“He was crucified, dead and buried.”

(II Corinthians 5:19)

(Apostles’ Creed)

“He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; he descended into hell.” Down, down, down, goes the creed in its recital of violent tragedy and shame. Why? If the Founder of Christianity died a criminal’s death, why discuss it? If Jesus was really the Son of God, the most perfect character that ever lived, and was unjustly put to death, God permitting, why what kind of a God is that anyway and what sort of sovereignty does He exercise in His world? Better a harmless idol, a dog or a cat or a sacred cow, than such a God as that!

Yes, this is strange business we find in this part of the Creed — “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; he descended into hell” — very strange, but it is there, you may be sure for solid reasons.

First, we find this in the creed because Christianity is an historic religion. It is interested with facts. Emil Brunner remarks that it is rather surprising when you first come to think of it that this statement of faith of one of the great religions should contain the name of Pontius Pilate, a minor official in a pagan government for one brief period of history 2000 years ago. “He suffered under Pontius Pilate.” That pinpoints events all right. That makes it particular enough. But why? What has Pontius Pilate to do with the Christian faith and the Christian church of the 20th century?

Why, that is what Christianity is all about. It is the faith that God is always pressing in upon us, as Augustine said. It holds with second Isaiah that God is up to His elbows in history, in human events. This is the raw material He is always working with. And it can get pretty raw.

“The Christian faith is inextricably involved in history. If it tries to evade the consequences of that involvement, it ceases to be Christian. The incarnation means that God has come right into the midst of the tumult and the shouting of this world. Therefore, to separate Christianity from social concern is to corrupt it at its roots: in the strong language of the Apostle — it is to ‘make God a liar.’ When Jesus was born of Mary in the stable in Bethlehem, when He toiled at a carpenter’s bench in Nazareth, when He walked the crowded ways and lovingly identified Himself with the struggles and miseries of man, when He suffered under Pontius Pilate, it was a declaration that divine Eternal Truth and the tough actualities of the human situation belong together, and that what God hath joined together let not man put asunder.” (James Stewart — A Faith to Proclaim)

And when Caiphas and his colleagues connived with false witnesses to charge Jesus with blasphemy in the Sanhedrin, then subtly twisted the charge to insurrection and treason to get a capital charge that would hold up in a court of Roman law, and then were unable to persuade Pilate to render a verdict of guilty, so brought pressure of threatened mob violence and accusation before the Emperor to force the procurator into permitting the crucifixion which he could not in justice pronounce — when in actual, diabolical fact, Jesus suffered before Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried, the creed recites the whole sorry, sordid mess, because this is life in this world of power politics, and selfish motives, and crooked protection of vested interests.

Yes, down, down, down, goes the Creed because the Creed recited the facts.

And when we say the Creed and leave off the phrase: “He descended into hell,” a phrase which comes from the earliest form in which the Creed existed, it is not because we shrink from going to the bottom of the whole grisly business of the death of Jesus, but because we believe this particular phrase exceeds the scriptural record of the facts in the case. The scriptures do not clearly state just where our Lord went after death and before the resurrection.

But there is another reason the reference to Pilate, the crucifixion and death of Jesus is in the Creed: the church found in their own experience and much to their surprise that the cross was central to the new life they had in Christ. Just what was accomplished and how by the death of Christ is not clear. To the best minds of Christendom through the centuries, the mystery has remained. But certain things grounded in their own experience they sincerely believed and proclaimed.

First, that Jesus died to save the world from sin. The terrible rift in human nature, the curse upon all societies and civilizations of men, the deadly infection in the bloodstream of the race, Jesus believed He had come to conquer. To His close friends in their farewell supper on the night before His crucifixion, He spoke of His approaching death as connected with a cosmic scheme for taking away the sins of the whole world.

The author of the Fourth Gospel represents John the Baptizer as saying of Jesus: “Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.” St. Paul felt that as Christ went forth to the cross, He went as a warrior champion to grapple with the universal forces of evil, and He put the Christian community’s conviction: “He who knew no sin was made sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God through him.”

Then again, the earliest Christians were convinced that Christ had died in their stead. He had taken somehow their places. His was a vicarious suffering. He did not have to do it, but He willingly took the place of others. St. Paul believed the new life he knew in Christ, he had all because the Son of God had loved him and given himself for him. And not for Paul only, but for all sinners, for Paul wrote that: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Whether as a substitute for us as condemned sinners, as Paul certainly thought, or as a new and better sacrifice offered on our behalf as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews seemed to think, always the death of Christ is viewed in the New Testament as vicarious, in our stead. There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin. He only could unlock the gate of Heaven and let us in.

And yet even more, those earliest Christians were sure that, though in part the expression of man’s rebellious, willful sin, the dire, dismal drama of Calvary was also an enacting of the loving, redeeming power of God. And it was what God had done, rather than what men then did, or ever could do, which wrought salvation. The cross represented the power of eternal love and redemption meeting the power of darkness and evil at their worst and winning the victory through suffering and apparent defeat.

At the death of Christ, the veil of the Temple was rent from top to bottom, the pagan soldier who witnessed that death in awe exclaimed: “Surely this was a Son of God,” and St. Paul exclaimed for the whole of first century Christian community — “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” The belief of the early church about the crucifixion was not that God was punishing Jesus instead of sinful men; it was not that a divided deity was at work there on the cross while God the Judge was demanding expiation from God the Savior, but rather that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.”

Now, why vicarious suffering on the part of God or man should be necessary or expedient or powerful, we do not know. The Bible does not say. All we know “is that it seems to be the very structure and fabric of things. Life is born through another’s pangs; liberty is achieved through the blood of those who themselves never enjoy the hard-won freedom; one soweth and another reapeth. It is so in art, literature, invention, discovery, faith. The pioneers are not the possessors; the explorers rarely the dwellers in the land.

“In the bitter wars of the 17th century, a son of the Duke of Ormonde gallantly laid down his life in what his sad father believed the cause of justice. Someone commiserated the older man on his sore loss. The Duke replied: ‘I would not give my dead son for the best living son in Christendom.’ Life is tragic, always. Never more so than in our time.” (Coffin — Joy in Believing — p. 49)

“The cross is still set up. The crowd still mocks. The soldiers still play dice. The faithful still draw near to worship God in man. That Christ who hung there, hangs there still, and calls to you and me, challenging us to take up the struggle of the higher life, bear its burden, endure its shame, and receive its inner peace.” (S. Kennedy — I Believe)

The earliest preachers of the gospel were startled at the remarkable results of their preaching the news of the crucifixion. Though it seemed foolishness to some of the Greeks and a stumbling block or scandal to some of the Jews, the fact was that this was just how the lives of men were remade, cleansed, turned about, and the church formed. When the cross was preached, the Holy Spirit accomplished the spiritual re-birth of twice born men.

1. B. Phillips says he was inspired to visit the U. S. A. for the first time, not by his curiosity (though he has plenty of that), nor because of the welcoming letters of invitation (though he got plenty of those), but because of the large number of remarkable young Christians from America, college students, who came to see him on their way to or from the work camps and rehabilitation centers of stricken post-war Europe. “I felt I was meeting,” says Phillips, “not merely fine, warm-hearted youngsters ready to donate part of their vacations for the good of others, but I felt I was seeing living representatives of a new spirit rising in the church. I was compelled to visit the country and some of the churches which had produced such cheerful willingness to serve under the cross.”

Daily, I’m being impressed by the rapidly rising crescendo of glorious young life of our city and our congregation whose lives are coming under the compulsion of the cross. They are sick of our sensuous culture. They are renouncing our old goals and false values of security and comfort and high salaries and abundance of consumer goods and wilder and more risqué pleasures and turning their backs on that and are grasping in their hands and heads and hearts the challenge of the cross.

When I watched the trial and crucifixion scenes in the motion picture “Ben Hur” and followed the faltering steps of Jesus as he stumbled along his Via Dolorosa under the ponderous weight of that cumbersome cross, I had the feeling that at any moment Judah Ben Hur, the strangely moved young hero of the play, might step out of the crowd and put his broad shoulder under that cross and bear it for Him. Behind the backs of the crowd that lined the roadway, Judah Ben Hur moved nervously. He pushed to keep alongside the Christ. Now and again, I felt he would burst through and take the cross. Several times he almost does. But in the end, it is Simon of Cyrene who is forced to carry the cross of Jesus.

And I thought how like this Judah Ben Hur we all are. Again and again the man of sorrows, the suffering servant, the Savior of the world draws close to us. We can see the cross that is too heavy to be borne. We can discern clearly the awful agony and pain. We are almost constrained to step out of the sheltering shadows, out from the protective anonymity of the conforming crowd, and let its awful weight descend upon our shoulders, then we don’t. We step back into the crowd. The fear of the stigma of the cross, the pain and the cost of it, the embracing arms of the comfort we have carved out for ourselves, keep us back. And we lose our chance at life’s only worthwhile greatness.

The redeeming, transforming grace of the crucified does not touch our crawling caterpillar complacency. We miss our chance of taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm. The glory and power of vicarious suffering does not transfuse our leukemic spirits into robust life.

From the throne of His cross the king of grief

Cries out to the world of unbelief;

Oh, men and women, afar and nigh,

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

 

Is it nothing to you that I bow my head?

And nothing to you that my blood is shed?

Oh, perishing souls, to you I cry;

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

 

Come unto me, — this awful price,

Redemption’s tremendous sacrifice —

Is paid for you. Oh, why will ye die?

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

   (The Crucifixion — John Stainer)

The living Christ calls all men and women to discipleship, sometime — somewhere. By the lakeside of life — where our living is made and we rub shoulders with our fellows — He calls — “Come, follow me.” From the mountaintop experiences where we see the transfigured in the dedicated personalities of His followers — our own contemporaries — He calls: “Come follow me.”

But never more appealingly does He ever call to any of us than when He speaks to us His living word of invitation from His cross, however falteringly the death and crucifixion is preached: “Take up thy cross and follow me, come.”