I think that one of the most underrated Disney movies of all time is The Sword in the Stone, Disney’s tale of how King Arthur—who everyone calls Wart in the film—grew up and his zany adventures with Merlin. I saw a copy of this movie on the DVD rack in BJ’s the other day and then proceeded to spend the rest of my shopping excursion reliving my favorite parts of this movie that I haven’t seen in over a decade.
Two parts in particular still stand out in my mind. Merlin wants young Wart to truly come to know and love the world around him, so as he teaches this king-to-be, Merlin keeps turning him into different animals so that he can experience the world through new eyes. Arthur learns what it’s like to be a fish swimming around in a lake and what it’s like to be a bird soaring through the air. He lives through the joy of near-weightlessness in the water as well as the overpowering fear of running from a predator for dear life. He finds true freedom and ecstasy in flight as well as the pang of loss in the death of a fellow sparrow.
By truly experiencing life in these different forms, Arthur learns to love and care for every creature, great or small.
In our chapter this week from The Story, we walked with Jesus through his last hours on earth. We shared in the Last Supper with his disciples. We listened with rapt attention to Jesus prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. We were there as he stood trial in the court of the high priest, and we were there when he was sentenced to death while a murderer and rebel walked free.
We were there when they crucified our Lord.
Could you feel the intense pain, the monumental sadness? Did it hit you as you were reading that this was the darkest moment in all of history? Did you find yourself asking why? Why did this have to happen? Why did Jesus let this happen?
Why?
I’ve been asked the question and often wondered myself just why Jesus had to die for us to be saved. Why is it that the Creator of the universe, the One who made everything and sustains everything, the God who is all powerful and all knowing could not find a different way to save humanity from their sins?
And in this account of Jesus’ death on the cross, in the words that Jesus utters with his dying breaths, I find the answer that I need.
You see, when Jesus cries out, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabbachthani,” My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, he experiences what many of us know too well in our lives: the feeling of true abandonment by God. Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, God incarnate, experiences what it is like to not feel God’s presence in his life, to feel utterly alone, and this takes place as he is struggling to gulp down his last precious lungfuls of air.
Scripture contains many truths, my friends, but one of the simplest and yet most important of these truths is that in God’s never-ending pursuit of a covenantal relationship with humanity, God constantly goes where we cannot go and does what we will not do. When God made a formal covenant with Abraham, it was the Almighty who assumed the position of the humbled king. When God felt the sting of the whip on the backs of the Israelites, it was the One above all others who relentlessly worked to free them from the grip of the Egyptians. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown into the furnace and when Daniel was tossed into the lion’s den, it was Yahweh who delivered them from the flames and closed the mouth of beasts.
And when the gap between humanity and the Almighty grew so large that we had no way of ever crossing it or closing it ourselves, God, in God’s infinite love, crossed the chasm himself and took on flesh. In pursuit of a right relationship with a people who broke every covenant that God ever made with them, God became one of them, experienced every aspect of what it is to be human, and made it so that no one would ever have to be apart from God ever again. And for this to happen, it had to include the cross. It had to include the cross because all of humanity had to see the great lengths and depths that God was willing to go for them. It had to include the cross because God understood that the darkest part of the human condition is the feeling that God is not there, that even in a world full of life, even in a world teaming with relationships and connections, they are truly and utterly alone, and for us to know that God truly did experience all, this experience would have to be big.
It had to be the cross because greater love has none than this that a man would lay down his life for his friends.
The cross was why the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us—so that no chasm could stand between humanity and the Almighty. God loved us so much that God endured all to maintain relationship with us. This concept is so important to us—maybe even just subconsciously at times—that we cannot escape it. Our culture is replete in the retelling of it. The Sword in the Stone is not the only example of a narrative emulating the task of God becoming man and experiencing as God’s own a foreign condition. In 1961, John Howard Griffin published the book, Black Like Me, a non-fiction account of a white male’s endeavor to experience life through the eyes of the African-American community in Mansfield, TX. Griffin altered the pigments in his skin for a time so that he looked much darker. He experienced prejudice and turmoil that he did not even know existed, and his exposé on the adventure led to countless others understanding for the first time the great depths of racism in this Texas town. In my favorite TV show growing up, Boy Meets World, one of the main characters spends a week dressed up as a girl so that he can write about the blatant sexism that runs rampant in his school and how it feels to be a teenage girl in that environment.
I’m sure that if you thought for a second, you could remember a book or movie or TV show that held a similar premise.
We are stuck on this idea, and we can’t break from it. It’s so important to us, and most of the time we don’t even know why. We cannot help but dwell on this idea, because it both confounds and over joys us so much. God, the Creator of the universe, the One who needs nothing and does everything, became human so that we would know that we are never alone and that we can experience nothing that God has not already experienced personally. Even the experience of feeling abandoned by even God Godself and truly alone.
Minds smarter than my own have come up with a number of theories of atonement to try to understand the saving work of Christ in the world. Some hold that Jesus was the sacrificial lamb that died in our place. Our sins were heaped upon him and he bore the load because we could not. Some hold that Jesus paid the ransom to Satan in exchange for our freedom. Our sin had bound us to the devil, but Jesus traded himself for us. Some hold that the act of death is only important in that it is necessary for the resurrection, and that it is the victory over death that is truly important.
All of these are scripturally sound doctrine, and all of them are extremely important in understanding what happens in the death of Christ. But I want to emphasize another aspect of this: Christ died so that God could and would experience everything that it means to be human and so that the chasm between God and humanity could be breached and bridged.
And this is a thousand times more amazing than a wizard turning a would-be king into a fish or a bird.
So may you remember that the cross is the point in which God lives out the darkest depths of the human experience. May you remember that God chose to go there so that there might never need to be separation between you and the Almighty. May you remember that the chasm between God and humanity has been breached, and that out love the Word became flesh and dwelt among us so that we would never be without it, without him. Amen.
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