Window Into the Heart

John 19:31-37

March 5, 2025 (Ash Wednesday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

There is perhaps no more recognizable symbol in the world than the cross. Not only do you see crosses on or in churches, but you also find them on t-shirts, on bumper stickers, on necklaces around the necks of the grocer and the celebrity, and even on the side of the road where tragedies have happened. The cross has even shaped our vocabulary; the word “excruciating” means “out of the cross” and the word “crux” as in “crux of the matter” also refers to the cross. It’s amazing to think that a instrument of Roman torture, cruelty and punishment could still be recognized nearly two thousand years after the Roman Empire is dead and gone. And maybe it would have disappeared from the public consciousness if not for one man who was nailed to a Roman cross on a hillside outside Jerusalem on a Friday somewhere around AD 33. His name was Jesus, he was from the small town of Nazareth, and his followers believed (and still believe) that he’s the Son of God. In the decades following, as they wrote about what happened on that hillside, they came to believe that if we understand the cross, we can begin to understand a bit about who God is. The cross is the crux of our faith.

We don’t think about it too much, but if we did we’d have to admit that the cross is a weird symbol of faith, and it’s even weirder for people to wear an instrument of execution around their neck. I remember Nicky Gumbel many years ago saying no one wears an electric chair around their neck, so why do we wear a cross? Yes, it’s “just” a symbol, and cultures all around ancient Israel had all kinds of symbols for their gods. But the Hebrew people were forbidden to have any kind of image for God. It’s right there in the most famous Top Ten list in the world: “You shall not make for yourself an image…” (Exodus 20:4), or in the older translation: “Don’t make any graven images.” And so, despite the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians and all the rest making idols, Israel refused to do so. Their god would not be represented by physical things or manipulated by magic rituals. “No image of God is better than a false image of God” (Zahnd, The Wood Between the Worlds, pg. 27). Until Jesus.

John says Jesus is the “word become flesh” (cf. John 1:14). Hebrews says Jesus is “the exact representation” of the Father (Hebrews 1:3). Paul says it directly: “The Son is the image of the invisible God…” (Colossians 1:15). If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. Not any of the paintings we have depicting Jesus as a white, blue-eyed man with flowing brown hair. He probably didn’t look like that, being born in the Middle East, but that’s not what tells us what God is like anyway. No, if you want to know what God is like, look at what Jesus does, and the “climactic, definitive moment…the central event in the gospel story” is the crucifixion (cf. Zahnd 28). The old rugged cross. The moment in Jesus’ life we have spent two millennia trying to understand and still haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of its meaning. That doesn’t mean we haven’t tried. And it doesn’t mean we aren’t going to try again. This Lent, we are going to look again at the cross. Each week we will attempt to see another facet of its meaning, knowing that whatever we see is incomplete. Sometimes we look at the cross and we say, “Well, Jesus died for our sins.” And while that’s true, wonderfully and powerfully true, it’s not all that the cross means. Because the cross is, ultimately, a window into the heart of God.

We see this in vivid color in the passage we read from John’s Gospel tonight. It’s been a long night for Jesus. He has been arrested, put through a sham trial, beaten within an inch of his life and then taken to a public execution where he was nailed to a cross. Crucifixion was one of the worst forms of state-sponsored torture and murder ever invented. The Romans did not come up with crucifixion but they perfected it; if there was a nasty way to do something, the Romans probably did it that way (cf. Wright, John for Everyone—Part Two, pg. 134) and that was certainly true in this case. Crucifixion was death by suffocation with a huge amount of humiliation to go along with it. The religious leaders had demanded Jesus die this way, mainly I believe because the Old Testament says that anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse (cf. Deuteronomy 21:23). This was their way of doing away with Jesus not only physically but also in the people’s minds. He died hung on a tree. He could not possibly be God’s chosen one.

That same law, though, that supposedly put a curse on Jesus because he was hung on a tree also said not to leave a body on the “pole” overnight. “Bury it the same day,” Deuteronomy said, and since crucifixion took a long time to kill someone (eight days was the record for someone surviving on a cross, Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 200), the religious leaders go to Pilate and ask him to take the bodies down. Isn’t it interesting that these rulers, who broke so many rules to get Jesus to this point, are now concerned with a technicality in the law (cf. Card 200)? The real reason they make this request has little to do with the law but with the next day. John says it was a “special Sabbath” (19:31), and they didn’t want dying men to ruin the spirit of the Passover party. Pilate of course doesn’t care about that, but still, for some reason, he grants their request. Maybe he just wants the whole sordid affair to be over. Of course, he can’t take down the bodies until they are dead, so he orders the soldiers to break the legs of the men so that they can’t push up to breathe. It’s brutal, but death will then follow quickly (cf. Wright 134).

So the soldiers go out and perform their ugly duty. According to John, they break the legs of the men on either side of Jesus first. Then he come to the man in the middle, but something is different about him. He is “already dead” (19:33) because, as we were told back in verse 30, Jesus had said, “It is finished” and given up his spirit. The Gospels are united in this message: Rome did not take Jesus’ life from him. The Jews did not take Jesus’ life from him. Jesus gave up his life. He dismissed his spirit. He made a choice because he knew what would come out of this act. Make no mistake, “Jesus was in control…His life was not taken from him. He gave his life” (McKnight, John, pgs. 305, 306). When the soldiers saw that Jesus appeared to be already dead, they did not break his legs, which goes along with John’s theme that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb. A lamb to be used in the Passover celebration could have its limbs pulled apart but the bones were not to be broken (cf. Card 201). Jesus’ bones are not broken because he is already dead.

But just to be sure, the soldier calls for a spear and he thrusts it into Jesus’ side. “Either it would kill him, or it would prove he was already dead’ (Wright 134). I’ve seen several medical attempts to interpret this scene; you probably have, too. A lot of them will circulate online during the next few weeks. They show up every year. But we don’t really know what was happening here. John doesn’t tell us anything more than “a sudden flow of blood and water” came out of Jesus. One of the most plausible explanations I’ve seen is that after death, the bodily fluids separate, so what comes out of Jesus is some sort of mix of clotting blood and a watery substance (cf. Wright 134-135). Another author I read speculated that they represent baptism and communion, water and blood (cf. McKnight 307; Zahnd 33). But John doesn’t say that, and he doesn’t seem all that interested in interpreting the event except for this: it means Jesus was dead. Really, truly, dead. John  even whispers to us this fact: “The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true” (19:35). So, at a very basic level, this is eyewitness testimony. He was there. He saw it. He may have even gotten some of the blood and water on his clothes. It’s true. Jesus really died, and the thrust of the spear was proof (cf. Card 201).

Pastor Brian Zahnd says, “What do I see when I look upon Christ in death with a pierced side? I see that a soldier’s spear has opened a window into the heart of God” (33). You think about some of the other ancient gods and what their symbols of power were. Ra, from Egypt, had a falcon’s head. Marduk from Mesopotamia had his spade to keep people in line. Zeus had his thunderbolts and control of the sky to exert power over the Greek and eventually the Roman people. But the power of this God was not seen in nature, or in man-made tools or weapons. The power of this God is shown when he is nailed to a tree (cf. Zahnd 28-29). When he is most powerless, Jesus is changing the world.

When we look into the heart of Jesus, the Son of God, we see no malice, no anger, and no vengeance as you find in the other stories of ancient gods. Sometimes I read those old stories and shake my head, wondering why people would even want to worship such creations? But it was out of fear—fear that the god would strike them down, kill them, or in some other way punish them. Many of the representations of the ancient gods that you find buried in archaeological digs today have angry looks on their faces, and people never knew what they could do to make them happy. Life consisted of trying to appease the god.

But not so with Jesus. When you look into his heart, you see compassion, mercy, forgiveness. In fact, he dies a horrible death not with a curse on his lips, as was usually the case with the victims of crucifixion. He dies instead with words like these: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Even the Jewish religious leaders of the day were intent on making sure people towed the line. They wanted to, you might say, put the “fear of God” into the people, to follow the rules, both the ones actually written in Scripture and the ones they had written around the ones written in Scripture. That was the biggest reason Jesus had conflict with them; they were more interested in the “letter of the law” than they were in helping people know God (cf. Card 200). But when you look into the heart of Jesus, you see the true heart of the Father; Jesus himself said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). When we look through the window into the heart, we see compassion, mercy, love, forgiveness, grace and so much more. As we look at his pierced heart, “we encounter a God who would rather die than kill his enemies” (Zahnd 33). We see a God who even says, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28). Is there any better embodiment of that teaching than Jesus on the cross, refusing to strike back at those who pierce his side?

John also says that what happened here fulfills a promise originally spoken by the Old Testament prophet Zechariah: “They will look on the one they have pierced” (19:37; cf. Zechariah 12:10). I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a hard scene to look at. This one who did no wrong, who only loved and never cursed, this one who willingly gave his life up—it’s hard for me to be one of those who stand at the cross and gaze at him for too long because I know he calls me to be like that, to be like the God we see there on the cross, and I know I’m not. This God who does not strike back, who calls us to love even those who don’t love us, has caused more than one person to stumble and even fall away. We sometimes get confused between the American story of strength and conquering and the Jesus story that says love your enemies, even if they pierce your heart. So we’re going to stand here at the cross throughout this season of Lent and let the dying Christ challenge us, call us to see a God who would rather die than live without you and me. When we get to Good Friday, this prophecy of Zechariah will, I pray, be true of us: “They will look on the one they have pierced.” And as we look, as we gaze, we will have a window into the heart of God.

Tonight is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. And tonight, as we begin our journey toward Good Friday, as we begin to gaze at the old rugged cross, you have an opportunity to symbolically join Jesus on his journey. Ashes have long been a symbol of mortality, of mourning, even of death; way back in the Old Testament, people would cover themselves in ashes as a sign that they were in distress (cf. Job 2:12). We’re not going to do that to you tonight, so relax. But you are invited to come forward in just a few minutes to receive the sign of the cross in ashes on your forehead or your hands. The forehead is the place of decision-making; the hands are the place of doing. Either place is symbolic of giving our will over to God, of saying something like, “My will is dead; I only want to do your will, Lord.” It’s a significant way to begin the Lenten season. But listen, I don’t want you to just receive the ashes tonight, go home and wash them off and be done. Well, yes, I do want you to wash them off. Wear them to work for the next forty days and people might look at you strange. Though it would be a good conversation starter. Anyway, here’s my hope and prayer for tonight: when people in ancient times would sit in ashes, they would stay there for a while. Job’s friends sat in ashes with him for at least a week. We tend to receive the symbol and then move on, forget about it by tomorrow, but what if we took the next forty days to sit at the foot of the cross and really gaze into his heart? What if we allowed that gaze to change us this Lent, to make us more like the one who is hanging between heaven and earth?

Early Christians intentionally chose the cross as the symbol of our faith. An object of torture became a symbol of grace because God is known in the death of his Son. So the cross is who God is. The cross is who we are. The cross is the heart of our faith and the heart of God.

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Immanuel’s veins

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains!

(UMH 622, William Cowper)

Amen.