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Following the pattern established in the Advent series of sermons, Robert Thomas devoted the first Lenten sermon to the theme that he and his three colleagues intended to develop during the following season. He stated that at a time when many peoples’ reflections alternate “between consideration of events in Christ’s life and events in our own” the Scripture readings and the sermons would “encourage introspection in the light of the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord.” He referred to recent “gospels of modernity” and their teachings that science or education could resolve the problems of life. In contrast, he continued, poets, dramatists, disillusioned philosophers, other writers, and theologians were “making common cause against the sentimentality of former generations, vigorously attacking that delusive optimism which held that goodness always triumphs.” After citing disorders of the time—urban crisis, the Vietnam war, and hordes of refugees—he referred to Nathan Scott’s 1957 book, The Tragic Vision and the Christian Faith, declaring that all of us are displaced persons “who cannot find anywhere a satisfactory dwelling place in the world of our time.”

Acknowledging that “the final accent of the Christian proclamation is not on tragedy, but on hope and victory,” he declared that this hope depends, in part, upon our facing seriously “the passion of Jesus, the pain and anguish of our Lord, its evidence of the God who himself suffers and thereby accomplishes our deliverance.” Thomas described Jesus’ final trip to Jerusalem as the turning point of his life’s work and the beginning of a series of events that would result in his crucifixion a few days later. It would be his final effort to persuade his followers and the crowds that his mission was religious, not political. Jesus came proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God, but his disciples and the crowds did not understand his message or realize that he faced the probability of death. He wept tears of tragedy, not for himself, but for them. The sermon concluded with a declaration that God sees the cities of our time much as Jesus saw Jerusalem, as places marked by materialism, destructive forces, and suffering. “Christ still weeps, and still hopes, and God still intends the Kingdom.”

The second Lenten sermon, “His Hand with Mine on the Table,” developed one of the factors that helped to account for the tragedy described in the introductory sermon: the conflict between two powerful forces that have always been present in human life. The more obvious of the two is the “will to achieve, to become a success, to gain wealth and power, to seek one’s ‘place in the sun.’” The other powerful force is clearly seen in Jesus “who went about ‘doing good,’ who seemed to care little for his own physical needs and advised his disciples to give their attention to other matters first.”

As the dialogue partner in this sermon, I summarized the history of Israel, beginning with David’s reign, and pointed to the contrast between “the kingly messiah” who would lead the Jewish people to military victory and political power and “the Suffering Servant” who would be “despised and rejected by the people, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, wounded, bruised, oppressed, rejected—and all for the sake of the people whom he came to serve but who turned away from him.”

At Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, this conflict and the seemingly inevitable tragedy that would soon occur were the dominant factors in his heart and mind. During the meal’s ceremonies with bread and wine, Jesus added a new meaning when he declared that this broken bread was his body. I then referred to “two elements—disaster and hope—that must be present for an event to be tragic,” and supported this idea with references to contemporary writer Charles G. Bell4 and classic authors, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Both factors were present as Jesus and his closest friends participated in that last meal together.

Thomas concluded the sermon by asserting that at the table “the Suffering Servant confronts his disciples, and those who are considering discipleship, with the fundamental choice as to life’s dominant motif—whether or not it will be the servant stance for us. The crisis of his decision is reconstituted in this room, his hand with ours on the table, his life calling ours to the way of servanthood.” On this Sunday the liturgical force of the sermon-sacramental supper sequence was especially clear. The word proclaimed brought worshipers to the table where we encountered once again the Word made flesh (see John 1:14).

Eugene Kidder and Robert Thomas devoted the third Lenten sermon, “In Anguish of Spirit, He Prayed,” to what happened in the garden of Gethsemane where Jesus and his disciples went to pray after finishing their somber meal. “Gethsemane closes the door on any spiritualizing of Jesus or our faith in him,” Kidder stated. “No more human picture of him is found in the New Testament. The valiancy of his work of mission and the agony of his suffering were so bound together in Jesus as to be almost indistinguishable. In Gethsemane these realities were expanded to ultimate proportions and Jesus was stretched to the breaking point. That event, written upon the face of history, epitomizes the deepest suffering of all who live in the spirit.”

As they concluded the sermon, both preachers referred to the sleeping disciples, and to other followers who were not there, who seemed to have abandoned Jesus in the hour of his deepest grief. All that can be said of them was “that they misunderstood who he was and the nature of his mission; only that they failed him when he needed them most.” Kidder then spoke in their defense. Soon thereafter, they experienced the resurrection and were the first to proclaim the good news. They carried the gospel across land and sea, and they organized the church. Thomas continued the recitation of their good work after the resurrection and concluded: “So anguish may turn to acceptance, and failure of discipleship may be the prelude to commitment, and the purposes of God redeemed from the worst work of the enemies of the Son of Man.”

In the fourth sermon of the Lenten series, “His Teaching Is Causing Disaffection,” Thomas McCormick and Robert Thomas interpreted the scriptural accounts of the public trials that came next in the narrative of those fateful hours. As had been done in earlier sermons, they acknowledged that the biblical narratives differed in detail, but then identified what seemed to them to be the heart of the message. Both Jewish and Roman authorities were agreed: “His teaching is causing disaffection among the people all through Judea. It started from Galilee and has spread as far as this city” (Luke 23:5).

Thomas explained: “Disaffection is a strong word, describing a condition that autocrats in every age and place fear. It means an alienation from those in authority; at least a lack of affection or good will; at most a tendency toward hostility and ill will. From the point of view of those interested in protecting the status quo, maintaining the establishment, carrying on in the traditional ways, the disaffected are disloyal and apt to be dangerous or traitorous. They are the dangerous nonconformists who must be silenced or destroyed.” The two preachers alternated in illustrating ways that political and religious leaders are threatened in tragic periods of time. McCormick then referred to Christopher Frye’s description of Greek tragedy as “the catastrophe which occurs when the individual’s vision or value conflicts with the structures of society.”

In his conclusion, Thomas told the congregation that one reason for “struggles in the church of our time is the new insistence of its most committed leaders and members that the faith relate to the life of the world, that the church speak and act as its Lord, that it really become a servant people, that it turn from its temptation to accept the judgments of the world about its life and work and test its life and work by the revealing Word of God alone.”

The fifth sermon in the Lenten series bears the title “Do Not Weep for Me, Weep for Yourselves and Your Children.” Thomas reminded the congregation that the purpose of the Lenten series had been “to discover in the major events in the last period of Jesus’ life the meanings that are significant for our time in the world’s history. . . . Our commitment is to the living God, made known in the Christ-event; not only in an age long past, but in this nation now.” After summarizing evidences of “growing frustration” throughout the nation, he declared that there was “lack of leadership to foster change and unwillingness on the part of the majority to make the sacrifices necessary to the achievement of justice. It is in this kind of world, he continued, “where the skein of tragedy is woven through the texture of man’s life, that we have to measure the meaning and significance of Jesus’ life, answer the questions about the nature of Ultimate Reality, and make the fundamental choices and commitments regarding our own lives.”

Thomas devoted the central portion of the sermon to a description of the cruel character of Jesus’ final hours and his intense suffering. He stressed the fact that neither the gospel writers nor Jesus himself emphasized the physical suffering. The center of what they remembered and proclaimed was “a precise recollection of his spiritual agony, the sense of being abandoned by God. They did not seek pity for Jesus and made it clear he did not seek it for himself.” He wept because the people whom he came to lead toward a new way of living “in the kingdom’s cause” would not change “from the pursuit of pleasure or material things or nationalistic glory in true repentance to the God of love and grace.” In a long paragraph, Thomas listed the many tragic circumstances of life in the world right then and concluded this recitation. “We weep for all the destructiveness and inability to come to grips with reality that is around us [and] for all the tragic limitations and failures that keep the world from becoming the kingdom of God’s love.”

On Thursday evening of that week—Maundy Thursday, April 4, 1968—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Three days later, the congregation gathered to celebrate Palm Sunday. The service for that day had already been planned to feature Cantata No. 4 by J. S. Bach, “Christ Lay in Death’s Dark Prison,” sung by the church’s choir with organ and orchestra, to take the place of the sermon. Instead of listening to the gospel word proclaimed from the pulpit, the congregation joined the choir in singing stanzas one and seven of the final hymn in the cantata (with the choir singing stanzas two through six). By singing these words, the worshipers became immediate participants in that day’s dialogue on the incarnation.

Christ lay by death enshrouded, from mortal sin to save us;

He is again arisen, Eternal life he gave us.

So now let us joyful be, and magnify him thankfully. Hallelujah!

To celebrate this Holy Feast in reverence united.

The evil leaven works no more. Thy Word its curse has righted.

Christ himself the Feast will be and nourish our souls

That we by faith may gain salvation. Hallelujah!

On Easter Sunday, the final challenge for the Lenten series of sermons was to proclaim the message of new life in a manner convincing enough to counteract the somber character of the five sermons that had explored the many-faceted suffering that Jesus experienced during his final week. The tragedy of Jesus’ death and burial had an epilogue, Thomas declared to his congregation. The disciples emerged from hiding, rejoicing in a mighty faith and new hope, and started a movement that “laid hold of multitudes and . . . affected the transformation of human hearts” around the world. The one explanation that seemed adequate was the one given in Acts 2:24. “God raised him to life again, setting him free from the pangs of death, because it could not be that death should keep him in its grip.” In answer to the idea that the accounts of resurrection were illusion or deliberate deception, he quoted Jesus scholar Joseph Klausner: “It is impossible to suppose that there was any conscious deception: the nineteen hundred years’ faith of millions is not founded on deception.”

The question that Thomas faced was how the people of our time were to understand the resurrection. Part of his answer was to call attention to the inconsistencies and problems in the gospel record itself, which enabled him to state that in the disciples’ time and in ours “the resurrection faith must be distinguished from the gospel stories about it.” After noting variant ideas in biblical writings, including those of Paul and concluding with John, he concluded: “Jesus had come back to trusting hearts as the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Helper, the Counselor, guiding them into the full truth.” The idea that “Jesus’ resurrection was a physical re-animation played only a very brief role in the serious thinking of the ancient church.” Instead, it was an idea declared in the First Epistle of John, describing “this return as an inward, spiritual force that proved to be indominable.”

Referring to the conclusion reached by one of “the great modern historians of the church,” Thomas declared that there “can be no doubt that Christians through the ages have been honest in reporting an experience of ‘being with a Presence’ associated with the historical Jesus.” He called attention to Martin Luther King Jr. as an example of a person whose life and ministry were sustained by this faith. “What we declare in this terrible time,” Thomas continued, “is that the emancipating event has occurred; that Christ has infinite significance both for the individual destiny and for the future of the human race.” In answer to many who during the past ten days had been asking if life can have any meaning, Thomas concluded the sermon with a paragraph, delivered with the full force of his personal and rhetorical power.

“That is our faith; that is our testimony this Easter day. We are not alone in an uncaring universe—alone with our sins and follies, our loss and grief and pain, our guns with telescopic sights, our unbridled hates and unreasonable judgments, our racism and nuclear power, our divided church with its traditional forms and reluctance to serve in the world. We are in the hands of God and God is the one ‘who raised Christ Jesus from the dead.’”