Midweek Lenten Message #5
April 1, 2020
Psalm 22: 24
“Jesus Sings the Song of Complete Satisfaction.”
“Now I am satisfied.” The parent looks at the room cleaning their son or daughter completed finally and everything is completed to satisfaction. The garbage is cleaned up. The bed is made. The dirty clothes are thrown down to the laundry room. All articles are put in their proper place, and the floor is vacuumed. In every case, no matter the task, parent to child, teacher to student, boss to worker, there is a check list that needs to be completed in order for the one in charge to say, “It is complete to satisfaction.” “I am satisfied.”
We have been meditating on a song groaned in agony these past Wednesdays. It is a funeral dirge of affliction and suffering, of abandonment and complete embarrassment. It is gasped with piercings and the fear of being ripped apart by marauding circles of bullies of hatred. Who could be singing this? Certainly, we can identify with King David’s words put to the notes on a page. We’ve experienced the sadness, the affliction, and depression that he did and maybe we do today due to the present circumstances that just a few weeks ago seemed like an impossible nightmare. But there is more. By the Spirit’s inspiration, there is another who is groaning these Words from some distant future on a place where skulls have been scattered outside the city wall up on hill, so he was nailed and hung and left to die. This is Jesus’ song, and the conclusion that he sings is satisfying.
How can one possibly satisfy the criteria set down to stand unified and embraced by the Holy God? Does it seem cruel or arrogant that a God would have holy, perfect demands that should have to be made in order that His supreme justice would be satisfied? The problem is not with God. The problem is with us who were conceived and born as children of the rebellion—a rebellion that swept over all of time and space on this earth making God out to be the liar, the selfish scoundrel, and us, mankind, out to be the gods. But justice must be satisfied, the criteria of holiness must be met or even an eternity for us in the agony of hell is too short to satisfy the supreme holy justice of a God zealous for his creation to be like he created us to be—holy according to his image.
And it’s sin that creates the affliction—the guilt over what we’ve done or failed to do, the damage that we’ve done to ourselves or to the personal relationships that God has blessed us with, the effects of sin in this world and the attacks that are whipped up by the enemy, all of it because sin separates us from God. And in those afflictions, in that pain, people whip up their own ideas about satisfying a perceived angry Divine judge. “If you broke it, you have to fix it.” Pay for it with your effort, your sacrifices, your money, your blood, sweat, and tears. But none of it satisfies because there’s an elephant in the room like the Tax Collector in the temple came to realize, so we must, too, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.”
I can’t satisfy God, and you can’t, either. He hasn’t despised or scorned the sufferings of you and me, the afflicted because of sin, instead he knit his Son together in the womb in our likeness to ‘present him as the sacrifice of atonement through faith in his blood. He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time.” God doesn’t just ignore or wish away the debt that we owe. But he satisfied them in the holy life blood of his Son. A holy life needed to be offered, and it was. Consider the power of God and the wisdom of God found in the cross. He proclaimed, “This is my whom I love, with him I am well pleased.” But Jesus groans, “Why have your forsaken me?” God is pleased with His Son and forsakes him at the same time! Holy and righteous Jesus who had done no wrong becomes cloaked and hung with the stench of our wickedness and sin wrapped around him. He simultaneously hid his face from the one who became our sin, and opened it up to the Son he loved. He equally did not listen to the cries of the one who became our sin and listened to his cries for delivery—both at once. His holy criteria was satisfied in the one who suffered completely for us while covered in our sin and guilt, and God’s wrath has passed over so that God could comfort us.
And God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. He was completely satisfied. Sin was killed and buried, and death was mortally wounded. The devil’s head, his will and ways were crushed and chained. Jesus sings this song for us who still struggle, who are abused and bruised by the effects of sin in our own fleshly members and in this world, which do cause affliction and suffering. However, God uses all of those forces of evil as a loving Father in discipline to his beloved children to produce a harvest of righteousness and peace, as a cleansing fire that polishes and purifies a simple faith that he has given which trusts that Jesus has provided the only perfect satisfaction in our place to God. God looks at you and me, sinners that we are, in the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ covering us in our baptism and sings joyfully, “I am completely satisfied with you, my son/my daughter.” Amen.
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