So here we are gazing at the Easter cross; the heart of Christian faith, indeed the heart of history; as Paul says, what’s of very first importance for us to grasp is what it means that `Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures` (1 Cor 15:3). The cross is so rich and profound that we need to keep coming back to it in communion, in the Lord’s supper. It’s the ultimate revelation of God, that we can (and must!) turn into grateful worship…
Revelation of God? Yes! First, it fuels us to worship God because he is utterly good; so good, so utterly pure and just (see Rom 3:28), so undilutedly holy, that he will never cheat, will never bend the rules, even if the consequence is utter agony for himself. Here too we see what the cross says about the universe: we’re used to the physical laws’ reliability, but the cross shows us this universe is made by a holy God and so that reliability extends to right and wrong too; God is not a mere Santa Claus, he takes the right and wrong in the world – and in my life – utterly seriously.
Thus what I do genuinely matters – my pride, my greed, my lust, my meanness, my dishonesty, my anger… If we lose this vital awareness we’ll start to do what’s unloving or impure and think it doesn’t matter. (Which in the end means, of course, that we don’t matter either.) Child abuse or torture or mass murder are not just unpleasant, or disgusting, they’re genuinely wrong, evil. But if I betray someone close to me, or I lie, or I allow myself to be persistently mean to workmates, parents or siblings, that too is wrong, evil. And this has consequences. The sense of lostness, alienation, homelessness we sometimes feel is reality, and we need to listen to it, not ignore it, just as ignoring a physical pain may mean we ignore a growing cancer until it’s too late. The cross reminds me that my sin determines where I stand in relation to the Maker of the universe (Rom 3:23); that we’ve alienated ourselves from God by the things we’ve done, separated ourselves from God who ultimately is the source of all life, all love, all joy. So if we lack his presence and loving power in our relationships now, too many of them won’t quite work. And more than that, we’ve never known undiluted love in this world; one day, if we are God’s, we will; but to stay separate from God who is the source of all love will put that forever out of reach. The cross reminds us that because right and wrong matter enormously; my sin, our sin, has a penalty (of eternal death, Rom 6:23), and that penalty has to be paid. But now we start to see what else the cross tells us about God: indeed we worship God because he is utterly good and holy and he never bends the rules; but, amazingly, in his astonishing goodness he took that entire penalty on himself to bring us back to himself, even if it meant Christ dying in incredible agony. This demonstrates utter integrity, utter uncompromising holiness…
So the cross equips us to worship because it shows us how good and holy God is – and then alongside that (and what a wondrous combination!), it shows us how utterly loving God is, how much he is willing to pour out his love, how much he loves us, even us. The cross is the very definition and example (for us and for our own lives) of what love means: `This is love`, writes apostle John, `not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins` (1 John 4:10). It shows how he loves us so hugely that he rescued us even at enormous cost; even if as a result the cosmos was disrupted and the eternal Trinity was ripped apart on Calvary. Surely God knows what it is to suffer, and he shares that suffering with us. It’s said that `Only the wounded physician can heal`; our incredibly humble God loved us so much that he came right to the bottom of the pit to rescue us – even those of us who didn’t care about him at all. (See Rom 5:7-8.) He loved us that much!
And then the cross also teaches us so much about ourselves. Again there are at least two crucial things here. First, it shows us how very lost we were, how very much we needed to be forgiven; again, so very lost that God had to rescue us, even at such huge cost to himself. When we see Christ on the cross screaming `My God, my God, why have you forsaken me` – separated as he was from his Father who is the source of all life, cut off therefore from all love and all joy because God is the source of all these – crying out like that on the cross as he chose to pay for our sin for us; that’s how enormous our need was, how very, very lost we were.
(And this is an example of how our apologetics must whenever possible build on `Christ and him crucified`. So our friends may ask: If I’m basically good, surely that will be enough to get me to heaven?; or, Surely what other religions provide is equally sufficient/good? Could something else not suffice?… And the answer is clearly no, these things cannot have been sufficient if Jesus had literally to go through hell for us like this. Clearly there was, could be, no other way. Our situation was so serious, the consequences of our sin and wilful independence so very major, that God had to rescue us this way, at this stupendous cost to himself…. Or again we may be asked, How could God allow so much suffering in this world? And the Bible teaches no easy answers to this; indeed what it shows us at the heart of Christian faith is a Man on a cross shouting, ‘My God, my God, why?’ Revelation 5 and 6 likewise take us to the cross: we read there of a ‘sealed book’ of human suffering, of war, famine, imperialism, economic injustice, disease and religious persecution: and we’re shown that it’s a `book` only Christ can read, something only Christ can comprehend, ‘because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God’ (Rev 5:9). Since the start of history we’ve insisted on running our own world, generation after generation, demanding our autonomy rather than submitting to God’s reign; our world has been wrecked as a result, and we haven’t the power to put it right. Christ’s crucifixion was God’s astonishingly loving response: Jesus took human pain totally seriously, went to the bottom of the pit of human suffering, dealt with the guilt and power and pollution of sin, rendered powerless the demonic powers, opened the way through death. He alone went to the utter heart of the darkness; and he alone sees and understands all our suffering.)
But alongside this revelation of how very lost we were, how great was our need, is this: at the cross we learn too just how enormously we are loved – unreservedly, every single one of us. Do we doubt our value? We each matter so very much that God himself came and rescued us, and died screaming to bring us back to himself. Can we be loved? Oh yes, we can, and we surely are; to this colossal extent! Here surely is something incredibly healing; and wonderful fuel for our worship!
And once we see all this, it’s not surprising that the cross was not the end but the Beginning. The cross is the absolutely essential gateway to life; once the penalty for our sins was paid, the barrier between us and God was gone, God loves to pour out his goodness on us unstintingly. The cross is a colossal gateway to colossal life. Until we come to the cross we are separated from God, disastrously, and in the most vital sense we don’t have life; but once we come to the cross, in repentance and in faith, there is `peace with God` (Rom 5:1); and longterm, an unimaginable amount of his goodness and his love and his undiluted joy follow for us.…
So what? So much flows from this, as we’ll recall next time…!
