Sermon for Good Friday (April 3, 2015): The Fruit of the Spirit: Self-Control

            Beloved in Christ, we have been considering the fruit of the Spirit this Lenten season. As we have been looking at each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit, we have seen how it was most visible in the life and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is no less true of the last aspect, which we explore tonight: self-control. Christ exhibited this virtue in a way that no other person has ever done before or after.

            First of all, there is the fact that He allowed Himself to be crucified—and stayed on the cross. Now you and I have a hard time following through and completing difficult tasks. Sometimes we are able to stick with it and get everything finished. Other times we get distracted or frustrated or bored or tired and give up. We’ve all had those occasions when we’ve undertaken a major project and vowed that we would complete it all in one day. We work for several hours and realize that it is bigger than we had imagined. And we may just give up and say that we’ll complete the task the next day or sometime in the future—and then we never get around to it. But that is not what Christ did.

            He could have said, “It’s not worth it” and walked away from the cross. He could have said, “This is more than I had bargained for.” He could have pulled rank, using His divine nature to loosen Himself from the cross, scatter the Roman soldiers, and smite all who had wrongly condemned Him or mocked Him. But He didn’t use His divine nature to free Himself from the pain. Instead He joined His divine nature with His human nature so that it intensified what He was going through infinitely. Had He suffered as one more human being, He could have saved one person. But because He suffered as true God and true Man, joined together for all time, He was able to suffer on behalf of all people and save all.

            That took a high degree of self-control. It’s one thing to use your self-control to keep soldiering on when times are tough. It’s quite another thing to use that self-control to ratchet up the intensity of the task. And yet that is what our Lord did.

            Next, we see our Lord’s self-control in the way that He forgave other people, especially the way He forgave those who were crucifying Him. Again, think of how you and I would have handled the situation. We would have said, “Fine. I’ve got to do this painful task because it will help humanity. But I won’t forget the people who were responsible for doing this. Those Roman soldiers will regret the way they’ve had their fun with me, scourging me and mocking me with a crown of thorns. They’ll be sorry they ever drove a nail in my hands or gambled over my clothing. And I won’t forget the lying witnesses, the high priests, the Sanhedrin, Pontius Pilate, and all the rest.” You see, we may do what we are ordered to do, but we aren’t going to let off the hook those who made our life miserable.

            And yet what does Christ do? He forgives even the people who had carried out the execution. He charitably said of them, “They know not what they do.” They weren’t complete innocents. They knew that they were being needlessly cruel, but that’s how they always behaved. They didn’t understand that He wasn’t a person they should treat in that way. And so He asked His Father to forgive them. He showed self-control rather than the natural anger we would have shown.

            Another way He showed self-control was that He refrained from drinking the sour wine until the very end. The soldiers had taken vinegary wine and added myrrh as a pain-reliever. However, Jesus had refused to drink it. He would bear the full pain of the cross. If He had deadened the pain somewhat, He might have left some people out when He was atoning for the world’s sins. And He didn’t want that.

            We are told that the fifth word our Lord spoke was “I thirst.” But note when our Lord said those words: He said it when He “[knew] that all was now finished.” Not until the job was finished would He ask for a little relief from His pain and thirst. Also note why He said it: “to fulfill the Scripture.” Psalm 69, which had predicted Christ’s crucifixion, had said, “When I was thirsty, [My enemies] gave Me vinegar to drink.” If He had had to forego that drink of vinegar and myrrh, He could have. But the psalm had predicted that His enemies would “poison [His] food and…give [Him] vinegar to drink.” And thus He allowed Himself to drink that wretchedly spiked potion.

            In one last way He showed self-control, and that is how He addressed His Father. You would have expected Him to have railed against Him, complaining how unfair it was for Him to bear mankind’s burden. We are tempted to curse God when life becomes hard. At the very least we want to mutter and complain. But Christ did not.

            Now He did say, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” At first glance, that sentence appears to be a complaint against God. But our Lord was quoting the opening lines of Psalm 22, and He expected everyone who heard Him quote the Psalm to think not only of the first verse but of the entire Psalm. You see, in biblical days people assumed that you knew the whole context and were thinking about more than just the line quoted. For us it is different. We quote lines from movies all the time, completely oblivious to their context. If the jingle fits, we’ll use it. But that’s not how people in Christ’s day would have handled quotations, especially from the Scripture. They would think not just about the words being quoted, but also the broader context.

            And the Psalm that Christ quoted—Psalm 22—poignantly sets forth His suffering and death, but also proclaims the resurrection from the dead that would follow. Thus, when our Lord quoted the first verse, He was showing His confidence in His Father in the end to deliver Him from the grave. He professed His willingness to continue to undergo all that He was experiencing because He knew that it would end well for Him. Although He would naturally feel abandoned by His Father, He knew that that was not the end of the matter. For even though He was experiencing the full fury of His Father’s wrath, that would come to an end and He would be vindicated by being raised from the dead.

            That is why He was also able to pray later on that day, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” He did not have control over His own life, but He exercised self-control so that the power would really rest in His Father’s hands.

            I have spoken quite a bit about Christ and the way that He exercised self-control. Well, what about us? If I’m going to talk about self-control, shouldn’t I talk at great length about how we should resolve to go out and do likewise? Shouldn’t the whole point of this sermon—indeed, of the whole Lenten season—be to motivate us to be better people? And yet, every time that I have talked about us in this sermon, I have contrasted how weak our self-control is compared with the vigor of our Lord’s self-control on the cross. Shouldn’t I praise us more or at least say that we can approach His level of virtue? Isn’t that what Christianity is all about?

            No. It is not. I certainly want you to grow in all the virtues. I certainly want you to bear the fruit of the Spirit in you. I want you to excel as disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. But never, ever think that you can attain the same level of virtue as our Lord Jesus Christ. Never, ever think that you can become so virtuous that you will no longer need a Savior. Jesus remains the only completely holy person ever to have lived. Even on the best of our days we show far less self-control than He did on one of His most relaxed days. And we certainly could never imitate the self-control He showed on the cross.

            But that is all right. Good Friday is all about Jesus and what He has done and the virtue that He has shown. It’s not really about us—or it’s about us in the sense that we are receiving His good gifts. Nonetheless, confessing our feebleness and having received the benefits of His self-control and of all His other virtues, let us be moved to grow in holiness of life and imitate Him as best we can. Let that happen not because we will ever be our own Saviors, but rather because we hold our Savior dear. In Jesus’ name. Amen.