See His Cross! Glory Be to Jesus!

John 17:1 After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: "Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. ² For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. ³ Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. ⁴ I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. ⁵ And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

The Medal of Honor is the highest honor a member of the American armed services can receive. Some medals are awarded posthumously because the service members died on the field of battle during their acts of courage. Those awarded the glory of such a distinction went beyond the call of duty to save their comrades and advance the military objective of their units. Their stories are preserved as an inspiration to others, including future generations. Such honor, such glory!

We have come here into this house of worship to hear a story of unbelievable courage on a different kind of battlefield. Jesus suffered, died, and rose again in order to rescue all of humanity. The story of his cross brings us comfort and encouragement in our own battles with sin, death, and hell.

Jesus was sent to earth with a mission. Even from the beginning it was clear. When the angel appeared to Joseph and explained Mary’s pregnancy, the angel said, “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Mt 1:21). Then at the birth of Jesus, the glory of the Lord broke into the Bethlehem night and the angel left no doubt about what had just happened: “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord” (Lk 2:11).

Of course, even before Jesus came, the mission of this baby was clear to anyone reading the Scriptures. God had said that a virgin would give birth to a son and his name would be Immanuel, which means “God with us.” His purpose was to preach the good news, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim freedom, and comfort those who mourn (Isa 61:1,2). All the sacrifices of the Old Testament law pointed not only to his coming but also to the bloody end of his mission. He would be sacrificed as the Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world, just as John the Baptist had also announced.

All of that is precisely what Jesus did. He spent his ministry proclaiming the gospel, healing the sick, and even raising the dead. But the final chapter of his mission was in Jerusalem. He had told his disciples of these events before they happened. And even if they did not fully understand, Jesus saw his mission clearly. When he prayed to his heavenly Father, “Glorify your Son,” he was ready to embrace his cross and all that it meant—the suffering, the abuse, the ridicule, and his death. While on the cross just before his death, Jesus announced, “It is finished” (Jn 19:30). All that God had planned for his Son to suffer and endure was complete. His resurrection three days later was a glorious confirmation of his mission. Glory be to Jesus! He has completed his mission.

No medal could adequately honor Jesus for what he has done. He has rescued us by his cross. We were born in sin and by nature are captives of sin and death. It is as Jesus said, “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (Jn 8:34). Our lives are broken by the oppression of guilt and sorrow. We mourn life’s tragedies and become brokenhearted at what we must endure here. The world might offer us some pleasures, and we might even revel in those pleasures: sexual immorality, selfish ambition, drunkenness, and a host of other vices. But our pleasure changes nothing. We cannot change our situation. All we might do is to make life a little more comfortable, but guilt and death remain.

Jesus has set us free. He suffered for our sins; we are forgiven because of his cross. That was God’s plan from the beginning. Glory be to Jesus! What we could not do, he did. We did not and could not deserve any of the blessings. They were given to us by grace through the cross of Christ. Jesus has completed his mission. He came to preach the good news, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim freedom, and comfort those who mourn. He has finished that task. Praise him for his efforts for you. Glory be to Jesus! As we focus on his cross, we have one more blessing to consider.

God has not hidden the result of sin from us. We experience its cruel force as we see family members breathe their last and then disappear into their graves. We know that we too will come to that end. Not only does God remind us of sin and death with each edition of the obituaries, he has also clearly said, “The wages of sin is death” (Ro 6:23). Death is the one constant in human history. We come here, we live, and we die. You can’t change that. I can’t change that. No leader, except one, has changed the formula. Muhammad, Confucius, Buddha, Lenin, Washington, and Lincoln were all great leaders, but they have not altered God’s announcement, “The wages of sin is death.” It’s worse than the obituary pages because God reminds us that the death he speaks about is eternal separation from him and the blessings of heaven.

The cross of Jesus has changed that forever. What wonderful news we find in the cross of Christ! God’s Word says, “The blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin” (1 Jn 1:7). The cross of Jesus brings justification—a declaration that we are innocent and forgiven. All are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood” (Ro 3:24,25). Glory be to Jesus! We stand acquitted before the court of God’s justice.

Is it too much to believe that with the forgiveness of sins also comes life? That’s also what God says. Since the wages of sin is death, “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Ro 6:23). Eternal life is our gift of grace through the cross of Jesus. We are encouraged to see his cross and raise our voices in praise! Glory be to Jesus!

Yes, eternal life is yours through the cross of Christ. Your sins are forgiven, and Jesus promises you life, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). You know that passage. How often it seems to recede into the background when we experience life’s tragedies. When we sense our own aging process and come to the realization that we are no better than any other human being, we need to see the cross of Jesus. We will die. We will shed this corrupt flesh. Yet we shall live. We will even arise with glorified bodies, no longer handicapped by the corruption of sin. So Jesus, who died and rose again, says, “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies” (Jn 11:25). The mission of Jesus was to die for our sins and rise again. He finished his mission. Glory be to Jesus!

Let’s not forget who Jesus is. He is the Lord of glory from eternity. We confess in the Nicene Creed that he is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” Jesus himself claims he is the Lord of glory from eternity. In the prayer in our reading, he says, “Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.” What a claim! Before Adam and Eve, Jesus had glory with his Father. Yes, he is God. He also claimed that he should be honored as God. He said clearly that “all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him” (Jn 5:23).

There were glimpses of that eternal glory while Jesus was here on earth. His miracles demonstrated that he was certainly more than just a great teacher. He took Peter, James, and John to a mountaintop and met with Moses and Elijah. On that transfiguration mount, they saw more than just a human teacher. They saw that “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light” (Mt 17:2). Most of the time his glory and majesty were hidden, but they were hidden only so that he could accomplish his mission.

When we see the cross of Jesus, we should remember that there too he hid his eternal glory. He appeared as a helpless victim executed at the hands of Roman soldiers. No one could see eternal glory in a bloody man accused of being a traitor to Rome, condemned unjustly, and crucified. Yet, at the death of Jesus, one of those Romans was moved to confess, “Surely he was the Son of God!” (Mt 27:54). That Roman did not see the eternal majesty and glory of Jesus, but he saw the cross, endured the darkness of Good Friday, and felt the earthquake at the death of Jesus.

The glory of Jesus is his cross. It’s still hidden from the world around us. The world wants pizzazz, celebration, lights, awards, and glitz. The lowly cross seems out of place. I think sometimes that even we are tempted to minimize the cross of Jesus. We think that the church should be prominent and should influence society and the world. We are at times disappointed by the way the visible church today is despised and even persecuted in our world. Ridicule and disgrace are the daily lot of Christianity, rather than acclaim, glory, and honor. We may be tempted to abandon the disgrace of the cross and its hidden glory.

But see the cross of Jesus clearly. This world will all disappear. Satan even tempted Jesus with “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (Mt 4:8). But Jesus resisted because he knew that all those kingdoms and their glory were already his. He knew they would soon be gone. All the fame, power, influence, and importance of those nations and people would be gone except in the history books and the broken monuments left behind. That stark reality is true even in our own lives. All we count today as our accomplishments, prize possessions, glory, and fame will disappear.

Jesus is the eternal Son of God. He came to claim you for his eternal kingdom. He humbled himself to accomplish his mission. His lowly bloodstained cross is your hope for life beyond the dusty history books and the crumbling monuments of great civilizations. He wants you with him eternally, and he came to redeem you for his kingdom. Remember that he has eternal glory—a glory he had before the world began. When the last page of this world’s history is written, he will still be here. He tells us that he will come in glory on the clouds of heaven to claim us from our graves and from this world of sorrow and misery. Then he will welcome us to heaven where we shall sing, “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!” (Rev 5:12). For now let us see his cross clearly and praise him. Glory be to Jesus! Amen.