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.