LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2023, Page 79

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them. The One who is the triumphant King suffered His
own skin to be nailed to the stake as the trophy of His
triumph over death. The One who hunted down death
allowed Himself to be devoured by it. He was pierced
through that we might be made whole. The wood upon
which He was set adrift under the storming wrath of God
He fashions into the ship of our salvation. It is our cross
too, but not a cross of punishment for us. Rather, He
makes it the cross of salvation.
The One bound by the nails is bound that He might bind
us to Himself through faith in Him. We, who might be
bound to Him by force, are bound rather by His mercy and
compassion for us; and that binding is the more powerful
because it is His. Bound to Him by His passionate and
bloody embrace, we no longer fear the bonds of death in
our own lives.
Punishment cannot hold us, for He long ago took our
punishment. Suffering cannot overwhelm us, because He
suffered for us on the tree. Fear cannot defeat us, for there
is nothing to fear that can harm us. The cross is the
instrument of His death, and the source of our life. Come,
blessed cross!
The one truly free person puts His freedom into the chains
of death that we might be set free. The one truly righteous
person puts His righteousness at risk by placing it in our
hands by faith, that we might become the righteousness
of God in Him. And how did we repay Him for this? What
have we returned to Him for this one act of mercy? We
return to him nothing but vinegar and gall to drink. When
He looks for good fruit in us, we have only yielded bad.
The branches have been unfruitful. But He, the Vine, has
determined to give His life sustaining body and blood for
us Christians to eat and to drink. While we produced only
sour grapes, He has given us to drink of His blood
returning again and again to draw us into the fellowship
supper of His love. We behold God and eat and drink
(Exod. 24:11). Who goes away from this repast, filled with
the fruits of His death, unchanged?

Christ crucified it embraces all people, races, languages,
nations, and tribes. Christ crucified stretches out His
arms to embrace all. In C. S. Lewis’s consummation of the
Chronicles of Narnia, entitled The Last Battle, he portrays
Aslan’s faithful coming into a tiny stable on a battlefield
where they presume a faithful, but certain, death will
befall them. As they enter the stable, they become aware
that as it grows smaller everything else gets greater and
ever larger. As they pass from Narnia into the paradise of
the blessed, experiencing the full expanse of Aslan’s
world, their refrain is “Come further up, come further in.”
The Lord Jesus calls us from the narrow confines of our
sin-sick world into the point of His cross where all the
expanse of His love will open out for us. Our refrain this
day is, “Come further up, come further in.” Let’s go into
the cross, bound to the Crucified One.
Thomas, whom we call “Doubting,” when he was seeking
the resurrected Lord, demanded to the signs of the
crucifixion, asking, “Unless I plunge my finger into his
wounds and my hand into his side” (John 20:25). Put me
with Thomas! Plunge me too into His wounds. Bind me to
that bloody man, who is God.
Christ has gone further up and further in. Jesus could
have come down from His cross fulfilling the worst
nightmare of those who mocked Him and ridiculed Him.
It would have been the worst nightmare for the world if
Christ had unbound the full use of His divinity and
unbound Himself from the cross. What His opponents
didn’t realize, and didn’t want to see, was that precisely
in His crucified weakness and tenacious unwillingness to
jump down off the cross was His sacrifice for the world
made complete. He bound Himself to the cross and in that
He sought to bind us to Him. He is most fully God for us as
the Crucified One.

The apostle Paul sounds too narrow, too fanatical
because he says so bluntly, “We preach Christ crucified.”
Can’t there be something else? Can’t there be something
warmer and cuddlier? I doubt that there is a “Precious
Moments” crucifixion figurine for my grandchildren’s
rooms. The crucifixion remains a stubborn fact that the
Church may not, cannot, bypass. The crucifix belongs
imprinted on every heart.
It is ironic that the narrower the point under the cross the
more there is to experience of God’s compassion in Christ.
The more completely we focus on Christ and His cross the
more rich and broad our experience of the grace of God.
When the Church proclaims the narrow message of

Convention Sermons

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2023 (68TH) LCMS CONVENTION | 79