When you listen to this passage of scripture with the ears of your heart, not just your head, you can feel Jesus’ pain.  Listen again, will you?  With your heart.  “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death.” 

There are lots of pictures in my mind of what Jesus might have looked like.  One comes from childhood.  It’s very old picture hanging on a faded, pale yellow wall in a far-outdated Sunday School classroom.  In the wood framed picture, a long-haired, bearded, white-robed Caucasian Jesus is sitting on a rock.  There are sheep gathered all around him.  He’s holding a lamb in his lap.  To this day, just the memory of that picture evokes powerful emotions.  I remember staring at it for long periods of time because it made me feel like I was in Jesus’ presence, safe and peaceful.  What pictures of Jesus hang on the walls of your memory?  Do any of them include this one?  A grown man weeping with “loud cries and tears”?  Have you ever seen a grown man weep?  What made Jesus cry?

The days of his flesh were coming to an end, for one thing.  He was about to die and he knew it.  What must that have felt like?  What do you think our Prisoners of War were feeling before they were executed?  What were their last thoughts?  Were they scared?  Did they think of their families?  Do you think they cried?  One soldier who was facing imminent death in another war said “I seen my mother, my daddy, my dog all in one flash (David H. Hackworth, Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts, RuggedLand, 2002, p. 25).”  It’s scary enough knowing that death can come at any time.  We all live with that knowledge tucked not far from our most conscious thoughts.  What must it feel like to have it shoved to the forefront, to be so imminent that it’s all you can think about? 

At John Louthan’s funeral this week, Herb Peterson recounted a conversation he had with John just a couple of weeks ago.  John said that he was ready to die, that he had accepted death already, it was what he might yet have to go through to get there that he wasn’t so sure about.  Jesus knew what that felt like.  It forged the way he prayed.  This was not a now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep prayer.  This was a grown man weeping kind of prayer, the kind he could only pray “with loud cries and tears” because he knew the time had come to sacrifice himself for our sins and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

That’s one reason we come to this Communion table this morning.  We come confessing that we have come to the end of our ability to get ourselves out of the sinful mess we’ve made.  It means believing that Jesus finally went through with what made him weep that provided for our forgiveness.  This passage from Hebrews is so crucial to our understanding of who Jesus was and what he accomplished because it describes him as the ultimate high priest. 

The priests in the Old Testament days were appointed by God to offer sacrifices on behalf of others.  They offered all kinds of sacrifices, sacrifices of food or animals, to atone for their own sins and the sins of others.  Jesus followed in that great priestly line.  He was appointed by God to serve as our priest.  Except, in Jesus’ case, he offered his own life as the ultimate sacrifice for sin.  In the Old Testament, the priests had to continually offer sacrifices for sins.  Christ made the ultimate sacrifice, once for all (Hebrews 7:27-28).  Coming to this table means confessing our trust that what Christ did was good enough, forever, for all of our sins. 

John Michael Montgomery followed in his dad’s footsteps and became a country and western singer.  After his father died some years ago, he wrote a song in tribute to his dad, I Miss You a Little.  One line is particularly haunting, “Every now and then some little thing I’ve buried comes bubblin’ up.”  He never says what it is he buried that keeps bubblin’ up.  But, anyone who’s ever stood over the grave of a loved one and grieved over unfinished business can take a pretty good guess.  Missed opportunities to express love?  Harsh words it’s too late to take back?  Unkind deeds they waited too late to apologize for?  When that stuff gets buried, it always gets buried alive.  Whatever Montgomery buried keeps coming back to haunt.   

Are there any missed opportunities in your life, gone forever?  Are there harsh words too late to take back?  Unkind deeds that have left broken relationships in their wake?  Are you tired of burying the memory of them alive only for them to come bubbling back up?  The Christian confession is that all of our sins, all of our true guilt, all of it, was buried forever the day Jesus died, never again to be an issue between us and our God.  Jesus, as our compassionate, sympathetic priest, “is able to deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward.”  That means that his mercy supercedes our ignorance and our our tendency to do things we later wish we could just bury.  When old, sinful memories resurrect themselves to haunt us, we have a resurrected savior who understands and responds sympathetically.  In coming to this table we will not hear God saying to us, “You should have known better!” or “How could you be so stupid?!”  This is not a place we will find judgment or condemnation.  This table represents what Jesus did when he became “a priest forever.” 

Jesus’ sacrifice means that every sin we’ve ever committed or ever will commit has already been forgiven.  Jesus fulfilled what Jeremiah prophesied that God had revealed to him, “‘They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more (Jeremiah 31:34).’” Coming to this table means no longer hiding, burying or stuffing what has been, because you finally trust that the grace God has promised has become personally yours.

Jesus was weeping because he knew he had to die.  But, he’d also learned how hard getting to death could be.  We’re sometimes tempted to believe that Jesus came to earth as prepackaged perfection.  In fact, “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”  Jesus learned obedience through the same experiences of human struggle we do.  It’s not that he learned through suffering the consequences of bad choices, like we do.  But, like us, he wasn’t given a free ride on the road to maturity.  He learned what it meant to pay the price of surrendering himself to a purpose greater than his own safety, comfort, well being, even his life.  If this season of Lent means nothing else, it means at least this much.  None of us ever comes to maturity, really lives, until we surrender ourselves to the divine purpose for our lives that is greater than our own safety, comfort and well being. 

If we build around ourselves a way of life, a way of believing, an institutional faith system, or even a circle of relationships that only comfort us when we are frightened or reassure us that we will be OK in heaven someday but never allows us to experience complete, obedient surrender to God’s sometimes very painful, even dangerous, will now, no matter what it costs, then we will never know what it really means to be a follower of the Jesus who “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears.” 

We’re so accustomed to thinking in our exclusively twenty-first century American upwardly mobile culture that life is supposed to get progressively easier as we get older and if it doesn’t then we’ve either done something wrong or we’ve had something denied us that was rightfully ours.  In contrast, the call of God on our lives is a call to deeper maturity and higher obedience that sometimes gets very costly and even makes life progressively more difficult, even painful.  I want and pray for my children to live peaceful and safe lives.  But, I pray more that they may live meaningful and significant lives.  I don’t want them to live only to die never having known what it means to live for something greater than their personal security and comfort.   For Jesus, the closer he got to obedience and maturity, the uglier life got until just the thought of what was next made him weep.  Sometimes for us, like it was for Jesus, that means trusting God when it makes absolutely no human sense.  But, in fact, if trust made absolute sense, it wouldn’t be trust.  That’s the hard part, trusting.  Trusting when nothing makes sense and life this side of death gets harder instead of easier.

Everyone has been touched by the story of Jessica Lynch this past week, the nineteen year-old Army private who was rescued from Iraqi captivity.  I stand with hat in hand respect for those who had the courage to lay their lives on the line to rescue her.  The Governor of West Virginia paid a visit to Jessica’s family.  Standing in front of their very humble hillside home, he said, “Our prayers have been answered.”  This young woman who just a couple of years ago could have been sitting in one of these pews as one of our high school students is now a true American hero.  And all she really wants is to come home to her mom’s mashed potatoes and gravy and to her dream of being a kindergarten teacher.  The Governor said, “Our prayers have been answered.”

But, what of those whose daughters and sons won’t be coming home?   Were their prayers not “answered”?  One of the captured POW’s whose body was found in the same hospital with Jessica was that of Lori Piestewa, a 23 year-old Hopi Indian from Arizona, the single mother of a three and four year-old.  The Hopi tribal chairman said that Lori’s death “has rocked the very foundation of the Hopi reservation since many of us have been continually praying with the Piestewa family for Lori's safe return (As reported by Lynn Ducey, “Families Mourn Dead Found In POW Rescue,” Associated Press, April 5, 2003).”  Unanswered prayer or even prayers that just feel unanswered will do that.  They’ll rock the very foundation.

Yet, having faith in God because things turned out the way you wanted is one thing.  Having faith in God, trusting him anyway, when you’ve prayed until you’ve wept and things only got worse, not better, is something else altogether.  Jesus wept through his prayers because life on the way to death was hard and only got harder.  But, what that means for us is that we now have a high priest who not only has stood in the holiest place to offer a sacrifice for our sins, it means that we have a brother who has walked where we’ve walked and wept where we’ve wept.  Jesus can truly say to us, “I feel your pain.”  We will never find ourselves at any point on this journey in the days of our flesh without a compassionate, understanding and sympathetic companion, Jesus.

This table means that everything that will have to be done to forgive your sins has already been done.  It also means that the one who made that possible knows exactly what it feels like to live in your skin.