Series: The Cross

The Cross of Christ
Hosea 11:1-9; 1 Cor 2:1-5

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. …

I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. (1 Cor 2:1-3)

My friends

We have journeyed this Passion season by meditating on the Cross of Christ.

We have seen that neither in the New Testament, nor in the history of the church, we find a unified understanding of the Cross. There is not one understanding of the Cross, there is not one theory of the cross. There are as many understandings of the Cross as there are people who have been deeply touched by the grace of God.

With our thoughts and our words and our theories we are always limping behind. But it is part of our make-up that faith seeks words to communicate and to explain itself. The conscience and the mind need to collaborate to build a good foundation for our living and our dying.

Therefore we cannot be silent about the Cross, as we cannot be silent about God. The Cross is written into the very heart of God. And from there, in the power of the Spirit, it touches us. From God's heart it is written into our hearts – we speak of faith and baptism – and then as we in our different situations, our different cultures, our different needs, seek words for what God has done for, a rainbow of beautiful but very different colours emerge.

We have spoken of the cross:

As the climax and integration of Jesus' life.

The Cross has helped us to distinguish between the power of weakness and the weakness of power; between the foolishness of grace and the so-called wisdom of the world.

We have heard how the picture of Ransom was used to interpret the Cross as the foundation for freedom.

The metaphor of an atoning sacrifice has been used to describe the Cross as the freeing from guilt.

We saw how in Hellenistic Christianity the Crucified One was understood as victor over the estranging forces in the air.

And we have meditated upon the Cross as God's great act of love.

Now we need to bring ourselves into the story a little more. What does it mean for us today if we acknowledge, decide and confess with the apostle of old that ultimately we want "to know nothing … except Jesus Christ, and him crucified."

From the rainbow of grace I pick out three colours.

When Jesus hung on the Cross, the male disciples had fled, his women friends watched from afar, the whole nature seemed to mourn. Darkness covered the earth.

A picture of forlornness. Not only cosmic aloneness, but utter loneliness.

Had humanity gone too far in its selfishness and greed; in its unwillingness to change, in its national and religious pride?

The man who hung on the Cross had lived with others and for others. Reconciliation was his aim.

Reconciling people with their God.

Reconciling people with themselves (healing).

Reconciling people with each other, even including the stranger, the widow, the orphan – the "other".

But he was rejected. They conspired against him. He was opposed, betrayed, sentenced and executed.

No wonder that the early Christians retrieved word from the prophet to bring Jesus on the Cross and God together:

He was despised and rejected by others;

a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. (Isaiah 53:3)

Was that the end of God's mission to reconcile with God what belongs to God?

When the Fourth Evangelist climaxes his passion story with the exclamation "it is finished", then he did not mean that this is the end of reconciliation, but he saw the Cross as the fulfilment of reconciliation.

By raising the Jesus, who had no other passion than to reconcile people with each other, with themselves and with their God, from the dead, God declared that nothing, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God. We can't hear them enough, the words of the apostle:

… I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38f.)

By raising the forlorn Jesus, the victim of violence and greed, from the dead, God demonstrated that humanity will not succeed in its attempt to close the doors to and from heaven. God wrote reconciliation into the fabric of being.

How can we respond? We respond with thanksgiving and worship.

Now we need to recognize that one of the reasons, indeed the major reason why Jesus was opposed, betrayed, tortured and crucified, was his radical assertion that the welfare of the human being, indeed, of all human beings was paramount, and was not to be sacrificed at the altar of tradition and structures of power:

Jesus assumed authority over the institution of the Sabbath by healing a person on the Sabbath who had been sick for a long time and who could have waited for another 24 hours. "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath." (Mark 2:27)

Jesus criticised religious practices that divided and classified people, and he rejected the whole religious system of temple and cult that wanted to relate to God via liturgical niceties.

He forgave sins and healed people, assuming the function of priest and prophet.

He assumed the radicality of grace by announcing God's blessings on the down and out and where that blessing had arrived there he claimed love for God and for each other would even include the enemy.

With liberating freedom, disarming openness and inherent authority, he named the institution that diminished human life and promised God as an alternative:

Luke was right when he introduced his story of Jesus with the overture:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."

(Luke 4:18f.)

For that vision Jesus was prepared to live and to die. For that vision of making human life human, Jesus was killed.

The vision became reality when God raised Jesus from the dead. By raising Jesus from the dead, the vision for which Jesus lived and ultimately died, was written into the fabric of being.

We may not want to know it. We may be unwilling to really believe it, i.e. stake our lives on it. We may prefer the ways of the world.

Nevertheless it is true!

By raising the Crucified One from the dead, the fabric of being has changed.

At the centre of life, where the heart of God beat like a burning oven of love, there is:

By affirming the Cross of Christ as the centre of our faith, we are committed, not to conform to a world of greed and selfishness, but to being transformed to become servants of life.

Jesus learned, and we know that changing the world causes pain. Swimming with the stream is easy. Paddling on the spot is not too difficult. But swimming against the stream demands, courage, discipline, skill and stamina.

If we want to take Jesus seriously, we have to correct the ancient and modern creeds that describe the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. We need to add a fifth ingredient. Otherwise we mislead people. The fifth ingredient is suffering. There is no following the crucified and risen one apart from the preparedness and expectation of suffering.

It is not enough to look back and take our stand with Amos and Jeremiah, against Amaziah and Micaiah; with Jesus, Peter and Paul, against their religious and political opponents; with the Anabaptists, Baptists and Dissidents through the ages, against their political and ecclesiastical opponents. It is not enough to criticise the "Deutschen Christen" and praise the Confessing Church in the Germany of the 1930's. It is not enough to remember with reverence and pride Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights and his prophetic protest against the Vietnam war (at a time when this protest was unpopular in his own circles. His friends wanted him to concentrate on the civil rights movement and not "touch" Vietnam; but King believed that the moral conscience cannot be divided!). It is not enough to say that God was on the side of the Anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, that the prayers of Christians helped to bring down the wall and open the Gate in 1989, and that God is on the side of the struggle for freedom and justice in Burma.

We must discern and decide - here and now!

By faith and baptism we are called to be witnesses for Christ. A witness is a person who accepts responsibility for what he or she knows. As witnesses, the truth and the relevance of the Cross is at stake in and with our lives.

These words from Paul have become icons for me:

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal 2:19f.)

Paul speaks of "always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. (2 Cor 4:10f.)

Try to engage yourselves, really engage yourselves for all Australians to have a fair go.

Try to open your hearts to the families in our society who live on a TPV and are getting mad with the institutional insecurity imposed upon them.

Try to be true to Jesus when you go to the voting booth.

And you will soon find out that in our greedy, selfish, power hungry and violent world there is no faith, at least no faith in Christ, without pain.

My friends, may I invite you to join Jesus as he set his face to go to Jerusalem.

May I invite you to join the others on the way: Dietrich Bonhoeffer of Europe, Oscar Romero of Middle America, Martin Luther King, Jr. of North America, Nelson Mandela of South Africa – and the millions for whom "God" was more than a word.

May I invite you to the Cross, and perhaps, you will discover it as God's icon:

Of reconciliation – to which we respond with worship and thanksgiving.

Of liberation – to which we respond with the praxis of justice.

Of pain – to which we respond with the feebly but intentional desire to follow Jesus in radical discipleship.

 

Thorwald Lorenzen
3 April  2004