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Sermons by The Revernd Grayhame Bowcott
“The Pewter Pin with Three Crosses”
The Reign of Christ – November 26th, 2017
St. George’s, The Blue Mountains
Luke 23.33-43
33When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. [[ 34Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’]] And they cast lots to divide his clothing. 35And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’ 36The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, 37and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’ 38There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’
39One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ 40But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ 42Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ 43He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’
The Lord be with you.
Let us pray.
Gracious and loving God,
Help us to know what we are doing.
May our faith, rooted in our relationship with you Son, Jesus Christ,
influence the decisions we make and the actions we live out in our lives.
And in the times when we knowingly do not choose your Son,
forgive us,
and lead us to choose you again.
This we pray in Jesus name.
Amen.
In my first year of seminary I was given the gift of a pewter lapel pin.
The pin was quite simple in design: it displayed three crosses standing together on a triangular hill.
The cross in the center was larger than each on either side.
The pin is about the size of a toonie, and so, as you can imagine, it was something that people noticed when you wore it.
And I started wearing it on my sports coat to church and whenever I was dressed up. I wore it on the bus, I wore it to class at Huron. I wore it when I drove my grandmother around for her errands. I found that, because of its unique appearance, it would catch people’s attention, to the point where curiosity seemed to get the better of them.
The conversations would usually begin: “That’s an interesting pin.”
And it would inevitably move to the question: “what’s it stand for?”
Now, I am always curious what people believe about seminary students:
either they known little about them and think that they are experts in what they are talking about, or they know enough to understand that half the time we don’t have a clue as to what we are talking about. To be honest I was more of the latter than the former.
At first, I started answering the question by sharing the story of Jesus being crucified between two criminals. (Read here from Luke 22)
Some people had heard the story before, for others it was new to them.
For some, talking about a Biblical story was pretty much the end of our conversation.
Their faces told it all “oh, this guy is some sort of Jesus-freak” – and that was that.
But some were honestly intrigued by the story, “Why was Jesus crucified with criminals?”
I soon realized that, to be honest, I didn’t really know enough about the story to do their questions justice, so I decided that best way to remedy this would be to actually study the passage.
When, in my New Testament studies class, I was asked why I was selecting Luke 23.33 as my passage for the year, I told the truth:
“Because I have a lapel pin with three crosses on it.”
You can imagine how impressed my professor was to hear that!
“Why are there three crosses?” more than one person asked me.
I had to think about this.
Three could stand for the Holy Trinity.
Peter denied his Lord three times before the cock crowed.
On the third day Jesus rose from the dead.
But for me the answer was simple.
There were three crosses because there were three men crucified when Jesus died.
When you looked at the pin, the center cross stood out – it was more prominent than the others.
Jesus is the focus of the event found in our passage today,
but he is flanked on either side by two very different men.
The more I thought about this, the more the two men, symbolized by the two smaller crosses, began to come to the forefront of meaning in the Gospel text.
Both men were sinners, both were convicted criminals,
but Jesus was neither.
One of the two criminals turns to Jesus on the cross and says, “If you are the Messiah, why don’t you do something about it?”
“Shouldn’t God’s son be able to help himself?”
“You think you are better than us – King of the Jews?
Why are you dying the same death as we are?”
In the first man’s comments we hear scorn and bitterness.
We hear condemnation and even a sense of satisfaction that Jesus is suffering.
We hear, in him, the thoughts of a world that doesn’t understand who Jesus is and what he came to accomplish.
This criminal dying on the cross beside Jesus seems to be an extension of all the soldiers, the religious authorities and the onlookers who mock and deride Jesus.
But, for me, he became something other than just another angry voice in the crowd.
He came to represent a choice that had been made about God.
The freedom that humanity has to not choose God in our lives.
Yet the other criminal rebukes him in saying, ‘Do you not have any fear or respect for God? Since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?
We both know that we are guilty and are getting what we deserve for our deeds,
but this man, Jesus, has done nothing wrong.’
The second man then has the freedom to make a choice of his own.
He turns to Jesus and asks, ‘Remember me when you come into your Kingdom.’
In his simple request the second criminal reveals a number of things:
1) he believes that Jesus is more than just a man,
2) he believes that Jesus’ Reign, his power and authority extend through death into life thereafter,
3) he believes that Jesus has the power to save him too,
4) and he is not afraid to voice an opinion and a choice that is different than those who condemned the Son of God to die.
The longer I thought about my lapel pin, the more the three crosses came to symbolize, for me, the single-most important choice that we will ever have to make in our lives,
not just once, but each and every day,
and it is by the grace of God that we don’t have to wait for our own death to make our decision.
The two criminals represent two different paths that are defined by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross:
one path leads us to see Jesus as much of the world sees him,
as a myth,
as a broken man dying on the cross, powerless, defeated, conquered by the world’s authority and ruthlessness.
Jesus, an inconvenience, a superstitious man representing a value-less faith.
Jesus as only man, who was born and who died and whose relevance ended there.
The second path, however, challenges the views of the first.
The second man crucified with Jesus recognizes that only by the grace and power of God can he be saved.
He also recognizes that Jesus, as God’s Son, is the only authority in the world powerful enough to bring about his redemption – power through sacrificial love.
The second criminal doesn’t claim any privilege by his own sense of worthiness,
instead he is appealing to God’s mercy and forgiveness:
“Remember me, when you come into your Kingdom.”
But what does this mean for us?
Every day we are presented with this choice.
What do we believe?
Is Christ relevant in our world? Is he relevant in our lives?
Or does he not matter at all?
The final word in the Gospel is made by Jesus himself.
He turns to look at one man and then the other.
Both have made their choice.
Jesus concludes that the second criminal has made the right choice,
for he has chosen to embrace God’s path of forgiveness and redemption:
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
When I studied this passage in seminary, I was surprised to discover that many scholars believe that some editing has been done to Luke’s original text. The evidence for their argument is that the first part of verse 34 doesn’t appear in some of the earliest copies of the Gospel of Saint Luke. It’s missing. Some scholars argue that it should never have been added in there.
It seems this sentence: “Then Jesus said, “Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” was added to later copies of the Luke’s Gospel.
While Jesus’ prayer from the cross captures the theme of forgiveness that we find throughout the Gospel of Luke and is quite consistent with many other comments that Jesus makes during his ministry, it may not quite fit into the context of our reading today.
Jesus prays for God to forgive those whose ignorance guides their own actions.
However, I believe that the most important aspect of our reading today
is the emphasis that is placed on the choices we make when we are not ignorant.
It is my belief that both criminals were aware of the choice they made as they hung dying on the cross next to our Lord.
God presented them both with an equal opportunity.
To choose Christ or to reject him and they make their choice willingly.
I have come to believe that this same opportunity is presented to us today and every day of our lives.
Now who would have thought that all this would have come from a little pewter pin?
Today as we celebrate the feast of the Reign of Christ, I’d like to leave you with this thought. While we cannot always control the events and actions of the world around us,
we do, however, have mastery over our own lives.
When we talk about the Reign of Christ as Anglicans, there is a very personal question that each of us can ask ourselves:
Does Christ Reign in our own life? Is he the light by which we live out all our other decisions and actions?
Each day, by God’s grace, we are given the freedom of answering: no, or yes, Lord, he is!
I would like to close with a quote that comes from the great Anglican author and theologian C. S. Lewis, whose contributions to our church and society have been recently celebrated with the laying of a tribute in Westminster Abbey’s famous Poet’s Corner.
On this tribute, this quote is inscribed:
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen.
Not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
With this thought in mind.
Let us close in prayer:
Gracious and loving God,
Help us to believe in a Kingdom we may not see,
Help us to know a salvation that we may not yet fully realize,
Help to choose the path of mercy and forgiveness
that is frequently overlooked by our world.
Help us to choose Jesus this day and every day,
and may he become our sun by which we see everything else.
In his holy name we pray.
Amen.