[AI translation] It is perhaps strange and unusual that on the first Sunday of Advent, when the Christian Church generally rejoices in the great hope of Christ's coming, I should now like to speak of the Apostles' Creed's statement that "he was charred under Pontius Pilate". This is not only because it is the last Sunday of the month in our order of preaching, but also because one of the most powerful Advent prophecies speaks of the coming Messiah as the man of all suffering, the man of all sorrows. As one whose physical and spiritual torment will disfigure him, whose form will be distorted into a form that is abhorrent, whose dignity and all human beauty will be lost, whose face we will hide from because we cannot bear to see him, because he will look in his misery like one who is 'scourged, scourged, scourged by God'. (Isaiah 53:4) Yes: this is how the prophet Isaiah speaks of him, this is how he paints the figure of the One to come 600 years before his coming. Strange but true: the mysterious One who was born there in that stable in Bethlehem, to Whom angels rejoice at His appearance on earth, to Whom shepherds make pilgrimages with such astonished joy, before Whom wise men from afar bow with such adoration, Whom hundreds and thousands follow and listen: this Jesus of Nazareth can almost sum up his whole life's work in one word: he suffered!
Yes, I said it right: his entire life's work. You know, one would be inclined to think that the Apostles' Creed has left something out here, because after "born of the Virgin Mary", this is what follows: "he was born under Pontius Pilate". It is as if the Creed skips over the life story of Jesus between his birth and Calvary. So what's in between? Well, in between, between birth and death, is what the Creed says: "he was senile"! Jesus' whole life consisted of suffering! So our Creed does not skip over the previous life of Jesus Christ, but with the word "senescence", it points back not only to the end of his life on earth, but to the whole of it, and calls it a time of suffering. The whole of Jesus' life is contained in this word: "senesced". Just try to look at Jesus' life from this point of view: you will see that there is no other man in the world whose whole life, from birth to death, was so truly a life immersed in a sea of suffering! In the thirty or so years that he lived among us, he experienced every suffering, every physical and spiritual pain that man can ever experience on earth!
And there are many kinds of suffering in the world. I have seen a man suffer, for example, because of statelessness: his beautiful, happy home, his whole life's work blown away overnight by the storm of war, leaving him with nothing. When we met, the big, strong man's voice was hushed and all he could say was: 'I've become a hobo! It was a terrible feeling: to belong to nowhere, to be nowhere at home, to be a tramp in a strange world! Well: Jesus Christ was born that way! You know: when he arrived on this earth, there was no room for him even in a guesthouse... He was born among cattle in a stable. And from that time until the end of his life he had nothing to call his own except the cross on which he was crucified! Can there be a more painful abandonment than to have no place to lay one's head when the whole world is one's own?! Jesus Christ lived through what is one of the greatest problems of the world today: the suffering of homelessness!
I have seen parents suffer under the ingratitude of their children. Once, an aged father complained that he had sacrificed everything for his children, his youth, his strength, his life's possessions, and now his children were hastening his death, making him feel how useless he was in this life... Terrible must be the suffering of a heart that is slowly being turned against all those it loved! Who knows this better than Jesus Christ! Never has anyone ever turned to people with so much love as He did, and never have people turned to Him with so much ingratitude, contempt and hatred! All the sacrifices He made for others, all the shame He received from others. His family thinks Him a fool, the leaders of His people blasphemous, one of His narrowest circle of disciples betrays Him, another, whom He called the Rock, disowns Him, and the rest all abandon Him... His people, for whose salvation he came, shout in chorus: away with him! Crucify him! Can there be a more painful ingratitude than to lay down one's heart for others, and have them kick it roughly?
And I could go on and on, but who can describe in words all that Jesus must have felt when he was arrested and had his two hands - those two hands! - tied together, when evil, sneaking, cowardly men sat in judgment on him, the innocent, when they pronounced the death sentence on him on false charges - the Lord of Life! When they struck God in the face with their fists, when unbridled human wickedness insulted the Saint with spitting, when they nailed the only Good to the cross, when in his convulsive agony he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mt 27,46) In short, when the horror of the horrors of his life was coming, the horror of what he had foretold, "The Son of Man shall be delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill him" (Mt 17,22-23), what must our Lord have felt in that dreadful hour? For this "being delivered into the hands of men" is worse than being given to the wild beasts! So unjustly, so humiliatingly, so painfully can only man hurt another man. One can almost feel that the simple word "suffered" is not enough to express so much anguish! No word in human speech can express the concept and value of suffering that Jesus suffered!
Indeed: the whole life of Jesus Christ, from the beginning, is passed in the ever-darkening shadow of the cross. So much so that it is almost as if the purpose, the destiny, the task of this life is to suffer! As if there were something programmatic, something planned in this increasing suffering. It is not by chance that the circumstances here have turned out so tragic that this life has ended up like this, but it was meant to be! He himself said: the Son of Man must go to Jerusalem, suffer much at the hands of the chief priests, and be killed... So a divine MUST prevails in this suffering. And then this suffering is not a passive thing, but an active thing, in other words: this suffering is an action, a service, a divine work! The greatest action of Jesus on this earth: suffering. To suffer. Here we are confronted with a mystery of unheard-of magnitude, for behold, God not only permitted this immense suffering, tolerated it - but willed it, deliberately chose this path of humiliation and degradation. Jesus Christ did not helplessly endure this immense suffering, did not endure it in surrender, but took it upon Himself in conscious and deliberate obedience, fulfilling it as a task, as one who is performing a voluntary service!
There is suffering from which something beautiful and good comes. As, for example, from the suffering of the shell the light of the true pearl; from the suffering of the poet the beauty of a work of art, from the pain of the mother the smile of new life. And what productive effects can God's suffering have?! Well, indeed: what is the purpose of this suffering? Our ancient Reformed catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, answers this question 37 in this way.Throughout His whole life on earth, and especially at the end of it, He bore in His body and soul the wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race, and that by this suffering, as the only atoning sacrifice, He might redeem our bodies and souls from eternal damnation and obtain for us the grace of God, righteousness and eternal life."
This suffering first of all exposes the essence of that tiny word we call sin! The fact that the Son of God, the visible representative of the invisible God, could only suffer and die in this world, gives a very dubious character to this world and its inhabitants, and to the whole of this worldly life. What good can this world expect from God if God has only suffering and humiliation in it? What good can this world expect from God, in which the chief priests and Pontius Pilate, that is, ecclesiastical and temporal authorities, the people of the streets and the disciples, that is, those near and far, believers and unbelievers, the religious and the irreligious, have had nothing to do with God but to betray, deny, mock, disparage, hurt, offend, and kill him?
This is the essence of our sin! Would that you could see in the suffering of Jesus that you deserve nothing - along with the whole world - but the weight of God's wrath! For in the Passion of Jesus Christ, the wrath of God that punishes sin is also revealed. Behold: this is what the man who rebels against God deserves, this suffering, this physical and spiritual torment, this fate that you see in the life and death of Jesus! Yes: suffering is the wrath of God! Suffering that is temporal and eternal, physical and spiritual suffering, is indeed God's punishment, as the human conscience instinctively feels it. But behold: this wrath, this punishment, is not inflicted on the one who deserves it, not on you and me, not on the world, not on the chief priests and Pontius Pilate, but on the only innocent one: Jesus Christ! The deepest mystery of the Gospel is that in the man-Jesus, God himself steps into the place of sinful man to become what man is: a rebel, and to suffer the punishment he deserves.
Jesus Christ has placed himself where the whole human race really stands, under the wrath of God. He himself becomes the universal sinner and the universal punishment. God dealt with Him as if the sin of us all were personified in Him. That is why Jesus suffered. By His suffering, as the one great atonement, He removed the wrath of God, delivered our bodies and souls from eternal damnation, and thereby obtained for us the grace of God: righteousness and eternal life. He has suffered for you, as realistically as the marks of His suffering and death are here on this table for you. Believe me, accept it as realistically as you can come here and reach out your hand for the tokens of His suffering and death and take them for yourself.
And finally, there is one great blessing of Jesus' suffering: it also sheds light on the mystery of our physical and spiritual sufferings. Human suffering is a perennial problem. There are many painful questions burning inside us: 'What did I do to deserve this? Why do I have to end up here? What have I done to deserve this? How can God allow it?" - You know those painful questions, don't you? Well, the Son of God suffered in this world, and that is a great help to the suffering person. He can draw strength from it, not only by reflecting on how much more Jesus suffered, but rather by the fact that in the suffering of Jesus God is, as it were, entering into human suffering. He comes with me, endures the blow that is meant for me to strike His heart, suffers with me, becomes my brother, my comrade in trouble, helps, lifts, comforts, strengthens me with His presence. The suffering of Jesus means that it is through the most painful wound of life on earth, through suffering, that God is most closely connected with humanity!
In so doing, he has lifted suffering out of the depths of meaninglessness and put it at the service of his own redemptive purposes. Thus, what is worst in our lives can become a source of the richest blessings. Our suffering no longer bears the mark of punishment, "the chastisement of our peace is upon him [Christ]." (Is 53:5c) Rather, it means that God has destined the one who suffers to a special task in following the Saviour, and He wants to bless him greatly! Oh, that we all had such power in this phrase of our Creed, "senvede"! Our Saviour suffered! I have just quoted the reply of the Heidelberg Catechism. When one of its authors, Gaspare Olevianus, was in the last moments of his life, one of his friends read Isaiah 53 to him. The verse, referring to the Passion of Jesus Christ, was a great comfort to the dying man. And when his friend asked him, "Brother, are you sure of your salvation in Christ, as you have always taught others?" the last word he breathed was this. "Absolutely certain!"
Absolutely certain - if only that were once, by God's grace, the last conviction of us all!
Amen
Date: 29 November 1959.