The Cross

GOOD FRIDAY

Matthew 26:47-27:66; Mark 14:43-15:47; Luke 22:47-23:56a; John 18:3-19:42

The death of Jesus is both a miracle and a motivation. In this event, we see the pinnacle of our atonement theology, but we also hear a call to match it and to live it, to carry this day with us wherever we are and in whatever we meet along the way.

THE MIRACLE

The cross is a miracle of grace because it signifies that God does indeed enter every experience that forms and shapes us as human beings, including the most God-forsaken contexts we can imagine. On the cross, Christ cries out for all the forsaken within the world now, throughout history, and whom we know to be yet to come. In the cross, Christ enters Rwanda; Christ dwells in the West Bank; Christ enters the barrens of industrial wastes wherein the poorest of the poor exist; Christ enters the hospice units, ICUs, the nursing homes, and the burn units; Christ enters divorce court, sitting among the children; Christ enters the prisons wherein live the forgotten and the despised; Christ enters the middle of the night when someone awakens to hopeless despair or debilitating panic—Christ enters every abyss that we can possibly imagine (and those we would prefer to never know or experience, let alone imagine being real). The cross is the bold assertion that the Creed was absolutely correct in declaring that Christ “descended into hell.” Christ is able to redeem all humanity from all suffering precisely because of this descent. He obliterates the waste of God’s absence by being present everywhere and anywhere—

Since Christ descended into hell, what we experience as hell, and everything else that can be called hell, has been objectively transformed…’I am told to believe in hell,’ said Berdyaev once, ‘but not that there is anybody in it.’

—Jurgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today’s World, pp. 66-67

That is the miracle of the cross.

THE MOTIVATION

But we cannot assume, nor should expect, to be watchers only of the miracle of the cross—rather, the cross stands as a beacon calling all who would follow Jesus to itself. Christ himself promised as much—“If anyone would follow me, let them deny themselves and carry their own cross” (Mt. 16:24). 

The cross is not only a sign of God’s mighty work, but it is the standard for all work of faith—for the very praxis we seek to embody as we take the name of Jesus upon us. What that means is that we are to enter the arena of the forsaken. As a colleague of mine, Dr. Matthew Rich, reminded us in a Good Friday sermon, “Golgotha is no place for winners, but rather those who know their brokenness” (“It Is Finished,” Good Friday, April 18, 2014). As those redeemed by grace, we are to redeem others through that same grace. We are healed to become healers. We are forgiven to become merciful. We are mended to begin mending. We are called to enter the hells all around us wherever human beings fall into existential pits of despair, be it through poverty, illness, age, weakness, depravity, or anything else. We are to meet them and guide them to God, allowing his grace to work within them as Christ once again enters the fullness of their experience through the cross. In this way, we actualize the promises of the cross. We embrace its full and lasting power.