F. Harry Daniel
Second Presbyterian Church
Sermons: March 18, 2007

"The Gospel and the Cross"

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There it is. Beautiful isn’t it. How can that cross be good news? It was a Roman method of punishing treason. Designed to cause extraordinary pain it is one of the most frightful things invented by human beings. Palestine was forested with them in the first century. A cross was not good news, was bad news! It declared to a human being made in God’s image you are wrong, useless, no good, hopeless, untrustworthy, damned and you will die. Yet there it is at the front of our sanctuary. Why?

Scripture Readings:
Mark 15:21-34, Romans 5:8

Mark 15:21-34
They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus. Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of a skull). And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh; but he did not take it.

And they crucified him, and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take. It was nine o'clock in the morning when they crucified him.

The inscription of the charge against him read, "The King of the Jews." And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left.

Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, "Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!"

In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, "He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe." Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Romans 5:8
But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. (NRSV)

The early church came to a startling conclusion: the cross is the defining moment for human beings, for them, for us. More it is the defining moment for God when the heart of the triune God is revealed, when we realize that God has always been this way. What way? Paul puts it with irresistible clarity: "But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." The cross is about the love of God. This is a love-driven image. No, this is a triune God-driven image that defines love. The very nature of God is reflected on the cross. Christ’s passion is God’s passion. This is what the life of God is. The Trinity loves us with the same love with which they love each other. The triune God has been doing this since the beginning. In the Old Testament, God is Yahweh the caring, forgiving one, generous in steadfast love and faithful.

At the heart of the cross is God’s stance in Christ of not letting human beings remain enemies and of creating space for human beings to come home. Read as the culmination of a larger story of God’s dealings with humanity, the cross says that despite its manifest enmity toward God, humanity belongs to God. God will not be God without humanity. The cross is God’s giving up God in sacrificial love in order not to give up on humanity.

That anguished cry of abandonment we read is a profound cry from the bruised Christ of God into the face of God the Father. Awesome! Those early Christians concluded that the humiliation of Jesus and the profaning of God the cross implied was the price God purposely and freely paid for the redemption of their lives and for the world. What Jesus commanded in the Sermon on the Mount as love of enemies has taken place on the cross through Jesus’ dying, the grief of the Father in the power of the Spirit for the godless and the loveless. God’s will is for restoration not retribution. The loving God can no longer tolerate the idea of the beloved no longer being there. The beloved triune God comes closer to me than I have ever been able to come to myself and brings me to myself in a completely new way. That is gospel. The cross is good news about my life and yours.

This crossed gospel is about God’s identification with us, God’s participation in our life, God’s sharing our creaturely condition, our flesh. This triune God knows our frame and remembers we are dust. Such a God cannot remain God "up there." Such a God knows what it feels to be like a motherless child. Such a crossed God knows there can be no solution to our sin, violence, and fear apart from becoming personally involved. Unlike friends who try to help us from the heights of their well-being: the security of their faith, the security of their economic success, this God must become the friend who stands on the same ground with us, who knows our frame from the inside.

In the act of loving us that much this cross also judges us, me, you, all God’s children. The cross holds before our eyes the unsurpassable depths of human power for destruction and self-destruction. The cross reveals in no uncertain terms that power is always corruptible and its use corrupting. It manifests the failure of the entire world since Jesus was crucified not by the worst of human beings but by the best of human beings. The cross pulls the rug out from under all religious, political, economic, legal and moral self-righteousness. We are responsible for that pain by what we do everyday: our hatred, destructive ways, idolatries. We are adept at wounding God, our neighbors and yes, ourselves. We are the crucifers. That is the cross of our victim. And it doesn’t cease when we become Christian. Pain and violence is something we cause and transmit. Yes, we know better, but our lives have not gotten crossed enough.

I do not grasp that cross, it grasps me. It reads me, understands me, forgives me, reconciles me, breaks me, rebuilds me, will not let me go, and is not finished with me or you. Hallelujah. Thanks be to God.

There is no way of fathoming or analyzing what God is doing in the cross. Understanding is surpassed. Reason can only bow its head and listen. No words are eloquent enough, no deeds may be compared it. That is the story, the old, old story we tell trusting that it will do its work sometimes because of us and, most of the time, in spite of us.

Did you notice something different about this cross? It is empty. It does not have a dying Christ on it. Our Lutheran, Episcopal and Roman Catholic neighbors do have crucifixes and they have value. Being Presbyterian, we like our brothers and sisters know that something has happened to this dead Jesus on the cross. God has raised him from the dead. These two events interpret each other. Resurrection vindicates the cross: it says while you are at cross purposes with me, your God, your neighbor and yourself, I the triune God will cross over to you out of love for you all.

The cross is empty because the outstretched arms nailed to the cross are now by the resurrection still open seeking to embrace you, me, all God’s children, the self-proclaimed enemies of a God who will not treat us as enemies. That is good news. Those arms declare eloquently that there is a space in God, in Christ, in the Spirit called home and those arms are an invitation for the enemy to come in. I’m tired of being an enemy. Can we quit treating each other as enemies?

But it is empty for another reason: Christ is here crossing us, crisscrossing life. Love leaves nothing as it finds it. We are called to take up our cross, not to redeem ourselves, Christ has done that, but to learn to love as we have been loved. That is a challenge to meanness, back-biting, conniving and plotting to control. Resist the cross we do. But it is still good news. Why? The Holy Spirit works in us drawing us to it. The Spirit calls us to understand the cross over and over again in the most basic sense of that word: to stand under. It is not our work; it is a work of grace. Which means that none of us has the authority or power to say to another you are not crossed enough, you don’t have it right. The cross can even overwhelm the hell we create for each other. It wants even to embrace our hellishness and love it to death.

To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting his way is to advocate cheap grace and a deceitful ideology that manipulates people. All four gospels agree that discipleship is to follow the same patterns of radical obedience to God and selfless love toward other people. They insist on living the same pattern of life and death shown by Jesus. Life is crossed, or it is not life. That is not a demand, something that you have to do. The message is that having been loved into redemption, you are surrounded by a presence, a divine presence, a Thou that gives you that measure of security that lets you risk the deepest things you have on others. That is freedom. Yes, there is a command to love. But greater is the fact of the cross that says the God who loves you, lets you get to love others.

Live in the story and see what its does to you. But the journey can be neither private nor self-centered. If you start the journey by recognizing the rich, forgiving, healing love of the true God, then to continue the journey means to join in and with God’s work of healing and love in the world. The church at its best consists of such people doing such work. Every time we come to table and receive Christ’s broken body and spilled blood, we, in a sense, receive all those whom Christ received by suffering.

God was not content to call creation good from a distance. God is down here working for good, to restore creation. God’s purpose is to give us all life, abundant life that the creator God intended for us from the outset – life that is very good. Christ on that cross is for all. There is no time or place or condition to which he is alien or where his story and his Spirit have nothing to give. You can’t tell, live, or die a story that Jesus Christ cannot cross nor God resurrect. That is why the cross is there. The cross takes us into the center of our lives, and then leads us back into the world again with our spirits refreshed and our hearts enlarged.

How does an old hymn put it: "nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling." That’s good news, and even then it’s God’s grip, not mine, not yours. This cross will have its way, it will get us crossed. Thanks be to the triune God whose heart is crisscrossed and who crisscrosses our world in love.