There is an old story -- so old, in fact, that I will not ask you to stop me if you’ve heard it before, because you have heard it before. But the story concerns a fellow riding on a cart, pulled by a stubborn old mule. It seems that this fellow liked to brag that he never had to whip the mule, he never had to kick it or goad it •• that the old mule would just respond to his voice commands immediately. No whip, no yelling, no jerking on the reins. Most of the time just a gentle word, he claimed, was all he needed to get the mule to do what he wanted.
However, someone noticed that every now and again the cart driver would reach back into the cart and bring up a piece of two-by-four lumber. And he would take this heavy piece of wood and suddenly swat the old mule on his head, just below the ear. The mule would bray loudly and pick up his step, complaining all the way. And so they asked, “Hey, you said you didn’t have to whip this animal. You said you could just guide him with a word. What about this two-by-four to the ears?"
"Wal," said the mule driver. “Yes, I can just guide him by a gentle word. But every now and then I have to get his attention."
Most of us are like that. Most of us need to have something slap us hard in order to get our attention. Sometimes it takes a serious illness before any of us will acknowledge that our bodies need to be taken care of; and that illness is like a two-by-four slapping you under the ear to get your attention.
Others of us go through life oblivious to the needs of our family and friends. We get so caught up in what we are doing, so impressed by our own importance, that we need something to get our attention and keep us from destroying the things that matter the most. I know a pastor who was so driven in his work, who pushed himself so hard to meet all the expectations that he thought his people laid on him, that he worked day after day and night after night. He never took a day off, he never took even a holiday. He totally neglected his family’s emotional needs. And so his wife began to spend money; she ran up credit card bills into the many thousands of dollars. She even cashed in her teachers retirement money and spent that. You could say that she was sick and out of control, and that is correct; but it is also true that all she was trying to do was to hit her husband up the side of his head with a two-by-four. She was trying to hurt him just enough to get his attention.
One way to see the cross of Christ is to see it as God using a two-by-four, trying to hurt us just enough to get our attention. That is not the only way to see the cross, but it is one way. The cross is God using a two-by-four, probing at us, pushing us, making us pay attention. The cross is God using a two-by-four, hurting us just enough to get our attention.
Jesus in Luke’s Gospel tells the parable of the tenants. According to his parable, someone planted a vineyard and leased it to tenants, with the understanding that a share of the vineyard’s produce was to come to the landlord. But the first year, when the landlord sent a servant, the tenants beat up on that servant and sent him away empty-handed.
And so the landlord sent another servant. This servant the tenants not only beat up on. This servant they beat up on and insulted, and sent him away empty-handed.
A third servant was sent. The third servant the tenants beat up on, they insulted him, and they even wounded him and threw him out. But still no produce, no grapes.
And so, in Jesus’ parable, the owner of the vineyard said, "These folks show no respect to my servants. Somehow they don’t take my servants seriously. So I will send my son to the field. Surely they will listen to my son."
But do you know what happened to the vineyard owner’s son? When the son came they beat on him, they insulted him, the wounded him and. threw him out … and at last they killed him. Astounding, isn’t it? These tenants were so arrogant, so disrespectful, so out of touch, that they actually killed the owner’s son, and. expected to get away with it.
And as the parable ends, the owner of the vineyard is saying, "I will come and judge these tenants. I will destroy them and punish them." And their answer is nothing more than a weak, insipid, "Heaven forbid! We didn’t do anything!”
What a parable this is of the human condition! What a story of our inattention! And what a demonstration of the fact that God must do something drastic in order to get our attention and make us face the facts about ourselves.
What God does in the face of our unwillingness to listen to him is to hit us with a two-by-four. What God does is to set before us the Cross of Christ and make us look at it, make us learn from it. What God does is to slap us in the face with the foolishness of the cross of Christ and thus get our attention.
I
First, I’d like you to see that the cross makes us pay attention to the long history of our disobedience. The cross makes us see that the disease called sin is long-standing, it is epidemic, it is universal, it is deep-seated. The cross is God using a two-by-four to make us face the truth about the long history and the depth of our disobedience.
I contend this morning that the issue about human sinfulness is that we have never really understood the exceeding sinfulness of sin. I contend that our problem is that we would rather call sin anything but sin. We just have not reckoned with the pervasive, long, disturbing history of human sin.
You see, some would say that sin is just the product of ignorance. If we just invest in education people will be different. But that isn’t true. That isn’t true. If you educate a sinner he will just become a more sophisticated sinner. We have not paid attention to the long, dismal history of human sin.
Others would say that sin is the end product of being poor and deprived. If you feed the hungry and clothe the naked and give them a nice, middle-class environment, then you will deal with the sin problem. But that’s not true either; that is not true. We are trivializing sin. We are pretending that it’s not very important.
I have a friend who was invited to preach a trial sermon in a church here in Washington. The church was thinking of calling him as pastor. But when they sat down with him after he had preached, they said, "If we call you to come as our pastor, please don’t use that word ’sin’. It’s such an ugly word. Please, couldn’t you just say ’mistake’ or ’problem’ or something else?"
But no. Sin is real. Sin is epidemic. Sin is universal. Sin is an ugly word, because it’s an ugly reality. Sin is part of my history, your history, everyone’s history. Sin is the basic issue in every human life. The cross makes us face that squarely.
So when the old spiritual asks, "Were you there when they crucified my lord?" of course the answer is, "Yes." Yes, my sin killed Christ. Yes, your sin killed Christ.
And when I look at the cross I can no longer ignore that most terrible of all truths. The cross is God using a two-by-four to get my attention and teach me the seriousness of my long history of disobedience.
II
Second, the cross is God using a two-by-four to remind us how much he suffers because of our sinfulness. The suffering of God is real. It is not an abstraction. It is not mere rhetoric. God suffers, God Himself hurts because of our sin. And the cross makes it impossible to ignore how much God suffers. The cross is God using a two-by-four to say to us, "Hey, look, this thing matters to me. This thing hurts me."
I wonder sometimes what has happened to our emotions. We no longer seem to be moved by much of anything. Our television screens bring us pictures of starving children in Ethiopia, and we are not moved. Our newspapers print photographs of women and children burned in a Baghdad bunker, and we are able to shrug it off. Maybe it is that in this Twentieth Century we have seen so much suffering that it has become ordinary or unreal. I don’t know.
But I do know that if you look long at the cross you will be struck by the suffering of God. If you look at the cross you will discover the anguish which God himself feels because of our disobedience. Every now and then, at least, if we look at that cross, we will see that when we sin, we drive another nail into the hands of the crucified Christ. When we sin, we add to the suffering of God.
I sometimes wish that in Protestant churches like ours we would at least occasionally display the crucifix that is so common in Catholic homes and churches. The crucifix is not only a representation of the cross; it is also a picture of the crucified Christ, there in anguish on that cross.
Oh, I know why we do not use the crucifix. I know we say that we want to focus on the risen and ever-living Christ. And that’s fine. But maybe an occasional look at a crucifix would help us remember how God in Jesus Christ suffers for us. Maybe an occasional look at the dying body of the Christ would keep us from sugarcoating the awfulness of the human condition.
"Upon that cross of Jesus mine eye at times can see the very dying form of one who suffered there for me. And from my smitten heart with tears, two wonders I confess: the wonders of his glorious love, and my unworthiness."
When I see the cross, it is God using a two-by-four to get my attention about how deeply he suffers. It is God getting my attention about the depth of his anguish. And I can no longer treat as trivial the issue of my repentance.
III
Finally, the cross is God using a two-by-four to get our attention about the lengths to which God will go to redeem us. The cross is God slapping us full in the face with his persistent quest to bring us back to himself. When you see the cross, you understand that God is doing all of this just to reach us.
Read Jesus’ Parable like this: in order to reach us God gave us the Ten Commandments, the basic moral law. But we ignored them, we disobeyed them. And so God tried again. This time God sent the prophets, men inspired of God to bring us back to a deep-seated understanding of his will. But we cast aside the prophets too. Then God sent us the wise men, those sages who gave us the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. But these too we rejected; these too we did not take seriously.
And so this God who will not leave us alone, this love that will not let us go, this God sends into the midst of the storm His own son, Jesus Christ, knowing full well what we would do to him, understanding full well that the depth of our disobedience is so radical that we would destroy even him. But God loves us this much, God cares for us this much, that he will go even to this length to bring us back to himself. "God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life."
And so when I see the cross, I know that God is using a two-by-four to get my attention. I know that God is bludgeoning me with the most dramatic demonstration possible of his love. God is saying, "I know who you are. I know what you have done. I know how deep and how intractable is your spiritual problem. I know all of that. But I want to reach you! Do you not see -- look at this cross and see it: “Oh the love that drew salvation’s plan. Oh the grace that brought it down to man. Oh the mighty gulf that God did span at Calvary.”
The cross is God using a two-by-four to get our attention so that we will see the long reach of his love.
In the spring of 1958, as a young college student wrestling with my future and with my sense of what God was calling me to do, I went off to Kinston, North Carolina, to work for a three-month stint at the Dupont plant there. I accomplished very little for Dupont; I don’t think I helped them increase their Dacron output one little bit.
But I certainly did accomplish some things in my own spiritual life. I can remember now how clearly and how forcefully God used the cross to slap me with something like a two-by-four and get my attention. I was walking one evening along the streets of that town, and in the yard of a church building I saw planted a cross, about six feet tall, and with words painted on its arms. The words were from the Old Testament Book of Lamentations; "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?" "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?"
Right then and there I decided that it was not a nothing to me that Christ had died; it was not a nothing to me that my sin and the world’s sin had brought him there; it was not a big nothing to me that God in Christ would keep on reaching out like that. And so right there, on that street, in a strange town, a long way from home, I made a commitment to Christ to preach his Gospel that has never left me.
It never left me because that cross got my attention. That white-armed, wooden cross, made of simple two-by-fours, slapped me awake that night. It captured my attention. And I knew as never before that "there is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins; and sinners, plunged beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains, lose all their guilty stains."
