Monday, February 18, 2019
640 - Cross Purposes
Spirituality Column #640
February 19, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Christianity
Cross Purposes
By Bob Walters
“For the Spirit God
gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love, and self-discipline.”
– 2 Timothy 1:7
When I look at the cross of Jesus
Christ I see righteousness, commitment, love, courage, God’s grace, sin’s
ugliness, and fallen man’s meanness and helplessness.
What I
don’t see, because it so diminishes Christ’s saving mission and accomplishment
– and please hear me out on this – is punishment, payment, shame, or even
humiliation. None of those are functions
of love, of resolve, of resilience, or of righteousness. I look humbly at the cross with thanks and
admiration, not guilt and fear.
The grace
and purpose of Christ were, first and foremost, fulfillment of God’s plan for
the divine restoration of mankind which had vacated its claim to God’s kingdom
with the fall of Adam and Eve. Jesus on
the cross is an awful scene, but sufficient to cover over the sins of the
world, reveal God’s Kingdom, defeat death, provide eternal life, seat us
forever in God’s heavenly glory, and endow us with the love and grace necessary
to love each other and boldly love God while still mired amid this daily,
earthly shadow of death. Because of the
cross, we have knowledge of God, Christ in our lives, baptism by the Holy
Spirit, and prayerful, divine relationship of faith, hope, and love. How often we boil-down the cross to a mere
trade for forgiveness.
Christians
sing endless hymns of payment and cost and price and purchase, though the
Apostle Paul famously conflates “loss” and “gain” (Philippians 3:8) and Christ
repeatedly muddles the worldly commerce of human compensation: “the first shall be last” (Mark 9:35),
etc. The cross of Christ, truly, is not “all about the Benjamins.”
Whether due
to logic, greed, or pride, humans vigorously compartmentalize God’s intentions
and Christ’s work – profound mysteries of grace and forgiveness – into the
“give and take,” “punish or reward,” “shame or pride” constructs of measurement
and comparison. How severely they limit our
view of God’s love at work in our lives.
That’s because none of these are functions of love, of
resolve, of resilience, or of righteousness.
They instead divert our attention from God's command to love Him and
love others and re-interpret it as a demand for legalistic obedience and
metrics. These “either-or” propositions are not indicative of God's higher
thoughts and ways, but only our mistaken, fallen, and narrow human perception
of quid pro quo transactions.
If the
Old Covenant taught us anything, it is that mankind is terrible at following
Godly rules. Hence the joy and the glory
of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ, which demands our love, faith, repentance,
and forgiveness of others, not a scorecard.
The
reason the cross of Jesus is so hard – whether the “washed clean” cross of the
Protestants or the starkly graphic crucifix of the Catholics and Anglicans – is
that when we contemplate the cross, encountering the suffering of Christ is
unavoidable. It is a miserable truth,
this suffering of Christ; and the world’s poorest possible sales pitch.
But our
lesson is this: guilt and payment will never help us love others with grace and
compassion. That is why love, not guilt
or cost, defines the cross of Christ.
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