Misplaced passion for the Passion.

This morning our pastor was in Matt 27:45-50. In particular we spent a lot of time on v45:

“From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. ”

I know we talked about a lot more than this, but this is what I immediately seized upon and stuck with for most of the duration of the message.

The sensation that was Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is years gone now, but some of the things I learned from the popularity of the film still remain. For one, I was impressed with how legalistic some people are. For many it was flat out sin to so much as see the movie, even just for the purpose of being informed. For another thing, I was disheartened by how many people were enthralled with the movie but couldn’t be troubled to be enthralled by Jesus as depicted in the Scriptures.

Also there is the point that Mel Gibson holds to a very strange strain of Catholicism, and that point came out in what he included in the movie. This was a point that didn’t interest most people who saw the movie in the least. But more that the cultic-Cathlolic aspects of the movie was Gibson’s very Catholic preoccupation with the suffering of Jesus. This most of all is what has stuck with me in the years since then.

Here’s what I mean: The human suffering of Christ, as brutal as it was, only signified that element of suffering that actually accomplished His redemptive work; the outpouring of God’s wrath was what made the cross effective.

This is what is further signified by the darkness spoken of in v45. For those three hours, Christ bore the brunt God’s eternal wrath for all the sin He would ever forgive. It was an eternity of wrath somehow squeezed into just a few short hours. Christ’s Roman torturers didn’t hold a candle to what He experienced, becoming accursed for us.

So that’s the thing: all that emphasis on blood, the flesh being stripped by the whip, the beatings and so on were only a weak prelude. His human suffering accomplished nothing. It was God’s wrath delivered in spiritual currency and nothing else. Christ could have received a million lashes and never have atoned for one moment of sin.

We are not under man’s judgment. We have not violated man’s righteous standards. We have not impugned the holiness of man. God is the offended party. For us to have propitiation made, it was necessary for God in human flesh, Jesus Christ, to stand under the fury of the Father. And He did.

Perhaps this is why Catholics tend to get stuck on the human suffering of Christ. It’s hard to think that bearing the wrath of God for three hours could be considered an incomplete work. The reference to the Eucharist as a perpetual, bloodless sacrifice belies, again, a preoccupation with what men did to Him. Christ’s work is a once for all sacrifice (Heb 10:10). God’s wrath was unfurled on Him in full; there is no more payment to be rendered.

because Christ suffered the Father’s wrath on the cross, He is now seated at the Father’s right hand:

“but He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, SAT DOWN AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD” (Heb 10:12)

Hallelujah! What a Savior!