is part of our lives. And I think it’s important for us to take—we of course not just during Lent, but during Lent, you know, I think it’s kind of a good thing to think about that.

And so we’re going to do that today. The suffering of Christ on the cross and then the implications for the nature of the God we serve. And then, you know, some of our suffering—the seven penitential psalms which were done at the Ash Wednesday service last Wednesday. You know, some of those are suffering for sin and some are suffering not in relationship to sin, but from enemies or whatever it is.

So I’m going to focus one sermon on understanding sufferings for sin and another sermon on sufferings not as a result of sin—the sort of things that we suffer for that aren’t directly related to our sins. And then we’ll look at the conclusion of this series of four sermons on suffering—at the suffering of Christ in the garden—and look at an interesting picture of what happens there.

So this is what we’re going to be doing during this season and I wanted to begin with you know this sermon “The Suffering of the Father.” The idea in the outline—Asa, when Asa broke his leg during Christmas season. Yeah, really the idea for this sermon came to me when I went up and visited Asa and of course he was suffering and his dad was suffering. And his father, you know, had gone through a series of things, continues to go through a series of things, his own physical difficulties, watching his son you know go through what Asa went through, and a whole bunch of other things, you know.

And I just—my heart went out for Takashi and of course for Asa too. But I don’t think, you know, I sometimes I think that we focus so much on our own sufferings. We don’t think of others. And specifically, I had no idea when I was a kid the suffering that would come to me as a father for my children. You hear this all the time. Well, it hurts me a lot more than it hurts you. That’s really true.

So the idea for this came to me when I observed and you know prayed for Takashi in the midst of his difficult suffering during the Christmas season and on into this year as well. The suffering of the father. We focus on the suffering of Christ as we should do and which we’re going to do here for a couple of minutes. But behind this I think it’s important to talk about the suffering of the father.

Now I’ve got 46 days. Lent is 40 days. You know, 40 days is 40 years—the Philistines oppressed the Israelites 40 days, receiving the law at Sinai. Jesus is in the wilderness 40 days. That’s how his ministry begins, right? So you know, Lent is sort of a remembering that Jesus’s formal ministry begins with his baptism and immediately goes into the wilderness for 40 days of suffering. Lent. And then at the end, he has the suffering as he moves toward the cross.

And so this period of 40 days is a period of judgment, testing, trial and tribulation from God from the beginning of the Bible to the end. Practically 40 years in the wilderness, right? So 40. But there are 46 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter. Usually why? Because the church recognized that we cannot properly refer to there’s an idea of suffering on the Lord’s day. But the Lord’s day is about victory and joy. And so those were not included—the Lord’s day observances—in the Lenten season. So it’s 40 days of suffering. But the Lord’s day specifically is not to be a day at which we fast, but rather to be a day that we focus on victory.

And so that’s why there are 46 days—to help you understand the sequence of Lent and why it’s 40 instead of 46. And then finally, I wanted to mention that some people have referred to Lent as spring cleaning. You know, you’re saying, “Well, Dennis, we should always think about our sins, confess our sins, process our suffering through the scriptures.” I mean the majority of the psalms are suffering psalms of various types, so we should always do that. So why should we do it at Lent? Well, it’s sort of like you always keep your house clean too, right? But you know a lot of people do spring cleaning—kind of deep cleaning stuff—once a year and Lent can be that for us.

It can be a time to sort of deep clean, to do really good stress test on the banks these days, right? So to stress test on our own lives and thinking about our sufferings, thinking about our sins, trying to turn away from specific sins, making renewed commitments to do that, etc.

So this is the time. We don’t actually use ashes at this church. I’m not sure that’d be such a bad thing to do. You know, in Ezekiel chapter 9, the people that are going to be spared the judgment, they’re marked on the forehead with a Tav—an X—which is the same, the beginning of, looks very much like the character of the beginning of Christ in the Greek. And so this idea of applying ashes to the forehead, you know, is kind of a recognition of that.

Now, ultimately, we know that Jesus came according to Isaiah to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, right? And in the words of Isaiah to comfort those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning. So the end result is not mourning without an end. Jesus takes that mourning and turns it into joy and he takes the ashes and turns it into beauty. But he does this for those who mourn, right?

So you know the physician comes to heal the sick. Jesus comes today to give you beauty for ashes and joy for mourning assuming that there’s a sense in which you mourn the results of sin in the world, that you suffer and understand that. So that’s who Jesus comes to and those same people that he turns from mourning to joy and from ashes to beauty in Isaiah—it goes on in Isaiah to tell us that they’re going to be the ones who rebuild the world, who transform the world.

So part of what we do—to leave this place as world changers—is to understand suffering, that we bring into the service of the church, into the service of God, and for Jesus to take that suffering and transform it and to give us joy for mourning and beauty for ashes.

Okay. So first of all, obviously Jesus suffers on the cross. Jesus suffers on the way to the cross. Jesus suffers on the cross and that’s a quite evident thing to us. And we want to talk about that a little bit.

First though, to make sure that the outlines got handed out? I saw something being handed out. Did they? That third page is a little edgy. I don’t know what you think about it, but you know Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” So it should be a cartoon picture of Jesus on the cross and us on the other side of the cross, but that’s the idea. Don’t get the wrong impression here. We’re not—but the Bible does tell us that. And so that’s what we’re talking about today—is our sufferings.

So Lent comes from the word lengthen because spring days are getting longer. The season starts with Fat Tuesday—modern Mardi Gras—and Ash Wednesday. Jesus turns sorrow into joy. There are about 46 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but we don’t fast on the Lord’s day. So it’s referred to as a 40-day period of Lent. Lent is like spring cleaning. And during Lent, we think about suffering.

So in order to think about suffering, we start, of course, with the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. And as I said, you know, these sequences we read from John’s Gospel or the other Gospel accounts have these rather intense descriptions of the suffering of Jesus Christ on the road to the cross and then actually on the cross as well. We focus on the cross of Jesus Christ then during Lent to think about what he did and its relationship to us.

Now we know that his suffering was effective for us. Isaiah 53:5 says he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement for our peace was upon him. And by his stripes we are healed. So by his stripes, by his sufferings, we are healed somehow.

Now we know that there’s this, you know, abstract notion of justification, which is certainly true. And we know that the death of Jesus Christ for sinners accomplished our redemption. All that’s true, but I’m not sure that really plums the depths of what this text tells us—that by his stripes, we are healed. I think by way of application of the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross, we should think in terms of our suffering being laid upon him as the sin bearer for us and somehow then transforming and doing things with our suffering that leads us into joy for mourning.

So by his wounds we are healed. Jesus on the cross personally experienced human suffering and as some people have pointed out, he really seemed to—if you think about the range of Jesus’s sufferings on the cross, it seems to be rather the full range of personal suffering. There was a guy named Frank Lake, a pastoral theologian, and he said this: “It’s an astonishing fact that the events of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ portray every variety of human suffering and evil.”

He points out that on the cross, Jesus suffered injustice, felt the shame of nakedness, was deprived of his rights, was mocked, was the focus of the rage of others, was rejected and forsaken, experienced thirst, hunger, emptiness, torment, confusion, exhaustion, and finally death. And we would, if we throw in those scenes of Mel Gibson’s movie and kind of think about who it was that Caesar would use to scourge people, we probably have some real sadistic men involved in the context of Jesus’s suffering as well.

Lake says this: “Life himself was identified with death. The light of the world was enveloped in darkness. The feet of the man who said, ‘I am the way,’ feared to tread upon it and prayed, ‘If it be possible, not that way.’ The water of life was thirsty. The bread of life was hungry. The divine lawgiver was himself unjustly outlawed. The holy one was identified with the unholy. The lion of Judah was crucified as a lamb. The hands that made the world and raised the dead were fixed by nails until they were rigid in death. Man’s hope of heaven descended into Hades.”

So if we look at Jesus’s personal sufferings, the sufferings that we go through—alienation, physical pain, torment, doubt—all that stuff is Christ’s. If we remember that the Psalter is the book of Christ essentially and is a picture of the thought life of the Lord Jesus Christ, we know that he suffered a lot. He’s referred to as the man of sorrows. So that means that no matter what suffering we went through this morning or this past week or in our lives, you see, it’s all up there. Jesus has personally engaged in that suffering for us on the cross.

That’s very significant. Jesus can truly identify with us. And of course, he makes a big point of this—that Jesus can identify with us when we suffer. He has been where we have been. The incarnated second person of God has been where we have been. Hebrews tells us that he learned obedience from what he suffered. He was made perfect through sufferings.

But not only did Jesus suffer personally and can identify with our personal sufferings—and we can know that he can identify with those personal sufferings—but of course, as the sin bearer of the elect, Jesus suffered covenantally, representatively, for the sins of the world, right? The sins of the elect. In the words of Isaiah, he’s not only a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering, but he took up our infirmities and he carried our sorrows. Isaiah 53:3 and 4.

On the cross, then, not only was he suffering there, but in some mysterious way yours, mine, and the suffering of the world were there also.

So a writer writes, and I think it’s true, now with what we’re talking about today, to try to push these too far in terms of categorical statements, we have to be careful. After all, the scriptures say that my ways are not your ways, God says. And his thoughts are not our thoughts. So there is this language of the second person of God’s suffering on the cross that we have to be careful we don’t make it identical with what we go through because it isn’t. Of course, we’re creatures and he’s the creator. But still, we don’t want to ignore the breadth of the scriptural teaching on the suffering of Jesus Christ and its relationship to our personal suffering and then for the suffering of all the elect as well.

Something extraordinary, I think the scriptures tell us, is happening on the cross as the culmination of his sufferings. Something strange, mysterious, ineffable, something for contemplation—not something necessarily for a logical set of statements and Venn diagrams. I’m not opposing logic and non-logic, but what I am saying is that there is something very mysterious, very significant, very profound about the sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross for us.

And at the same time, the scriptures say that we are to see that as greatly comforting to us because he suffers what we have suffered.

Now the next point on the outline is the suffering of God. And here we have to be careful again. As I said, his ways are not our ways. But who suffered on the cross? Does God suffer? Well, some people say yes, some people say no. I do think that the scriptures have some things to say about this.

Of course, Psalm 78:41 says, “And again and again, they tempted God and limited the Holy One of Israel.” But this word limited in the King James, in the New American Standard, for instance, is pained. They pained the Holy One of Israel. Talking about God now, not just the incarnate second person. They pained God. And the word means kind of, in its literal sense, the Hebrew word means to scrape into pieces. And so it’s pained—to cause anguish, to cause sorrow. The Holy One of Israel is pained by them.

And Psalm 78 says the reason for this is he did all these things for them and they just essentially spit in his face. You know, Takashi, other dads can relate to this. Now, I’m sure that it goes the other way too, kids. I’m not. But listen, this is the common experience of mothers and fathers. They do things for children. They delight to do them. But then when it’s just sort of not regarded or you become derided by them, then this verse from Psalm 78 is they pained God, the Holy One of Israel, who was like their father, providing for them. It says he was their father, providing for them. God suffers. At least that’s what Psalm 78 seems to say.

And as I said, in the context of it just a verse before this—how often they provoke him in the wilderness and grieved him in the desert. The scriptures say that God is grieved. We know in the New Testament, of course, we’re told several times not to grieve—to cause sorrow to—the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 4:30: don’t grieve the Holy Spirit of God. Isaiah 63:10 says they rebelled and grieved the Holy Spirit. So it’s the same thing going on. They rebelled, they caused him pain, they grieved him, they grieved the Holy Spirit.

So this pain of God that suffered when those that he loves and cares for reject and spurn him is what’s being talked about by way of analogy in the New Testament when the Holy Spirit is grieved. We have these Old Testament allusions to the suffering of God.

Jeremiah 31:20 is a particularly interesting verse. “Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he a pleasant child? For though I spoke against him, I earnestly remember him still. Therefore my heart yearns for him. I will surely have mercy on him, says the Lord.” When it says “My heart yearns for him. My bowels are moved. I am in pain. I am afflicted because my love for Ephraim, my son,” the text tells us has been rejected. And yet he’s acted sinfully, and yet I will love him. And those things coming together in Jeremiah 31:20 are described as God being pained, suffering—his bowels being moved and shaken in the context of Ephraim’s rejection, and yet God’s love for him that will be put into place.

Now there’s a Japanese theologian—I think he’s dead now. He wrote in the ’50s, Kazoh Kitamori—and he has a book called “The Pain of God” and several articles on it. And this verse from Jeremiah is one of his big verses that he uses to talk about the pain of God, the suffering of God. And he relates it to this idea of God’s love and his wrath being put together in the context of how he deals with the people that he set his love upon.

Kitamori, it’s interesting. He takes the verses in Acts where it talks about how God has apportioned the nations for particular reasons and he comments on the fact that you know Christian theology began in a Greco-Roman, Greek philosophical context and the Greeks had this idea that God was completely other and he was impassible, meaning he doesn’t have passions at all. He cannot suffer. He’s the unmoved mover. He’s out there and he is not pained or suffering. If he was, he’s not God. That’s kind of the Greek idea.

And Christian theology to some degree was influenced by that. And then he says the Protestant Reformation came along, a theological development, and this was primarily through German Lutheran and rationalism, which is very important to apply to these things. But he thinks that we’re now in a season in the history of the world when Japan, other Asian nations, and philosophies will bring to us a fuller, a continuing maturation of the development of the person of God. And it comes in this particular area because these cultures don’t have this Greek mindset that God is totally removed and can’t be affected by his relationship to his creation, yada yada, and because in China, in Japan, for instance, they do have a long philosophical history of suffering and you know that it’s—there’s value to it.

It’s interesting that Arianism—Arius denied that Jesus Christ was God. You know, one of the biggest reasons for that—it’s what we’re talking about. He believed the Greek ideas of God, that God couldn’t suffer. So if Jesus suffered on the cross, well then he can’t be God. He’s some sort of demigod. He’s some sort of created god, but he’s not the ultimate God because the ultimate God is unmoved by people. You see, he doesn’t enter into suffering.

And Kitamori and other men in our sphere of influence or have been influencing me and this church and others have kind of raised back up this idea of who God is. We’ve talked about perichoresis. It’s in the nature of God not to seek his own glory but to set that aside and to serve the other. The father denies himself and loves the son. The son denies himself and the spirit himself and loves the other. And there is a sense in that—in the eternal, in the eternal triune God—there is this denial of self for the good of the other person.

And then if we look at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and all these verses and try to deal with them realistically, truthfully rather, we have to say that some of these ideas we’ve gotten of God—that he’s completely removed, the unmoved mover, he’s has no passions—now the confession of faith says he has no passions. I think we can say what they mean by that is he’s not controlled by his passions. His passions are under control. We want to make sure we understand that. He’s not a god that’s, you know, like us, where he can’t control his sorrow and it leads him to do stupid things. No. But to say he’s without passions leads to people then thinking that God is removed and other.

And in the context of a world in which suffering is so much a part—we don’t get it—where does this come from? How is it being worked out? And so the idea is that well Jesus comes and in his humanity he suffers on the cross but really—not it’s not the nature of God to enter into suffering for his people. And these verses we’ve just referenced—and a whole host of others—even for Moab, not Israel, in Jeremiah 48:36, for instance God says, “Therefore, my heart shall wail like flutes for Moab and like flutes my heart shall wail for the men of Kir-Heres, even for those outside of the chosen people, Israel.” In the Old Testament, it says that God’s heart wailed for them like flutes blowing.

So I think we have to say that God is a God who suffers. In Isaiah 63:9, we read that in all their affliction, in all their sufferings, he was afflicted. He suffered. Now for some of you, this is all okay. So what? But for some of you, this may be a little new notion for you. God suffers. At least it seems to say this.

Now how far can we take that? Again, limitations. We don’t want to go, you know, into saying that he suffers exactly the same way we do because that’s not true. He’s other than us. His thoughts are not our thoughts. But and we have to say that the scriptures tell us in repeated illustrations over and over again that God suffers in relationship to the created order. God has a covenantal relationship with the world that produces suffering.

Jeremiah 31:20—oh, I just read that. Sorry about that.

So another verse that’s important to talk about the suffering of God. So not only did Jesus suffer on the cross, you know, I think that we have to say that God suffered on the cross. God suffered on the cross.

Now Jesus came, particularly in John’s Gospel, which is why I read the crucifixion account in John’s Gospel. Jesus came to reveal the Father. In John chapter 1. Catch up with my notes here. John chapter 1, verse 14: “The world and the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory. The glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Jesus is the only begotten of the Father.

And as I said earlier, Lent is a reminder of the wilderness—40 days in the wilderness of our savior. And do you remember how that started? At his baptism, God says, “This is my beloved son.” So the only begotten of the Father, the only begotten son, the beloved son of the Father is who Jesus is identified as in the Gospels.

Now we all know this, right? The Father loves the son. If we don’t know that, we’re not—we’re somehow really messed up in our Christian understanding of things. But this is clearly the case. The Father has deep love. It is the—you know, some people have said the Bible is the norm by which all other norms are normed. God’s love is the norm by which all other loves are normed. We can never attain to it. It’s—we have creaturely love, but still we look at God’s love for the son and the son’s love for the Father and this is the ultimate of what love is all about.

So the Father has great love for the son and the son has great love for the Father. And in verse 18 of chapter 1 it says no one has seen God at any time—referring to God the Father—the only begotten son who is in the bosom of the Father. Now, in the bosom of the Father, again emphasizes the closeness of the relationship and in fact there’s movement in the actual terminology here—who is always moving closer to the bosom of the Father. We can say now you got to be careful there too, but the point is this is describing a very tight relationship between Father and son. Deep love is indicated here, right? And unity of person—the only begotten son who is in the bosom of the Father. He has declared him. He has declared him.

And this word declare means, in fact, in the Greek it’s the root of our word exegete. To exegete is to draw out, to understand what a text of scripture says. For instance, the Father is exegeting, declaring the son. And throughout John’s Gospel, this is what he says: “I don’t say anything of my own. I’m showing you the Father. He who has seen me has seen the Father. I’m not doing anything in my own volition. I’m doing what the Father told me to do. I’m revealing. I’m exegeting. I’m declaring the Father.”

In John’s Gospel, this is the repeated refrain. And in John’s Gospel, the other major theme that goes on here, the other booming line, the bass line. You know, Kitamori says that he wrote his work in opposition to Barth, who stressed the wrath of God and unknowability of God, and the liberals, who stressed the love of God and never thought about the wrath of God. And he really built his work on Luther, by the way. Luther talks about on the cross we see God striving with God. And Luther didn’t back away from statements about the suffering of God. And Kitamori says that the liberals—you know, it’s always love, love, love, love, love. And that’s the soprano voice, but they never hear, you know, the deep resounding baseline of God’s suffering, which goes with that soprano voice to bring an accurate depiction of the God we serve.

And here in John’s Gospel, that bass line of the suffering of Jesus is booming all the way through it. In John’s Gospel, the emphasis is—not I mean, it is on the resurrection—but the real emphasis, the glorification of Christ, happens on the cross. This seems to be the focal point of John’s Gospel.

So we put these things together. We’ve got the Father exegeting, declaring the Father, and we have the son suffering as God on the cross for us. What’s he doing? He’s telling us that when you think of me suffering on the cross, don’t just think of me. See my Father. This I’m revealing to you. I’m expounding to you. I’m exegeting to you the heart of the Father.

The same Father that had all those feelings for his beloved son Ephraim in the Old Testament. The same Father who treats Jesus as this beloved son of his throughout all eternity. This Father is suffering on the cross.

Now you have to be careful with this stuff, but there’s a painting. I haven’t actually seen it. I’ve seen it described. And the painting has, you know, Jesus on the cross and then behind it kind of a large—I don’t know if it’s shadowy, but a figure representing the Father. And the nails that go through Jesus’s hands go all the way through the cross into the person standing behind him. And the spear wound in the side from which blood spurted out goes all the way through him and is piercing the Father behind as well.

Now the Father was not crucified for the sins of the world. Okay. And neither, you know, neither do we believe in these—are these separate and distinct persons of God: the Father, son, and the Holy Spirit. So the Father was not crucified for us. But I do think that Jesus is declaring to us the nature of the Father on that cross. And the nature of the Father is that he suffers for his son and he suffers for us as well.

So when we look at the suffering of God, we’re not just relating that to the son. We’re saying that the Father suffers as well.

So you know, I’m a father. Takashi’s a father. And many of you are fathers. And you understand now, you know, maybe a little better, or just remind yourself why we suffer. You know, God, part of the problem, I think, in theological development of this nature, has to do with how we look at these terms.

In other words, people can read these verses that I just read from the Old Testament that talk about the suffering of God and the pain of God, and they say, “Well, you know, he’s just using language that we can understand to say something else.” So it’s analogical language. Well, surely that’s true. True. He is other than us. But just as surely, he created and determined that fathers and sons would exist in the context of the world and that the suffering that happens here would be understood in relationship to his divine suffering.

So he’s—it’s not as if God, you know, sort of all of a sudden woke up and said, “Oh, there’s created order. They got fathers, they got sons, they got love of dads and moms for sons and daughters, and so maybe I could express myself in those terms.” That’s not the way it works. It works the other way around. In eternity, you have the Father, the son, and the Holy Spirit denying themselves individually, serving the other. And then this created order reflects that. The created order demonstrates the love of the father and mother for the son and daughter, right? Based upon the love of God the Father.

And parents understand—when you suffer, when moms and dads, as I know you do, you know that old Negro spiritual, “Nobody’s Seen the Trouble I’ve Seen. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows but Jesus.” Well, you know, there’s a lot of truth to that. And people don’t know the trouble you see, the suffering that you go into for your children. And in a sense, they will never really know it either. They’ll know it by analogy when they have their own children.

But what we see here is the suffering not just of Jesus Christ, not just the second person of God. I think we have to see in John’s Gospel, particularly in all these scriptures, that the Father is suffering as well.

So it’s the suffering of the Father that’s revealed to us. Jesus is loved very greatly by the Father and Jesus came to show us the Father. And we should think more about the Father. You know, I so often the person of Jesus receives the focus of our attention. And yet in John’s Gospel, remember what he says over and over and over again: “I come here to reveal the Father to you.” In the last 50 years, the Holy Spirit has become a focal point of attention and thought and thanksgiving. Now we’re thankful for the Holy Spirit. It’s very important, our relationship to him. But he didn’t come to exalt himself. He came to exalt the son to bring us things of the son. And the son came to reveal to us the Father.

I think that a culture that fails to appreciate the significance of the revelation of the Father at the cross is a culture that grows cold and uncaring about the suffering of parents for their children. They can’t relate to it anymore and they don’t have a way to process it, so to speak. They don’t have a way—structures to put it into the context of. And what have we become? We become a nation that all we care about is the kids. It’s all about the kids. People’s lives rotate totally around the children and we have children-centered households and you know it, children are important. Praise God for children. They’re the future. We know that in this church. But I think it’s a reflection of a general failure in our century—the century that we’ve gone through in the last hundred years—to not focus upon the Father.

And so as we think about Lent and as we think about our sufferings, I think we need to think about the suffering of the Father for our sake.

Now you know what’s the significance of all of this? Well, it’s the God we serve, right? The nature of the God we serve determines who we become. We read that in the Psalms that if you worship idols that can’t talk, you lose the ability to communicate very well. You become like what you worship. If we worship a God who suffers only once, or only when it’s, you know, and it’s not even God’s suffering, but it’s the second person, then we’re going to think it’s a bad deal when we suffer. It’s unjust. We you, we know we’re gonna doubt God’s love for us because we’re suffering.

So you know, number one, it’s the God we serve. And if we see that this suffering of denying oneself in eternity, of coming and actually suffering on the cross for humanity, and then of the Father’s compassion, at least, right, with the passion of the savior, his love for the son—if we think on those things, then we understand that oh, this is part of the nature of who it is to be a created image bearer of God and particularly in a fallen world, we’ll suffer. And the Bible tells us that we’re supposed to understand this. We’re supposed to appropriate this and we’re supposed to see it in relationship to the person of God.

So the significance of this great truth of the suffering of the Father is that God cares. The Father cared for the son. He was not uncaring. And this is whom we are to be. We’re supposed to be caring people. Suffering hurts. We’d rather wall ourselves off against suffering, but God says, “Don’t cut tribulation short.” So God’s love causes him to suffer. Our love for the people that God puts in the context of our life and world will mean that we’re going to suffer as well.

So the significance, first of all, is the God we serve. We’re going to become more and more like him. Secondly, the significance is that this is the great answer, the great way that we think about our own personal sufferings. Remember that the end result is not Jesus perpetually on the cross. The end result is victory. He suffered for the sins of the world. He brought us through the sins to bring us to victory. And it tells us about the nature of God. Not only is God a God who suffers. God is a God who uses suffering to advance his kingdom.

Kind of a duh thing, right? That’s rather obvious that God doesn’t, you know, he certainly is a powerful God and he uses physical force and all that stuff in the world. But the great demonstration of victory is the suffering of the son on the cross. And we should think about our suffering, you know, in the same way. One, it should drive out our sins. But if it’s not for our sins, we’re loving somebody else and they’re going through a really difficult time. We should recognize that the end result of that—that’s how God advances the world. That’s how the world matures. That’s how victory comes. We’re given joy for mourning. But that means that mourning is what produces the joy. Our ashes are turned into beauty. You don’t get the beauty without the ashes. No pain, no gain.

God is a God who uses suffering to affect his purposes in the context of the world. God is one with us in our suffering. He identifies with us totally. We, you know, somebody has seen the trouble we’ve seen. Jesus, not just because of his omniscience, but because of his taking up on himself the same sufferings we went through, that he might be a sympathetic High Priest. And also in taking upon himself the context of the sins of all the world. And the Father knows those things as well.

We know that God understands when we struggle. We know that he understands. He’s empathetic. He stands beside us and with us to strengthen us as he strengthened the son. We’ll see that in a couple of weeks that the Father strengthens the son in the midst of his sufferings. The simple knowledge that God is there, caring about us, compassionate for us, aching, being pained in relationship to events that surround our lives. This also is a great truth.

I’m reading from an article I read online now. He tells us that God does use suffering in redeeming the fallen creation. His solution to the problem of suffering is not to eliminate it nor to insulate himself from it, but to participate in it and then having participated in it, to transform it into the instrument for redeeming the world. Doesn’t cut himself off from it. Doesn’t say it’s of nothing. He participates in it and in doing so redeems his people. God uses suffering. He weaves it into the redemptive plan and pattern for the salvation of the world.

He takes the terrible tragedy of the cross and turns it into a triumph. What is grotesque becomes glorious. What is evil is transmuted into what is good. Emil Brunner says this, the theologian Emil Brunner: “If there ever was an event in which evil, innocent suffering, malice and human pain reaches its climax, it’s in the cross of Jesus Christ. And yet God took all the awful elements of that event—the diabolical evil, the flagrant injustice, the excruciating pain—mixed them all together and through his marvelous divine alchemy transforms them into his divine medicine for the healing of the nations.”

The cross then is the supreme illustration of Romans 8:28: “In all things, God works for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.” It proves that even when things seem to have gone tragically wrong, God can still use anguish creatively to bring out of it blessings that could not have been realized any other way. In fact, this is God’s method. This is how God, in the face of evil, works to accomplish his will and his purpose in the world.

How does God overcome that which opposes his will? How does God demonstrate his sovereignty and power in the face of evil? The cross tells us that he does it through the power which absorbs the opposition to his will through innocent suffering. And then having absorbed it, God neutralizes it by forgiving love. And finally, having neutralized evil, he uses it to accomplish the very purposes for which it was originally intended to thwart.

The Lord God is the sovereign God. He calls us to not insulate ourselves from our sufferings, not to wallow in them as if there’s no answer, but to recognize in the cross of Jesus Christ we have one who identifies with us in our sufferings and more than that shows us—this is to bear the divine image of the Father, the son, and the Holy Spirit—to suffer in a way that is not hopeless but leads to victory, knowing that this is the way God moves the world forward.

Let’s pray. Father, we do thank you for causing us to meditate briefly here today and on into this next three or four weeks on suffering. We thank you for the sufferings that you bring into our lives that cause us, Father, to know the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you that the apostle reminds us that we are to enter into his sufferings, that we may know his sufferings as well and not pull back from them.

We thank you for the example of Paul to us who suffered so many things for the cause of Jesus Christ and because of his great love for others. Help us then in suffering not to strike back, not to pull away, but to work diligently through in the power of the Holy Spirit transforming suffering into glory. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen. Amen.