On Monday night I watched part of Australian Story on the TV. It was about a young man who had been drinking heavily and who had then driven his car and had an accident. In the accident another young man had been killed, and his fiancé severely injured. The young man himself was not injured. The story was about the effect this terrible accident had on his life and the lives of those around him as well as the innocent victims of the accident.
It seemed to me that this could be a parable of the crucifixion. Both the accident and the crucifixion are terrible things, and both took the lives of innocent people. The effects on other people involved have been very deep indeed.
The young driver was drunk, there is no doubt; his blood alcohol reading was 0.203%, which is a huge reading. He was obviously one who drank too much very frequently. We could say that he was not in control of his life; instead, his addiction controlled him and his life. It certainly caused him to be driving in a careless way when he had the accident. That young driver is like so many people, who are controlled by their desires and the things around them. They imagine that they are free, but really they are slaves to destructive forces, which we call sin. St Paul says frequently that worldly people are slaves of sin.
The victim of the crash we can compare with Christ Jesus. We can do that because it was not his sin that caused his death, it was the drunkenness of the young driver which led to his death. The victim, like Christ, had done nothing to deserve death, but both he and Christ found themselves the focus of someone else's stupidity and sin.
Of course the victim was not Christ Jesus, he was young man like the driver; but then, Christ Jesus is a human being like all of us, living the life of a person of his time and place, like we do, and like the driver and the victim were.
Let's look now at what happened after the accident. The young driver was utterly horrified by what he had done. This was the first major accident he had and he had killed someone. He wished it hadn't happened, he wished he could turn back the clock, but he couldn't, he had to face up the consequences of his actions.
He did, and he decided to tell other people about the horror of those events. He would speak to other young drink drivers, and share his experience with them, so that they, too, would no longer drink and drive. He became very successful at this job, because he was in the same age group as the young people he was talking to. For the first time, they were able to see the foolishness of their lives. Lectures and prison sentences did not convince them, but to sit in the same room and hear how an ordinary person could become a killer convinced them to change their drinking habits as well. That young driver became an evangelist for safe drinking habits.
Today we have heard about a 30 year old man who died on the cross as a result of our actions. It is hard to understand that, but we believe it is true. Christ died because of our foolish actions and the foolish actions of all creation. It was our drunken driving that put Christ on the cross. But there is a huge difference between the drunken crash and the crucifixion, and there is a huge difference between the young victim and Jesus.
The young victim died because he was in the wrong place and the wrong time. Jesus died because he chose to be in that place at that time. It is as if Jesus stood in the middle of the road and said, "Friend, I love you dearly, and this crazy drink driving is going to kill you one day. I love you so much that I will let myself be killed for your sake. The consequence of your blind misbehaviour will be my death, not yours. Maybe this will shock you out of your destructive lifestyle."
The other big difference is that Jesus' death means forgiveness of sins. The road victim's fiancé declared that she would never forgive the drunken driver, and the drunken driver is constantly haunted by guilt and self-blame. Not only that, when his case comes to court, he is liable for a twenty year jail sentence. On the other hand, Jesus, who was killed by our mistakes, got rid of those mistakes for ever. There are no unforgiving relatives, there is no jail sentence ahead, God has said that Jesus' death cancels all our debts and all our misdeeds.
What, then, is to be our response? I suggest we should be like the young driver, and make some radical changes to our lives. The young driver repented of his drink driving, which means he will never do it again. More than that, he wanted others to learn by his experience, so that it would never happen to them.
Our response could be the same. There are behaviour and attitudes which we have which we should really repent of, and never do again. The young man repented out of guilt and the threat of punishment, we repent because God loves us and wants us to be perfect. Jesus died out of love for us. It was no mere accident like a drunken car crash. Jesus knew what he was doing, he had to stand in the way, between us and our sinfulness. There was no other way to stop us.
We are here today to think about this amazing death, this dreadful and tragic death. The story I have used is only one way of thinking about he crucifixion. My story can never fully explain the depth of God's love for us, or how our sins are forgiven. I know that Christ died for the sins of the whole world, and that if my sins are forgiven, I must do everything in my power and the power given to me by God's Holy Spirit to avoid anything which would make his death worse.