contradictions of the cross

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S EAST BENTLEIGH

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT

(SUNDAY 28^th February) 1988

 

 

We move today to what we might call our second Station of the Cross, our second reflection of the significance of Lent. Today we have to reflect on the moment that the bloodied Jesus lifts the beam of the ruthless, vicious instrument of his imminent death, the cross.

But I want to take us our text this morning a verse from our Old Testament reading.

My son, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.

For I believe there is a fundamental link between the vivid story of Abraham and Isaac, which has so tantalised artists and authors down through history, and the events of the cross on the skull-shaped hill beyond Jerusalem, Golgotha.

There are many links of imagery, links that fascinated the theologians of the early church – for example the connections between the young Isaac struggling under the weight of wood that was to be the instrument of his sacrifice and Christ struggling beneath the weight of his cross. But these are, I believe, less important than the connection between what we might imagine to be the feelings of the father, Abraham, as he leads his son to apparently inevitable death and the feelings of God the Father as Jesus the Son heads to his own lonely death.

Imagine the pain in the heart of the man Abraham as he spoke those words to his puzzled son. Imagine the desperate hope in his heart that somehow all this would work out alright and the boy’s life could be miraculously spared.

For God the father of the son Jesus there can be no such hope. For Jesus there can be no other culmination of a life spent exposing the civil and religious hypocrisy of his time. The Son Jesus is, of course, the lamb as well, and there can be no other option.

With this in mind let us return to the moment that Jesus lifts up his cross and sets out for the place of crucifixion.

Pilate, the bewildered consul, has bowed to the demands of the raucous majority who have cried out for the blood of Jesus. By bowing it to the wishes of the Pharisees he has averted a riot, yes he has also risked appearing to be a walk over for the whims and fancies of these strange and powerful religious leaders. And so, having quite literally washed his hands of the whole troublesome affair, he attempts one mast and puerile joke at the expense of the Jews. He places a sign at the head of the cross announcing,

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

 

He knew how scorned the town of Nazareth was, making his jocular claim almost a contradiction of itself,

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? (John 1:36).

 

Perhaps on the other hand he simply saw how tragic and deflated this man now seemed to be, this once charismatic leader, this tall poppy, now bruised, bleeding and with seemingly no remaining followers. Or perhaps he saw this mocking gesture, as a way to end any militaristic dreams of a Jewish uprising against Rome. Here for all to see was the end of one pathetic specimen who had claimed to be the Messiah-King of the Jews.

Whatever Pilate saw before him,  we must ask ourselves the question, “So what?” Is this man now staggering out of the city of Jerusalem merely another humanitarian inspiration? Is this so-called King of the Jews merely a good man who held high ideals but who in the time of crisis was no more or less than a Mahatma Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, a Steve Biko? Is there a difference?

What is the meaning of the Cross?

There can be no doubt that in one very real sense there is no difference between Jesus, Ghandi, King and Biko. The deaths of all these men are testimony to the way in which the rich and powerful treat the powerless who dare to challenge power. Each man, Jesus, Ghandi, King and Biko, and countless others besides, is whether knowingly or otherwise participating in the concern of God “to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” But there is a fundamental difference, a difference ultimately discernible only by the eyes of faith.

For by faith we make the claim that the cross that Jesus carries out of the city of Jerusalem is not the final word in the relationship between Jesus and the world. It is not merely that the cause of Jesus continues after his death, as some theologians have been understood to claim, for if that were all there would again be no difference between Jesus on the one hand and Ghandi, King and Biko on the other.

The difference that we believe in faith is that the life of the very man Jesus continues, defeats death, and thereby pronounces a new word of liberation that is not merely political but is political as well as being far, far beyond the realms of politics. Christ then, as he takes up his cross, takes up not only the instrument of his death, but the instrument of God’s great irony, the instrument by which God transforms death into life.

Of this there can be no rational proof. It is only by faith that we can affirm the exciting belief that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God. But having made that leap in to the language and thought patterns of faith, we can then make the further affirmation that God makes himself known to humankind precisely and only in Jesus, and particularly in Jesus as revealed in the events of the cross which he is now taking up and carrying to the hill of crucifixion.

It is the Cross which stands at the heart of all that Jesus stands for, and it is the Cross which is the inevitable outcome of his teachings. It is then in the Cross that we find God revealing himself to us:

You do not know me, nor do you know my father. If you did know me, you would know my father also                                                                                 (John 8:19).

 

When we know and accept for ourselves Jesus and all the ramifications of the cross he is now carrying we accept the will and the love of the Father. While we may or may not affirm or continue the works of other great liberators of history without ultimately affecting our relationship with God, that is not the case with Jesus. By the cross we stand or fall.

The irony of the cross haunts human history. It is the utter reversal of the ways of the world. It is the absolute abnegation of power by the one who had access to absolute power.
                                                                (Richard Holloway, The Way of the Cross, 37)

Saint Paul puts this in another way.

While Jews look for miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, here are we preaching a crucified Christ, to the Jews an obstacle they cannot get over, to the pagans madness, but to those who have been called … a Christ who is the power and wisdom of God.
                                                                (1 Cor. 1: 22-24)

 

I wonder if Christians have ever really grasped this message, or whether the Cross is too stupid for us, too, to grasp?

The Cross can never be pretty. It can never be merely decorative. Although we used to speak of the comfortable words of Christ we must never understand the gospel as comfortable in the modern, lounge suite sense of the word. Christianity if it is to be Cross-centred, can never be a religion that leaves us secure in our existing state, but one that must constantly pummel and torment us into new stages of faith and humanness. The comfort that the Cross does provide is the mysterious truth that it is precisely in suffering that our God makes himself known. Where pain is there God is also.

And that is why I chose the verse from Genesis as my text. In fact the writers of that passage in Genesis were probably writing the story in order to persuade their people to turn away from human sacrifice to the less ghastly option of animal sacrifice. Yet there is nevertheless in the passage a powerful image of relevance for us. For the symbol of the steadfast, obedient, but inevitably suffering, grieving Abraham can stand for us as a reminder of the suffering, grieving God, Father, Son and Spirit, as Jesus picks up his cross and trudges towards the place of the skull.

There is of course more to the gospel than Good Friday, more to the gospel than the scandalous event we know as the Cross. But until we have grasped the terrifying concept that the Cross in all its bitter pain lies at the heart of our faith, until we have grasped the Cross, we cannot begin to experience the glorious resurrection that we celebrate at Easter and every time we participate together in the Eucharist.

Says Richard Holloway,

it is the weakness of God we see on the Cross, the weakness of God that reverses and contradicts the strength of the world.

Let us learn to take on our shoulders the contradictions of the Cross.