Skip to main content

Following Jesus: To the Tomb

(A Good Friday Meditation)

Today we follow Jesus all the way to his tomb.

We follow him as he is mocked and beaten and spit upon.

We follow him as he takes up his cross and begins the long walk through Jerusalem out to Golgotha.

We follow him as he stumbles under his burden until Simon of Cyrene is pulled out of the crowd to help him.

We follow him as he is nailed to the cross.

We follow him as he suffers and dies.

We follow him as he is taken down from the cross.

We follow him as he is carried to the garden tomb.

We follow him as the stone is rolled over the mouth of the tomb.

We follow him as he lies there in the silent darkness.

That’s what we do today: we follow him all along the way as he moves from his trial to his entombment.

And if we want to we can go to Jerusalem and walk along the Via Dolorosa, literally following in the footsteps of Jesus.

But are we following Jesus to the tomb in our real daily lives? Jesus called his disciples and Jesus calls us (we are also his disciples) to take up our cross and follow him. Jesus calls us to lose our lives for his sake. Jesus calls us to love God with all we are and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Jesus calls us to love each other like he loves us, which means that we willingly give ourselves up for each other.

Jesus died for our sins but he also calls us to die to our sins. What is in our hearts that needs to die? What kinds of motives or fears need to die? How does our pride still need to die?

Our following of Jesus begins not with our feet but with our hearts. If we are going to die with Jesus, we will start with these prejudices, biases, fears, grudges, and other things that we harbor and nurture because they feed our egos.

Will we follow Jesus all the way to the tomb? Will we die with him?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Was a Refugee

(A sermon based on Matthew 2:13-23 for the First Sunday after Christmas) I have never been a refugee and you probably haven’t either. There have been times for many of us when we “had” to leave home but we did so because we chose to get an education or to take a job or because our parents told us it was time. Oh, there is a sense in which many of us feel a restlessness and rootlessness and feel like we are on a constant quest for home. But the facts remain that we have never been driven from our home or from our hometown or from our homeland because of warfare or famine. We have never been driven away because of our ethnicity or our politics or our religion; we have never been forced out or forced underground because we are a threat to those in power. Millions of people are refugees, though. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there were at the end of 2012 15.4 million refugees—people who have fled their country for another because of war or persecution—in the world....
Post a Comment
Read more

When You Pass Through the Waters

(A sermon based on Isaiah 43:1-7 & Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 for the Baptism of the Lord) The images are ones we still use. “I feel like I’m going under.” “I really got burned.” Water and fire have long been images of trial, testing, and suffering. We experience events and situations that either are life-threatening, such as a serious illness or accident, or feel like they are life-threatening, like a divorce or job loss or serious problems with a family member. We feel like we’re going under. We feel like we’re getting burned. Sometimes, we don’t just find ourselves in such a situation; we rather put ourselves there. So the prophet speaking in Isaiah 43 spoke his words to guilty people, to people who had sinned and who either knew they had sinned or needed to admit their sins. Their nation had been devastated by the Babylonians and they had been transported into exile hundreds of miles away and it was all because, the true prophets had told them, they had sinned against ...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Experiment in Preaching

A friend who in his late fifties took a new pastorate said that he had written the last sermon he ever intended to write, meaning that he planned to use the vast collection of sermons that he had built up over his career and produce nothing new. I have in my paper and electronic files every sermon I have ever written; I even have the outlines, some of which were lifted straight out of the back of my trusty Thompson Chain Reference Bible, from my first halting efforts, which were quite different than my later halting efforts. I have at times “re-preached” some of my “greatest hits”; in so doing I heeded the wise words of my wise father who once told me, “If it was worth preaching once it’s worth preaching twice.” And if it’s worth preaching twice maybe it’s worth preaching thrice or more! Over the last twenty-five years I have written full manuscripts for 99% of the sermons that I’ve preached and 90% of the time I’ve taken that manuscript into the pulpit with me. Last Sunday I began an...
3 comments
Read more