Sermons and talks
|
|
St Paul’s view of the Cross |
Paul writes, ‘God forbid that I should boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world is crucified to me and I to the world!’ These extraordinary words of Paul tell us the Cross was the heart of his faith, the centre of his life, and the focus of his ministry. He defines the gospel as ‘the message of the cross’, his ministry as ‘we preach Christ crucified’, baptism as initiation ‘into His death’ and the Lord’s supper, the Eucharist, as a proclamation of the Lord’s death We will again use the ancient ‘cross-head’ that lives in the Lady Chapel and consider the four faces. Just as the four gospels provided for us four different perspectives on the cross, we shall see how Paul, too, presents a multi-faceted doctrine of the cross. We shall look briefly at Redemption, Reconciliation, Propitiation and Justification. And we will have time only to consider each in a thumb-nail sketch. In all that follows we need to remember that Paul, like his Lord Jesus, was a Jew; steeped in the words of the Old Testament (even as his Lord was) and everything that we consider tonight grew out of the Old Testament, and from the Lord’s teaching. In the Vicar’s introductory sermon in Lent 1 he reminded us of the way the Law and the Prophets point forward to the Cross. In my mind’s eye that little stone crucifix has grown so that it stands tall before us. We look up into the face of the rough-hewn Christ to see what He has to say to us. He looks down in sorrow and pain and forgiveness, and always with love. He looks down to tell us of the message of His Apostle Paul; each face a perspective of the message of the Cross. We walk round this huge piece of granite. In Mark’s gospel an argument is recorded when James and John expressed their hope to sit on Jesus’ right and left in glory. Not surprisingly the other disciples were furious. In explaining the nature of discipleship Jesus used these words ‘The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’.This incident, recorded also in Matthew, is highly significant. The word ransom and its associated group of words convey the sense of redemption by the paying of a price to secure freedom. This is the major sense conveyed in the OT and in secular authors when they write, for example, of a slave being set free: a price is paid, the slave set free. Redemption is the name for the process. After the discovery of the empty tomb, two disciples encounter Jesus without knowing Him and unburden themselves to Him. Cleopas, one of the two, speaks of their disappointment because they had ‘hoped that He was the one to redeem Israel.’ In other words it was a common belief in Judaism that God would redeem His people; and the disciples had seen Jesus as that Redeemer. You will remember that Jesus chides them, and points to the prophets to show that the Christ had to suffer these things before entering His glory. The words immediately remind us of Is 53 and the Servant suffering for many: ‘Surely He has borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows…He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities… and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all’. Paul is in a position to expand on this with both insight and ‘hindsight’. In a wonderful passage in chapter 1 of that wonderful book Ephesians, Paul writes of Christ ‘in whom we have the redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our sins, according to the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us’. In other words, through His tremendous love and grace, God enabled the forgiveness of our sinful natures; and He did it through the shedding of blood – that is Christ’s death on the cross. This is the message we imagine of the east side of stone crucifix. We hasten round to the opposite side, the side that faces west 2. Reconciliation In the O.T. there is the belief that God is angry when men sin, and this demands an act of reconciliation. In Judaism, Rabbis typically taught that a person must be reconciled to his fellow if he would expect to be reconciled to God. A recurrent theme in the O.T. is that of peace –‘shalom’. (It is ironical that for a people that were continually in conflict with their neighbours, the importance of peace is found in each book of the law, and throughout the prophets!) So in Numbers we have those wonderful verses: ‘The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace’. The child about whom Isaiah prophesised, was to be called ‘Wonderful Counsellor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace’. What is this peace? The Hebrew ‘Shalom’ means more than stopping enmity: it means ‘completeness’, ‘well-being’. The equivalent Greek word means ‘peace’, ‘unity’, ‘concord’. One commentator puts it like this: it is a ‘tranquillity of mind which comes with assurance of being reconciled with God and under His care.’ The group of words that are used by Paul for reconciliation convey ‘a thorough change of heart’. So in his marvellous passage in 2 Corinthians when he writes of the Christian in terms of ‘if any one is in Christ he is a new creation’, he goes on to say ‘all this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.’ This great doctrine of reconciliation occurs in most of his letters: the change of heart it implies becomes the message we proclaim. When we walked round the four-faced crucifix from East to West, we moved with hastening step and downcast eyes past the North face, to which we now must return. 3. Propitiation This northern face is little visited. It never looks directly on the daylight and the dark gloom of its surface well suits the sombre message it speaks. This is the face of the crucifix which, if we dare look upon it, speaks of the wrath of God. The doctrine it dares to utter is that of PROPITIATION. There are those who never visit this face. It is too severe. It seems to fly in the face of love. More something to do with pagan gods, than the everlasting Father, whose very name is love. So if you feel repelled by this view of the cross, you are in the company of not a few distinguished theologians. Professor C.H.Dodd whose work was much esteemed, was quite clear that he regarded the wrath of God as ‘a thoroughly archaic idea’ and he argued that the word group for ‘propitiation’ should be seen as ‘expiation’. My Bible puts it as a ‘sacrifice of atonement.’ Moreover, many congregations are probably ill-at-ease with the concept of God’s anger. Two world wars, and the passing of three or so generations, to say nothing of inevitable fashions in theology, have made us increasingly uncomfortable with some parts of the Bible. But let us be cautious. There are 580 references to the wrath of God in the O.T. (I have not personally counted them!) Do we discount them? Do we write off the whole of the O.T. while we are at it? Maybe the wrath of God does sounds archaic, or the stuff of cartoon characters. (Beware of the wrath to come!) But what about the holiness of God? Do we write off that too? Clearly God’s wrath cannot be confused with the irrational anger we too frequently find in humankind (and indeed in heathen deities). It has to be granted that ‘anger is not an ideal word for our purpose’; but as it has been carefully argued ‘there must be an eternal recoil against the unholy on the part of the all-holy God.’ God does not just overlook sin in a kindly manner’. Yet it is fair to add that the O.T. also consistently regards God as a God of mercy, so that although we sin, yet God ‘delights not in the death of the sinner’, and He provides the way in which the consequences of sin can be averted. We heard how the prophet Micah finishes his prophecies with the words ‘Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression… You do not stay angry for ever, but delight to show mercy’. What of the gospels? I, perhaps like you, do not feel comfortable with some of the parables and teaching of Jesus. Phrases like ‘the eternal fire’, ‘the fire that is not quenched’, ‘power to cast into hell’, ‘in like manner perish’, ‘outer darkness’, ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’…and so on. It seems to me that on the cross there is a coming together of the holiness of God, and the love of God. It is the place where God Himself resolves His hatred for sin, with His love of the sinner. It is seen in the anguish of Jesus at the Mount of Olives, where He asked His Father to take that cup from Him, and where His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground’ And it has to do with the darkness that came over the land for three hours, culminating with the darkness in our Lord’s own soul “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ It is the combination of the deep love for the sinner and the reaction against sin which brings about the situation which the Bible refers to as ‘propitiation’. So the north face of this great granite cross-head that we have conjured up has written on it ‘Propitiation’ in my imagination. It calls to mind Paul’s words ‘[Christ Jesus] Whom God set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood’ (Rom.3.25) 4. Justification We hasten round to the Southern face of the granite figure. The Christ there looks down in the full light of day with the most startling message of all. ‘You are JUSTIFIED’ it says. ‘Trust in me. Do not imagine that you can do anything to bring about your salvation; for I have done it all. Only trust and I will make you completely acceptable to my Father’. Justification. Where to start? Reams have been written on this aspect of the cross. So all I can do is to hope to catch the tiniest essence of the doctrine of Justification that is particularly associated with the Apostle Paul. When we turn to the Greek of the N.T. we find a similar group of words. The righteous are those who are acquitted at the bar of God’s justice; righteousness is the standing of those acquitted. At the time of Jesus, Jews took it as a basic belief that one was able to acquire merit in God’s eyes. And ‘good deeds’ were gradually built up by keeping God’s commandments, by the study of the Law, and by alms-giving. The final judgement would be a weighing up of the merits and demerits one would have acquired in a lifetime. When our Lord says ‘except your righteousness exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven’, the logic would be dauntingly clear to his hearers. It was indeed difficult to see how their righteousness could be exceeded – granted the premise of good deeds. But Jesus did not grant that premise – their punctilious conformity with the letter of the law. His emphasis on the spirit of the law rather than the letter was a radical departure; it regularly brought Him into conflict with the Pharisees. When Jesus gave the beatitude ‘Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled’ , it is plain that the people in mind are those who realize that their own efforts do not, and cannot, produce righteousness before God, and it is God Himself who will fulfil their longing. It is in the writing of Paul that this thought receives full expression. Paul was no stranger to the righteousness of the law: he tells us he was blameless regarding it! But his encounter with Jesus changed his ideas. His aim became ‘that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having the righteousness of my own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ.’ He puts it even more strongly in Galatians: ‘if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing’. |
