The Cross where God shows us His Love

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            “Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man - - though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die.  But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”  (Romans 5:7-8 RSV)

            One of the most unique movies I have ever seen was the movie “The Mill and the Cross”.  The movie focuses on Peter Bruegel explaining his 1564 painting, of the same title to a Dutch art collector, as they exchange perspectives on the brutal times in which they lived.  Bruegel explains his painting that shows the passion of Christ as if Christ were a Dutchman and he was being crucified in a Dutch setting, with literally hundreds of fellow Dutchmen as well as their Spanish oppressors around the passion scene.  Before one condemns Bruegel’s work of trying to contemporize Christ’s passion into a sixteenth century Dutch setting, we might pause for a moment, to see how St. Paul’s grammar in Romans 5:8 employs a curious feature.  St. Paul divides the sentence into present activity and a past event.  Christ died in the past, an event that is once and for all time.  But God employs that event to show us in forever present tense that God shows us his love now in this moment even to the end of the age and into the heavenly realms in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  Bruegel has the Biblical sense to know that because Christ died centuries ago, God was now showing his love Bruegel’s fellow Dutchmen in the death of Christ.  The minister proclaiming the Gospel to men and women of modern cultures whether they are in the modernistic West, in the developing southern cone, in an Asian setting has the ministry of showing God’s present tense love that is shown in the death of Christ for us while we were yet sinners.  My theology has to a large degree been shaped by the theology of the Reformation, but the Christian gospel must not become a gospel that tells people how they may enter a subculture that freezes life in the sixteenth century or any other century.  Nor is the goal to simply contemporize everything in modern dress.  Rather the goal is to show men and women in every generation, every cultural and subcultural setting that God is now showing his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.

            In “The Mill and the Cross” Bruegel makes a curious point about the sufferings and death of the Christ.  God mysteriously hid the effects of Christ’s death not in the ordinary way we think of one hiding some great treasure.  God hid Christ’s sufferings and death right in the middle of everything.  He placed Christ’s death in the middle of history and placed his death in the middle of witnesses, but so many of those who witnessed this death were oblivious to the true nature of Christ’s death because they were so engaged in their own activities and pursuits.  There were some that had become Christ’s enemies and actively pursued his death.  St. Paul wrote as someone who had once held similar sentiments.  He had been that sort of sinner until God showed him his love in the death of Christ.  Many others were like those of which the two disciples spoke on the road to Emmaus.  They told the stranger who had come next to them on the road of the commotion in Jerusalem for many had hoped that this Jesus was the Christ, the promised Messiah, but now he had been crucified and had died and apparently with him had died that hope.  Palm Sunday had not been a flash in the pan event.  Men and women really had come to believe that this one was the Christ, but this death of Christ how did it fit into such a hope?  God, says St. Paul, shows us his love in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.  He took upon himself the burden of our sins and paid the penalty.  I cannot escape that New Testament logic.  That is not the only thing that he did and this was not some Gnostic act of a loving Son of God trying to appease a vengeful and wrathful God the Father.  This was a Trinity in unity; a Father so loving the world that he gave his son, a son so loving the world that he would die in the place of sinners, and the Holy Spirit so devoted to the love of the world that he would descend and fill the church and be with its ministries to the end of the age that he might bring this one activity hidden in an ancient past into present tense in every time and place where the Gospel is preached and where the sacraments are carried out.

            St. Paul’s theology and that of the other New Testament’s Epistles was never meant to become a separate branch of Biblical studies.  Rather the New Testament epistles were meant to be authoritative commentaries teaching churches and Christians about the meaning of Christ’s life, teachings, death and resurrection.  The best way I think to understand what St. Paul is saying about God showing or demonstrating his love in the death of Christ for sinners is to see how the Gospel writers described Christ’s death in the midst of so many varied persons and how among those represented by so many various persons there were those whom even on the day Christ died came to realize that there was something unique about Christ and his death.

            Bruegel, in his painting showed Christ’s death in the midst of an entire village, along with a number of foreign soldiers brutally oppressing the people.  The scenes in the movie based on the painting are often brutal.  Bruegel’s painting tried to successfully capture in his sixteenth century Dutch setting the relationship between the lives of Dutch sinners hoping in Christ and that long ago scene around the cross of Jesus Christ as he suffered and died for us while we were yet sinners.  That original setting shown by the Gospel writers was one of darkness, literal darkness on the day that the sun seemed to be taken out of the sky as Christ was to die.  There was gloom and despair as the hopes of the disciples that this one was the Christ turned to the desolation of grief as Christ died.  Was this the end?  Had it all come to this nothingness?  But even in this day of darkness a handful of souls were being enlightened and instructed in an astonishing manner as if the first fruits of those who were discovering the truth about this death of Jesus of Nazareth.  They were not the expected recipients of such a discovery.  There was a Roman centurion, a thief on the cross, and seeds were planted in the consciences of men who had likely participated in manipulating the political scenery and the masses to put an end to a Christ they felt had gone too far.  There was a disciple lingering there who had been described by Jesus as a “son of thunder” whose desire to see God’s wrath upon Christ’s enemies showed that he did not yet understand Christ.  He lingered there at the cross and learned the lesson of that great day when God showed his love in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.

All of these stories of those around the cross of Christ are meant to be brought into our lives so that we see we too, even out of time and place, have lives taking place all around the cross where God shows his love toward us.  We too have our lives described in the scenery of the cross.  Perhaps we are discouraged for everything seems to have grown dark and if Christ is not being crucified in our time, his religion is being scorned, ridiculed, forsaken, and worse treated as if wholly irrelevant to modern life.  Perhaps we are the scorners who have decided this is a religion simply in the way of progress.  Perhaps we are those who are too busy in living out our lives on the way to the grave to think upon this scene where Jesus is dying for sinners.  We are the busy ones on the fringe ignoring the scene taking place on the hill outside of the city.  We are all there able to look and see upon the proclaimed death of Christ that God’s love is being shown to us.  Perhaps we will just walk on by as if that has nothing to do with our lives.  Many did just that on that first Good Friday so long ago.  But the writers of the four New Testament Gospels saw that some did not just walk by, but took notice and realized to differing degrees something unique in the death of Christ so that they understood that God was addressing mankind through this death of Christ.

            We can begin at the very top.  While N.T. Wright is sometimes controversial, he seems to me to be correct in his assessment that Christ came to establish the kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven and that he actually succeeded because he was establishing a kingdom unlike any other kingdom or nation of men.  This was not the sort of kingdom imagined by so many of the Jews of Jesus’ day, nor was it even like the great nations that have had their influences felt in our own lives and passions.  It is sometimes difficult for men and women who are citizens of a nation they love to realize that the kingdom of God operates very differently from what any nation on earth can operate.  There is a great difference between the kingdom of Rome ruled by Caesar and represented in Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate; and the kingdom of God represented by Jesus Christ even on the day when Christ suffered under Pilate.  Rome imagined that it had a mission of bringing Roman peace and law to the world.  Great powers grow great imagining themselves having a divine mission, ministry, mandate, and manifest destiny.  If they do not imagine themselves to be a truly superior people they imagine themselves to be the possessors of a superior order.  Thy imagine that this gives them the right to conquer other people, to occupy more and more territories, and to grow their empires and global influence so that they might enlighten the rest of humankind.  Rome conquered nations to give them law.  Britain accepted the white man’s burden to take science as much as Christianity to a world devoid in British opinion of civilization.  America determined itself to be the guarantor of democracy, and gradually gave itself the right to intervene globally in the cause.  In every instance great powers regarded themselves as having a mission, ministry, and destiny to use power and influence to change the world.

            That is part of the Gospel story.  There were two contrasting lordships, one heading an Empire of this world and calling upon men to recognize the divinity of Caesar and one who came to be made a king of a kingdom not of this world.  Pilate representing Roman rule came to realize that Christ was not a man who was going to lead a rebellion against Rome.  Pilate came to understand that Jesus was an innocent man.  But Pilate also had a problem.  Judea was an unruly province and Caesar didn’t care much for the details of how Pilate kept the peace in Judea and maintained the authority of Roman law over the province.  Pilate served a lord and his sole purpose was to maintain Roman rule and Roman law over the peoples of Judea.  Pilate’s decision to crucify Christ was a decision to maintain the peace of the province and to maintain Roman law over the province.  Rome was more important than any one man.  To preserve Rome’s authority in a province was more important than the life or rights of a single innocent man wrongly accused.  Pilate washed his hands of the affair and did what needed to be done to maintain the peace of Rome in the province of Judea.  But Christ came to establish his kingdom in a new way and at the foundation of his kingdom was not the power of a military conquest, but the power of God’s love.  The individual of an empire was in Roman thinking an obstacle to the greatness of the collective power of Rome.  If an individual threatened Roman peace and Roman law then he could be justifiably swept under the power of Rome with the washing of one’s hands.  But in Christ’s kingdom it was to be wholly different.  It was to be recognized that through a single man came sin and death, and therefore through a single man would come a death and resurrection that brought forth salvation, redemption, forgiveness and a new and eternal life to a whole world of sinners.  Rome could justify killing an innocent man to preserve a collective peace.  But in the kingdom of Christ, it would be through one just man that his offering of himself in death would become the foundation stone upon which a new kingdom not of this world was to be built.  The nations of this earth rule by military might, the kingdom not of this world rules through love as one offers his life in death for sinners that such sinners might receive the new life of Christ’s triumphant resurrection life.  This is the way God shows his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  This is the kingdom not of this world and any nation who raises its head in competition will find itself in a war that it cannot win.  Yet this is what the nations must do for there was a lord of this world above Caesar who had long ago enticed mankind to reach out for the forbidden so that we could instead of worshipping God might try to live our lives out as if we were gods.  He will entice the nations with grand visions of what power can do employed in the world, all so as to obscure from our understanding that it is not power but love that transforms men and women and creates goodness out of evil.

            There were the Roman soldiers shown in the Gospel accounts to be gambling for Christ’s vestments.  Depending on one’s perspective soldiers are either valiant men who offer their lives for great causes or the scourge of the earth who wield the sword and are often the final protectors of the most grotesque tyrants the world has ever known.  Perhaps there is truth in both the praise of soldiers and the condemnation of them.  Soldiers often give themselves valiantly for the defense of their homelands and their ways of life.  An American soldier who had fought in Iraq captured both sentiments as he spoke of his service in Iraq.  On the one hand he entered the service to defend American freedoms.  He served in Iraq and the defense of those alongside of him was important to him.  He spoke seldom about the fighting he had been in, but once after describing some of the techniques of fighting the “terrorists” in various places in Iraq he added, “But I can also see their perspective.  If a foreign army was in my country I might be the one placing IED’s in the road.”  The soldier often discovers in wartime that war is seldom a black and white issue without shades of gray.  Each side’s soldiers think they are fighting for something.  Each side’s soldiers, in the midst of war, often grow disillusioned with their place in the battlefield.  They often find they cannot share in the grand patriotism of those who seem to most vigorously support their cause.  They have seen more than their souls or consciences can fathom.  But whatever they think of themselves they also don’t see their buddy beside them as evil.  So they learn the way of survival rather than the pursuit of glory as they serve in a war.  They learn that a good soldier is part of a unit that battles as a unit under a battle plan.  Questions of conscience are not as important to survival as learning to follow orders.  I suspect this is the sort of hardened consciences and souls that characterized the Roman soldiers following Pilate’s orders.  They had learned not to question orders, not to decide their battle actions based on their own consciences.  But one of the Roman soldiers seeing Christ die came to see Christ’s death differently than he had seen any other thing he had ever seen in his service to Rome.  He saw a man on the cross in complete composure of himself.  This man experienced great pain and suffering.  This man did not hide his feeling of suffering with a false bravado, but this man also in his depth of suffering uttered a prayer for his tormentors.  He was every bit a man yet he prayed for mercy toward his tormentors rather than vengeance.  He was dying but sought to comfort a grieving mother and disciple standing near him.  He kept his composure and saw his own death as finishing something.  This soldier saw it all and his soldier’s code of silencing conscience and following orders gave way to expressing his admiration for one who must be more than any other man he had ever known.  He saw what he saw and declared “Truly this man was the Son of God.”  Here was a man who did not likely understand all he saw but was being impacted by the astonishing love of God demonstrated the day Christ died.

            There were also two thieves next to Christ, also being crucified on the day Christ died.  It seems that at first both of these thieves were joining in insulting Christ.  But for one of them, as he watched from his own death post, he began to see something differently in the way Christ was dying.  He told the other felon not to ridicule Christ, for they had both done things for which they deserved to die, but that Christ was an innocent man.  Then he turned to Christ and asked Jesus to permit him to enter his kingdom when Jesus entered his.  Jesus told the sinner turning to him that this day he would be in paradise.  Surely this man had come to know that in the death of Christ for sinners, God had shown us his great love.

            Some of those impacted by God’s display of love in the death of Christ did not have an immediate conversion to Christ.  There were many who had opposed Christ that must have had seeds of doubt planted into their thoughts as they watched Christ die.  They would find it impossible to put things together until fifty days later.  They would be in the temple when St. Peter and the other disciples began preaching Christ as the way of salvation.  At one point St. Peter would describe how some of them present in his hearing had helped godless men put Christ to death.  This was a charge that would have angered a Jew in that time.  Jews described “Gentiles” as godless men.  Christ had been put to death by religious leaders groveling at Pilate’s feet to put their religious enemy to death.  Perhaps some of those who responded in the temple when St. Peter preached had watched at Calvary when Jesus had died for us while we were yet sinners.  Instead of rejecting St. Peter’s charge as ridiculous hyperbole a number of those hearing St. Peter preach were struck with their guilt and responded saying, “What then must we do to be saved?”  It was perhaps quite likely that a seed of conflict within their consciences had been planted.  They cried out like Newton wrote of in his hymn.  They first learned from the gospel that their sin was heinous.  They had reason to fear for they deserved retribution for their great sin.  But then they learned that this death was for them as it was for others, and that Christ had died for them while they were yet sinners.  This was the same lesson John Newton learned when he saw his sins as a captain of ships carrying men to be enslaved saw his sin as heinous.  Yet in the cross of Christ he learned that Christ had acted to set him free from his slavery to sin.  He had great sins which required an amazing grace, and being freed from his own bondage to sin he became all the more desirous that the blight of enforced slavery would be abolished forever from the earth.

            St. Paul in Romans 5 thus sums up very well the teaching of the four Gospels on Christ’s death.  God showed his love to us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.  In the fifth chapter of Romans, St. Paul does for the theology of the Scriptures what the apostles did for the scene around Christ’s death on the cross.  The Gospel writers had set forth a multitude of men and women around Christ’s death to show that God demonstrated his love toward humanity through the death of Christ for sinners.  Each and every witness of the death of Christ had seen the great event of Christ dying for sinners.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had shown in their portrayals of Christ’s death how this death was the demonstration of God’s love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.

            St. Paul describes Christ’s death in between his praising of God in a Trinitarian formula, and his confession of mankind’s sin.  The opening verses of Romans five describe our relationship to God the Father, through Jesus Christ the Son, by the power and aid of the Holy Spirit.  Following his declaration that God shows us his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, St. Paul describes how sin entered the world through one man and then through sin came death and death spread to all men, for all had sinned.  I am not interested in parsing out all the various theological theories relating Adam’s sin to our sins, nor even to attempt to parse out what exactly is the most perfect understanding of the Trinity.  While I wish to be as free from erroneous thoughts about such matters as I can be, sometimes our endless discussions on these matters lead us to set aside the purpose for which St. Paul spoke of these matters.  We get enamored with studying individual trees and lose sight of the forest being set before us.  St. Paul was deeply interested in conveying to us that the Trinity in complete unity was showing us the love of God as Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  St. Paul was desirous of us understanding that just as through one man sin entered the world and the powers of sin overwhelmed us all so that all sinned and fell short of the glory of God, but he wanted us to understand this so that most importantly that in Christ, one man came into the world to die for our sins and to bring us into the righteousness of God so as to know the love of God shown to us in the death of Christ for us while we were yet sinners.

            I would plead with ministers who preach the Gospel.  If you preach the most perfect sermon on the dreadful nature of sin it can be so particularly correct as if lecturing on a single tree in the Amazon rain forest.  Yet what your congregation and your hearers need to understand is that even though sin entered into the human world through Adam, and death spread to all because sin overpowered us, that now because Christ came into the world we can be brought into the love of God who sent his son into the world so that he could die for us while we were yet sinners and reverse that curse that came through Adam.  Now instead of seeing Adam’s story as the story of mankind, we are invited to see that through Christ came life and righteousness.

            The same is true of the doctrine of predestination.  In essence there are two paths of predestination and only two paths.  There is the path of that destiny to which our sins would take us, ever further and further removed from the love of God.  But that path is to be proclaimed only to encourage that there is another path of predestination.  It is the path of predestination in Christ.  Christ is the chosen one, the chosen cornerstone upon which the temple of God’s people is being built and brought together.  In Christ there is a destiny that has been sealed by God’s love toward those who are drawn to hope and live in Jesus Christ.  The Gospel is proclaimed freely unto all men and women that they by hearing and believing the Gospel message might forsake the destiny wrapped up in disobedience and sin so as to obtain the destiny of life in Christ.  That is a destiny discovered and experienced in unity with Christ, a unity begun by believing upon the gospel.  That is a unity expressed in our baptism into the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  That is a unity expressed in Holy Communion when partaking of the elements expressing Christ’s body and blood we partake of him with one another and celebrate our shared destiny as the people of God united in and through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

            St. Paul I suspect wanted for us to understand that not one doctrine of the Holy Scriptures could be declared and proclaimed apart from the centrality of all reality that God shows us his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  That is a message which will capture the attention of Roman soldiers, Pharisees, thieves, old white men with too much pride in their morality and theology, and young people seemingly at a distance from others with their hip-hop gangster rap music that has seemingly captured the frustration of a world that makes no sense.  It is a message meant for affluent Europeans and other Westerners, and likewise for men and women of the developing world and for every tribe and tongue, culture and sub-culture upon this earth. 

In truth, all of St. Paul’s teachings on the various doctrines of the Christian faith served one purpose to convey the power and force of God’s love shown in that Christ died for us while we were sinners and to convey that love to the ends of the earth to every man and woman on this earth, and to every aspect of each of our lives.  Every doctrine mentioned by St. Paul is a wheel hung upon a gear driven by a transmission with spokes designed to transfer power and energy from the power of the engine and its drive train to be applied at the point where the rubber of the tire meets the road.  If a spoke in a wheel isn’t connected in a straight line from the center of the wheel to the wheel’s outer rim then we would acknowledge the spoke to be damaged.  The same is true for all Christian doctrine.  It either links the love of God, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to our human existence or we have a damaged spoke that needs to be fixed for the sake of the Gospel proclamation to men and women for whom Christ died while we were yet sinners.  The world seems sometimes devoid of any meaning apart from the love of God.  Christ’s death on the cross seems at first only to convey that total and complete meaninglessness of life in this world.  But then as we look upon that cross and see it and are drawn more and more into its true meaning, we see the love of God being shown in the death of Christ who died for us while we were yet sinners.

            I will leave the final word to be spoken by the disciple standing nearest the cross of Christ on that darkened day called “Good Friday.”  St. John was there alongside Jesus’ mother.  Jesus called upon him to treat her now as if he were Mary’s own son, and Jesus commended his mother to recognize that he was appointing John as his dear friend to be one who was to have the responsibility of a son in watching out and caring for Mary in the days ahead.  It is this disciple who must have spent his years thinking of all he had seen and witnessed in the life of Christ.  It is he to whom it was given the privilege of writing a simple sentence that conveys profoundly the central teaching of the Christian faith.  The lesson John learned is ultimately learned as we see that God shows his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  St. John expressed this wonderful lesson so simply, saying, “God is love.”