Sermon for Good Shepherd Granbury July 6 2008

The crowds were tired. It had been a long day, extraordinary even for one of the major imperial game days. The spectacle had begun in the Circus Maximus, ancient Rome’s horseracing track. In the morning there were the usual beast fights, where professional hunters dispatched ferocious lions and bears for the amusement of the crowd. The afternoon had featured gladiators, both in single combat to the death and in larger groups reenacting famous battles from the Roman past. During the lunch hour in between it was customary to stage the public execution of condemned criminals. And today the body count of Roman “justice” had been enormous.
This was Rome in 64 A.D., and the day’s events had been orchestrated by the Emperor Nero. But Nero had a public relations problem. Large sections of the city had recently burned, and the public had come to believe—perhaps correctly—that the emperor had ordered the setting of the fatal blaze himself in order to clear the ground for his grand, new royal palace—the Golden House. The ancient historian Tacitus tells us that in order to deflect this suspicion the emperor had selected a scapegoat to take the blame for the burning of Rome. Or rather, Nero had selected an entire community of scapegoats—the fledging Christian Church of the capital.Hundreds of Christians had been rounded up in a sweep of the city during the preceding weeks, and now they were being executed for arson. At today’s noontime public executions large numbers of these Christians, sheepskins draped over their shoulders, had been marched into the middle of the Circus Maximus. The Roman mob howled its approval as wild lions were loosed upon the convicts—a fitting punishment for the flock of Christos, a dead Jewish rebel against the empire whom the Christians knew as “the Good Shepherd.” But even though hundreds of the members of the Jesus cult had died in the arena that day, a sizeable number had been held in reserve for an even more impressive display of Roman vengeance that night.
Around dusk these surviving Christians were driven from their prison and each victim was forced to take up a wooden beam, very much like the one their Lord and Master had carried to Golgotha thirty years earlier. They carried their burdens through the streets of the city into the imperial gardens, where Nero awaited them along with the still blood-thirsty mob. They were then nailed to their crosses and raised up alongside the road that ran through the emperor’s gardens. In an ironic twist highlighting their alleged arson, the emperor ordered these crucified Christians to be set on fire while they were still alive. The light of those burning crosses illuminated Nero’s path as he drove a chariot through his pleasure garden that night. We will never know the number of these steadfast martyrs, but their courage still shines as beacon in our own times.
God alone knows what was in the hearts and minds of those early Christians as their captors lead them to crucifixion in 64 A.D., but it is likely that certain words of our Lord Jesus were uppermost in their minds: “whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” You and I must spiritualize these words in order to apply them in our lives. But the first generations of Christians lived them—literally taking up their own crosses and dying for Christ. But as they lost one life to the jaws of lions, the iron and wood of Roman crosses, and the searing pain of sacrificial fire, they found a new life of far greater value than the one ripped from them by Nero’s henchmen—eternal life with their Savior.
But surely the words of Jesus we have heard today were also very much on the martyrs’ minds: "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Even as those first Roman Christians shouldered the heavy beams of their crosses they knew deep in their hearts that Christ’s yoke was in truth easy and light and that under His yoke God’s people find rest for their souls. That is no doubt why early tradition records that many of these Roman martyrs went to their deaths singing and weeping for joy, enraptured in the peace that passes all understanding.
Yet how is this possible? The words we have heard this morning from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans give us a clue. No doubt the martyrs of Rome knew this letter well. It had actually been written to their community, after all, just a few years earlier. Here St. Paul tells us that, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. … To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” Notice the distinction the Apostle draws between “the mind set on the flesh” and “the mind set on the Spirit,” which he parallels in this passage to “the law at work in his members” and “the law of God” in which his mind delights. We all know the tension between these two, don’t we? The good that I want to do I don’t do, and that which I don’t want to do I actually do! St. Paul tells us that fallen man is “captive to the law of sin that dwells in [our bodily] members.” Left to our own devices we are slaves in our innermost being to sin and death. We are trapped. “O wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Paul cries as he reflects on our plight. But the Apostle simply cannot hold back in announcing our Liberator. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
This is why the martyrs of Rome marched to their deaths singing. This is why we have no stories from the ancient Church about jailbreaks of Christians who had been arrested by the imperial government. They may have been bound in Roman chains, but they had already been set free! The love of God which had burst into the world through the cross and empty tomb of Jesus Christ had freed them from “this body of death.” What could man do to them? Our brothers and sisters went to the lions and to their crosses with gentle and humble hearts, at peace in their souls now that Christ’s obedience had ended the war between the desires of the flesh and law of God’s Spirit. They had taken our Lord’s light yoke of service in God’s Kingdom upon their own shoulders and they carried His love out into a world that despised them. They were free men and free women now, empowered now by the Holy Spirit to do their Father’s will. They were free through God’s gracious gift of faith and they wanted their killers and those who cheered their deaths to be set free as well.
If you and I share the faith of these martyrs in our Lord Jesus Christ, my friends, we will also share their peace and their witness. “For those who are in Christ Jesus …the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set [us] free from the law of sin and of death.” That is as true of us as it was of them. But if we have been set free, we too should do everything in our power to see that freedom triumph everywhere around us. The entire created order pines with eager longing to know that freedom. Certainly every human being on earth needs to know it. You and I must tell our neighbors what God has done for them in Jesus Christ. We should show those around us by the quality of our lives what it means to be gentle and humble of heart, so that our world may see the peace that floods the souls of yokefellows in Christ Jesus and long to share in that blessedness. Our forebearers in faith lived out that call. May God give us the grace, as he did to the early Christians of Rome, to take our Savior’s yoke upon ourselves and carry it out into a world that desperately needs the peace that passes all understanding.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.