St Mary's Church Almondsbury
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THEOLOGY 2: Why did Jesus die on the Cross? A summary of the talk given by Rev John Hadley; the second in our series entitled “Theology for the Layman / Laywoman”.			X-plore topics
“He died that we might be forgiven, he died to make us good, that we might go at last to heaven, saved by his precious blood”. Is this true? and, if so, what does it mean, and how does it work? Let’s start with the rather dogmatic statement I made last week: ‘The coming together of God and humanity in Christ is ..... a love story; one which ends, not with God grudgingly “adopting” us his children again once Jesus has made a suitable sacrifice for us: but with Christ welcoming us as sharers of his sonship, of his divine humanity, in what he calls “the Kingdom of God”.’ Let me now try to unpack this with reference to the Cross: (1) The Incarnation and the Cross are not two separate & conflicting ideas: they belong together. (Cf the story of the nun who loved the infant Jesus & was heard to say to him one Good Friday “Why do they have to keep bringing this up?”) Nikos Kazantzakis in The Last Temptation of Christ has Jesus being tempted to do what the priests suggested, to come down from the cross and live an ordinary life instead – a temptation he eventually rejects. For if he had refused to drink the “cup” in Gethsemane, if he had come down from the cross, he would actually have been less than divine. But almost everyone failed to understand this: if he was the Son of God, he had to stay up there, just as in the wilderness he had to reject all suggestions of being superman or a magician. Only the penitent thief understood: the cross was the only way into paradise. (2) Also, the Cross is not a one-off act of sacrifice which Jesus made on Good Friday, but the logical and inevitable culmination of his whole life. Many theologies talk as if the only purpose of Jesus’ birth was that he should eventually die, as if his life and teaching and preaching and miracles were of no real relevance. Many accounts of the Christian story jump directly from Christmas to Easter, e.g. the creeds, the rosary, cycles of mystery plays, even the Christian year to some extent. But Jesus, being the perfect expression of God in human form, was therefore constantly giving himself away in love, constantly offering himself for the world, constantly taking up his cross. The cross casts its shadow forward through the whole story, to the very beginning, with the uncomfortable words of the angel, the inhospitality of Bethlehem, the massacre of the innocents, the prophecy of Simeon. Predictions of his passion, overt and hidden, are strewn through the story in the first three gospels – not only in what he says but in the pain he feels - while the Fourth Gospel abounds with references to “his hour”. The more passionate the love, the more intense will be the pain. The cross is therefore not an isolated event, a bad thing that happens out of the blue to a good man. It is the dénouement of a Way of the Cross that has lasted a lifetime. But it is also the making public and universal of what has until then been obscure and local: I, if I am lifted up, will draw everyone to myself. That is why the cross has become the Christian sign. (3) This event, the crucifixion of Jesus, looks like defeat. It appears to say to us: don’t love, don’t care, don’t follow Jesus, because this is what will happen if you do! And yet, for Christians, it mysteriously becomes the sign of victory. Because Jesus did not turn back, because he walked in the way of divine love right to the end, he overcame the sin and evil that has infected humanity and the world, and makes it possible to walk in the “more excellent way” with hope. God vindicates him, God raises him from the dead. It ceases to be a dire warning and becomes a glorious invitation. The crucifixion was the moment of victory, the hour when Jesus was lifted up to draw us all to himself. But it cannot be just a one-off event, something which just happened in 1^st century Palestine, to put things right for the human race (before AD 33 everything was wrong: since then it’s all been right). It may have been possible to believe this before the Copernican revolution, when people thought in terms of a geocentric 3-decker universe lasting a few thousand years: but it cannot make sense before the immensities of time and space that now confront us. The cross is not just an event: it is a universal truth about God. This coming Friday is the distinctly un-Anglican feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. If we can get beyond the rather sentimental pictures that usually portray it, it actually offers us a momentous opportunity, inviting us to look into the very depths of the love of God revealed in Christ. And at the heart of this heart is the cross, God’s amazing and unstinting desire to pour himself out for his creation, again and again and again. We could usefully say in the eucharistic prayer, not only that Jesus “revealed the resurrection” but also that he “revealed the cross”, the sign both of love and of victory which is hidden at the heart of God and of everything. (4) Therefore the cross was not a transaction for getting humanity (and perhaps God also) out of a tight spot. Summaries of the Bible account often have headings like “God’s plan”: down on earth it had all gone wrong; humanity had fallen into sin; what was God to do? the flood hadn’t done the trick, and Moses also talked him out of wiping the slate clean and starting again... so...why, yes! eureka! he’d got it! the gruesome death of an innocent person, his own Son in fact! that would satisfy his desire for justice for the dreadful things that went on in the garden of Eden, and let at least a few choice people back into heaven. This caricature of a particular theology of the cross is meant to point up its chief defects, viz. 1. God isn’t a bumbling old man; 2. the Bible isn’t literal history; 3. as said already, the story didn’t begin so recently; 4. God’s justice is not primitive and savage; 5. Original sin is undoubtedly a fact, perhaps one of the few undeniable facts of life; but is punishment really a suitable remedy? 6. the Gospel is meant to be good news, not bad news 7. all this does nothing, or less than nothing, for those parts of humanity and creation which haven’t come within the Christian ambit. (“Unbaptised infants may be saved, say Vatican theologians” was the chilling headline in a Catholic paper a few weeks ago). No, the cross is a revelation – the revelation – of the universal love of God. (5) But just a revelation? of course Christ on the Cross does not only demonstrate God’s love to us, he fills us with God’s love and forgiveness. But it goes further than that. We are not only on the receiving end of God’s love: we are invited to share Christ’s divinity and so to become, in our turn, the mediators of that love to the world. The cross is the way into the kingdom: take up your cross, follow me, give up your life, receive new birth, says Jesus over and over again: I am the way. All these sayings manifestly don’t mean that you have to be a paid-up Christian to enter the kingdom, because there are plenty of sayings warning us that this is far from the case: but they do mean we have to take the way of Christ, the way of the cross, the way of self-giving love. That is the only way back from the false humanity of “sin” to the true, divine, humanity of Christ – the only way to be saved. And the Saints are the evidence. They all, in one way or another, internally or externally, “bear in their body the marks of Christ”. Most obviously, the martyrs have followed him to death: but all are martyrs in one way or another. The prophets pay the price for telling the truth; those who have followed the religious life carry the cost of renunciation; confessors are those whose Christianity has been in sharp contrast with the ways of the world; even marriage is seen in the Eastern church as a form of martyrdom. Above all, there are the apostles, those bearers of the good news who also carry the responsibility for the churches to which they have given birth, and whose daily martyrdom is described again and again by St Paul. All these are people who have entered the Kingdom through the narrow gate of which Christ has spoken, who have walked in the way of the cross and found it to be none other than the way of life and peace, for themselves and for those to whom they have brought the good news. And now it’s our turn.
Contact the Church Office Rev. Philip W. Rowe, Vicar of Almondsbury and Olveston with Aust The Vicarage, 3 Sundays Hill, Almondsbury, Bristol, BS32 4DS 01454 613223		Email the Website Administrator