God is Most High. His eyes look down. He sees what you are — the poverty, the squalor, the weight of it all. He sees it, and He does not look away. He comes down. He comes all the way down, down to the floor, down to the cross, down to this altar. The Most High becomes the Most Low so that the lowly might be raised to the Most High.
“No One to Help” Isaiah saw it before it happened. Many centuries before Calvary, he asked the question that hangs over everything you have heard this morning: “I looked, but there was no one to help, and I wondered that there was no one to uphold.” Look through the Passion, and you will see that he was right. There was no one.
The righteous Man is inconvenient. He reproaches their sins. His manner of life is unlike theirs. The very sight of Him is a burden. So they have made up their minds: He must go.
Jesus did not stumble into the Passion. He was not simply a good man who ran afoul of powerful enemies. He is the eternal Son of God who became flesh for the express purpose of offering that flesh to be broken. The Zechariah cento your ears received this morning is a mosaic of prophetic fragments, and together they tell the whole story of the week before it unfolds: the King riding in lowly; thirty pieces of silver weighed out; the shepherd struck; the sheep scattered; darkness at midday; living water flowing from the city. Zechariah saw it all. Isaiah saw it all. The thread running through every prophet points to this one Man, this one week, this one death.
This is what the church does when she reads the Passion over you. The Word does what it says. It puts you under the torn curtain, in the company of the saints who walked out of their graves, in the place of Barabbas. This is not a report on something that happened long ago to someone else. It is a delivery—to you, this morning, in this place.
The cross is coming. You can feel it gathering through these weeks. Every story this season — the plotting, the stones, the thickening opposition — it is all converging on Jerusalem, converging on one man walking steadily toward it. No one takes His life from Him. He lays it down. For sheep who wander. For sheep who sleep in Gethsemane. For sheep who deny three times before the rooster finishes crowing. For you.
“Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). Abraham saw it. Not dimly, not as a vague hope. He saw Christ’s day. When? On Mount Moriah, when the old man bound his only son, his beloved Isaac, on the wood of the altar. When the knife was raised and the angel stayed his hand. When the ram appeared, caught in the thicket by its horns, and Abraham offered it up in place of his son. Abraham saw it and was glad because in that moment on the mountain, in that substitution, he saw the shape of what God would do. The beloved Son would carry the wood up the hill. The beloved Son would be laid upon the altar. But there would be no angel to stay the hand. The knife would fall. The Son of God would die in the place of sinners. The ram caught in the thorns would wear them as a crown.
The thing that changes everything is an empty tomb on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem. That tomb is empty. He is not there. He is risen. And because He is risen, the grave that holds Joyce Hofmann right now is temporary. Her baptism still holds. The name put on her in Skokie in 1931 still belongs to her. The resurrection that Jesus is — the life that Jesus is — she is in it.
There is mourning, and there is rejoicing. Both. All the way through Lent. Not mourning for six weeks and then a gasp of relief on Easter morning. Both. The question is where you are looking. Look at yourself, and you can only mourn. Look at Him — and rejoicing is already there underneath everything, because of what He is doing.
But Jesus does not operate by human arithmetic. He takes what is insufficient, and He gives thanks, and He distributes until everyone is full and there are twelve baskets left over. He does not run out. He will not run out. Not on that hillside, not at that Upper Table, not at this rail.
