Good Friday - the death and triumph of love

What is the cross about? Why did Jesus have to die? In what way are we ‘saved’ by his sacrifice?

The cross cannot be fully analysed and understood by intellect.

In some ways I think these questions miss the point, like asking what a great work of art means or is worth, when it simply means itself and is worth itself. The cross is not, I suspect, something that can be analysed and fully understood by means of the intellect, or at least not of the intellect alone. Theological theories and models of the atonement have some usefulness but all fall short, and ultimately the cross is perhaps best understood by the heart.

Nonetheless, there are aspects of the cross that we can perhaps understand a little.

Love rejected

For me, one of the most important things about the cross is it makes everything suddenly concrete, real and personal. From sin being an abstract offence against the apparently arbitrary law of an unseen God, it becomes a very real offence against a very present and personal one. The hands of humanity nail the perfect Lord to a cross of wood; the voice of humanity is lifted up in mockery against him. Even if we were not there, our race, our species stands collectively convicted of deicide, of highest treason against the King of all kings.

The greatest law in the universe and in the Bible is the law of love. Love the Lord with all your heart, mind and strength… love one another. In different ways all our small and great sins are sins against love, but at the cross humanity sinned against love in the greatest way imaginable. We turned our faces against love; we violated, we killed Love itself; we destroyed the source and sum and sign of all love. We broke the divine law so completely that no amount of good deeds could ever repair it. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…

So the cross levels us all, kings and beggars, saints and sinners. None of us can lift our heads and call ourselves guiltless. Even Jesus’ own closest friends and followers deserted, denied or betrayed him.

Love vindicated

The cross not only makes sin up close and personal; it makes salvation up close and personal too

But that is only one side of the story. The glory of the cross – what makes it Good Friday – is that at the exact same time as Love was being utterly rejected and violated by humanity, Love was also being utterly fulfilled by humanity’s true and perfect representative. Jesus – he who is Love incarnate – took love to its extent and extreme by dying for those who deserted, denied, betrayed, scorned, mocked, wounded, and ultimately killed him. Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends... except perhaps that he lay it down for his enemies.

So as we threw the worst of ourselves at Christ, he bore to the fullest extent our own suffering, shame and sorrow, and in doing so he redeemed it all. As we subjected him to the deepest horror and torment humans can devise, he bore the utmost depths of our evil and overcame it. Nothing others can do to us, and nothing we can do to others, is now beyond the power of Christ’s healing and redemption. This is real love; this is love tested to the limit and proved beyond doubt.

So the cross not only makes sin up close and personal; it makes salvation up close and personal too. If Christ died in some sense because of me and you, he also died by the same token to forgive, heal, redeem and restore me and you. We all stand equal before the cross: equally guilty, yet equally freed and forgiven. The cross is the total triumph of love over all that would reject, betray, mock and destroy love, and Easter is the proof of that triumph.

Postscript: penal substitution

There are of course many ways of viewing the cross; the evangelical favourite is Penal Substitution, whereby Jesus is thought to have borne in our place the punishment due for our sins and so satisfied God's just anger against us. I do not deny the truth of this, but in my view it has to be placed firmly in the context of love, for God is love and love is God's highest law. God's anger is simply the result of the violation and betrayal of love, and his solution is the full outworking of love.

So though it may be true to say that God's wrath is satisfied on the cross, it is also true - and in my view far more importantly true - that God's love is satisfied, is fully expressed and fulfilled, on the cross.

Many ways to one God? (part 1)

A friend of mine has a saying, 'There are many mountains in the Himalayas and all of them point to God'. To a lot of Christians this just sounds like new-agey fluffiness - after all, didn't Jesus say 'I am the way... no-one comes to the Father except through me'? And some will understandably feel that if other ways did lead to God, then what on earth was the point of all the hassle of being a Christian - though this would perhaps miss the point somewhat.

While I can't perhaps go as far as my friend in believing that all roads lead ultimately to God, nor that all people will eventually be redeemed - though I do hope for that - I have moved quite a distance in that direction. I have reason to hope that many who do not know or consciously profess Christ will find themselves in God's Kingdom; and conversely I suspect that many who call themselves Christian will find their place among the chosen less guaranteed than they imagined.

Does this mean I'm becoming a wishy-washy anything-goes so-called liberal? Perhaps, but I don't believe so. Rather I'm trying to take Jesus' own words and character very seriously and not shoehorn them into watertight doctrines that don't actually hold water.

The Way, the Truth and the Life

In the next post I want to look at more of what the Bible has to say on the subject but let's start with 'I am the way, the truth and the life'. To my mind it's quite possible to interpret this verse in a way that's far from the standard 'only Christians go to heaven' version.

Yes, Jesus is the Way, but it is possible to follow a way without knowing its name or having been shown it on a map. All who, led by the Spirit, follow the true way are indeed following Jesus whether they know it or not. Similarly, Jesus is the Truth and the Truth is Jesus, so anyone who seeks the truth is surely seeking Jesus whether they realise it or not. And Jesus is the Life, but life whether spiritual or biological is a pretty mysterious thing, and those who have it may not exactly understand what it is or how they came by it.

So Jesus can truly say 'No-one comes to the Father except by me', for all who do come to the Father by whatever route will find - perhaps to their surprise - that they came in truth through Christ.

One of my favourite passages in C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories comes towards the end of The Last Battle. The young Calormene Emeth, a lifelong devotee of the pagan demon-god Tash, finds himself to his great surprise in the Narnian heaven. Aslan the Christ-Lion explains to him:

"Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me… For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him…

But I [Emeth] said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."

This to me is the crux. Those who seek truth, goodness, beauty, justice and mercy will find it, for they are truly seeking God.

Love

We in the modern western church make much of right belief in a correct creed, and of following particular steps that will guarantee us a place in God's kingdom. But authentic Christian faith is not mere intellectual assent to right theories about God and salvation, nor following a five-step programme to eternal life. True belief is about who we are in the deepest place, and about the actions and attitudes towards God and other people that flow from that.

So the greatest command is simply - and almost impossibly - to love: to love God with all our heart, mind and strength; to love our fellow humans as ourselves. Those who seek to follow this law are, as Jesus said, not far from the kingdom, whatever theologies they do or don't profess. And conversely those who have not love, though they perform great miracles, are not actually on the Way of Christ at all.

My own view then is that Christ's presence and activity are not limited to those within the Christian church, and that he is often present incognito in other faiths and none. For wherever there is goodness, truth, love, kindness, honesty, generosity, compassion, or mercy, there at least to some degree is Christ. Even if all paths do not lead to him, in his grace he often chooses to meet us on whatever path we happen to be on.

Killing in the name of - the death penalty and Christianity

Significant sections of the UK population think we should bring back the death penalty - at least for cases like the Soham murderer Ian Huntley. Huntley molested and killed two innocent young girls - surely it's obvious that he deserves to die. The only reason in most people's minds for keeping him alive is that death is too easy a way out - perhaps better that he should stay alive and be made to suffer.

I can see the logic - and feel the emotional power - of such thinking. The only problem is that it overlooks some vital realities, particularly for Christians.

One - people like Huntley are unfortunately still people; they are still human beings. We desperately don't want them to see them as human, as being in any way like us - so we label them as Evil, as Monsters; we try and convince ourselves that we have nothing in common with them. Indeed, we eagerly place on them all the evil that we can't bear to face in ourselves, and hurl at them all the loathing and disgust we feel for those unacceptable, shameful parts of our own natures. But in so doing we do not stop them from being human; we merely become less human, less real ourselves.

Two - all people, however far they have fallen, are at least potentially redeemable. It's not for us to decide who can and who can't qualify for ultimate mercy. For our own sakes we dare not deny even the worst criminal the right to genuinely repent and reform.

Three - we who set ourselves up to judge may not be killers or sex offenders, but we still might not look too good under close scrutiny. I know I don't have the right to throw stones at anyone, even at Huntley, and I suspect you don't either.

Four - none of us have the right to wield the power of life or death over another. As soon as we claim that right, we are in grave danger of abusing it.

Five - killing Huntley will achieve nothing. It will not hurt Huntley himself for more than the briefest period. It will not bring back the girls he killed, nor heal the wounds of what he did. It will not bring redemption or hope to anyone. All it will do is dehumanise the ones who kill him, and perhaps conversely re-humanise Huntley himself - as Saddam Hussein became for many a figure of sympathy in light of his humiliating execution.

Finally, though we may be clear in Huntley's case that he is guilty, in many other cases it's much harder to be certain. Miscarriages of justice and subsequent reprieves are commonplace.

The Bible and capital punishment

Those who seek support for the death penalty in the Bible are on shaky ground. The Old Testament law of Moses did of course prescribe the death penalty for certain offences, though we wouldn't recognise many of these as crimes today - Sabbath-breaking for example. But in fact the death penalty was not often enforced, and the Bible only records a handful of cases when it was - mainly for religious offences.

When we come to the New Testament, all the examples of capital punishment are either miscarriages of justice or abuses of power - John the Baptist beheaded by Herod for example. Neither Jesus nor the apostles ever prescribe the death penalty (leaving aside the highly unusual case of Ananias and Sapphira).

When Jesus himself was presented with a woman caught in adultery, for which the law of Moses required that she be stoned to death, his judgement was 'let him who is without sin cast the first stone'. When all the woman's accusers had duly slunk away, Jesus, who alone was without sin and so did have the right to condemn her, turned to the woman and said, 'neither do I condemn you'. I would say that makes the Christian attitude to the death penalty fairly clear.

But the most compelling argument for me is Jesus' own bearing of the death penalty, in the ultimate miscarriage of justice in all human history. Christians believe he bore it for all of us, on behalf of all of us, and in place of all of us. In so doing, I also believe he completely fulfilled and utterly abolished the death penalty for all time.

In one sense, we are all of us under sentence of death, and none of us knows when our time will come. How will any of us face that moment, and when it comes will it feel like a penalty or a reward?

Walking in darkness - reflections on Holy Saturday

I know it's not quite Easter yet, but I like to be ahead of things occasionally.

Holy Saturday - the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday - is perhaps one of the most neglected days in the Christian calendar, which is strangely appropriate given what it represents - a gap or a void rather than anything positive. It is a troubling, confusing day, one which hardly seems part of the Christian experience at all and which therefore struggles to be represented in the church year. Yet I believe we need to rediscover it, to walk through it on our route to Easter.

Holy Saturday is a day of waiting, a day of darkness; a day of grief, doubt, disappointment and shattered dreams; even of despair. It is the day for all those struggling with loss, bereavement, uncertainty, chaos, chronic depression or other forms of inner darkness. It is a lightless day when the Sun refuses to rise - it is the Long Dark Night of the Soul; the Valley of the Shadow of Death. It is a day in which there seems to be no end in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel; a day when all the former certainties and supports on which life and faith were based have been snatched away. It is a day which for some - even some Christians - can last for months, even years. It is a day in which hope seems dead and God distant, absent or worse still an enemy.

The writer of Psalm 88, the bleakest and most desperate psalm, knew well this experience:

"You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths...

...my eyes are dim with grief... Why, O Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me? 

...You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend."

Holy Saturday does not chime with our expectations of the victorious, joyous Christian life. Yet it is a valid - perhaps a vital - part of the Christian experience, and one that most of us will face at some time. We need to stand with our brothers and sisters who are going through this Holy Saturday experience; for Christ's sake we dare not shun them, blame them, tell them to pull themselves together, or insist that they should be happy in Jesus. Christ too has walked in the darkness and dread of Gethsemane and Good Friday; has waited in the tomb of Holy Saturday.

To those who have been in the dark for as long as they can remember, the hope of Easter may seem a distant, even a false and mocking one. Yet it is a certain, unshakeable truth that for all who cling to Jesus, the tomb of death will one day become the womb of new life; however long delayed, day will follow night. Then truly those who walk in darkness will see a great light; on those who live in the land of the shadow of death will the light shine.

I pray that for all who today stumble in the dark of Holy Saturday, the light of Easter will soon rise.