Sign of Hope

In this middle Sunday of Lent dedicated to honoring the Cross I would like to explore some of the insights theologians, hierarchs, and biblical scholars have on the subject of the Cross.
We all know that when Jesus taught us how to pray, he began with Our Father in heaven. Later he would say that whatever you ask of your Father in heaven in my name will be given to you. Finally, from the cross he prayed, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Even further, Jesus illustrated his oneness with his heavenly Father by enacting the gracious goodness of the Father and displaying a life-giving creativity and a passion for justice. He delights in being with people; joy, insight, and a sure way to God are to be found in his company. Again and again he spells out the reality of the reign of God that is drawing near by using his imaginative parables, compassionate healings, startling retorts to his enemies, and festive meals. Jesus brings with him a different way of being, a new order. He includes anyone and everyone at the table. He forms a community of the discipleship of equals with both men and women who offer each other the mutual services of friendship, with Jesus himself washing the feet of those at the last supper.
We believe that in this and other ways he personifies the very Wisdom of God to the very end. Wisdom is the tree of life, says Proverbs, whose branches are abundant life, as Ecclesiasticus says, and her love has no bounds, as Isaiah says when describing the divine loving kindness as exceeding even a mother’s powerful and tender love for her child. This same God, Isaiah again says, will send a signal to illustrate divine tenderness and integrity to all peoples—and that banner of God is Christ himself, symbolized by the sign of the Cross that we honor today.
When Christian thinkers throughout the ages have reflected on this same cross, they have come up with many kinds of interpretations, meanings, theologies, and justifications for the crucifixion: they have figured out what God intended when Jesus was put to death. They have also figured out what Jesus intended when he directly faced the deadly powers that opposed him. They have often preached popular descriptions of God demanding payment for sin, and of Jesus throwing himself to God in sacrificial appeasement, or of the divine Father and Son conspiring to find a way to redeem and ransom a humanity which has mortally offended God.
Others wonder if this is at all what God is or could be, unless we are talking about a kind of the pagan god who acts not much better and usually much more demanding than any cranky human being, but with infinite power and consequences. This, of course, is not the kind of God we find in the New Testament. This is not the God portrayed by the lives of the saints
We believe that human beings are the ones who left God’s love behind, not that God broke with us because of sin: Isaiah has God asking: Why did I find no one when I came, why did no one answer when I called? And he goes on to describe the ideal messenger of God, whom we see as Jesus, who knows how to reply to the weary, how to encourage those in darkness to lean on God.
The political and religious status quo, those who wield power, find this image of God in Jesus too threatening, and so they conspire against him. The friendship and invitation of Jesus are rejected and he is violently executed, the last in a long line of murdered prophets of the love and beauty of God, as a modern theologian has put it.
When we see the cross we might think of all that makes his death terrifying, state torture, physical anguish, brutal injustice, hatred by enemies, mockery, collapse of his life’s work in ruins, betrayal by some close friends, the experience of abandonment by God, and no longer heroic but powerless, shattered. As Pilate said, “Behold the man:” and we see Christ crucified; there we see the wisdom of God.
Then in an unimaginable way, the disciples experience the resurrected Christ, who has not really been abandoned. Those who were drawn by the attractiveness of Jesus and his gracious God receive the Holy Spirit. They are sent to spread to word of grace and loving salvation so that everyone may share in this joy of life that rises from the ashes of suffering and death.
Once again, this is totally at odds with the image of God as angry, bloodthirsty, and violent, an image reflective of those who crucified Jesus, not of the one who raised him from death to life. Was the death of Jesus really required by God as a repayment for sin? His death was in fact caused by sin, a ghastly sin in itself, by fellow human beings, and therefore against the will of the creative, provident, God, the one Jesus called Good. It occurred historically because of Jesus’ absolute honesty and fidelity to the deepest truth he knew. His confrontation and challenge, his offer of freedom to those around him, evoked envy, suffering and death. Some of his fellow human beings were the twisted ones, sadistic and death-dealing. Not so the author of life itself.
In Jesus God participated in the suffering of the world. Jesus did not retaliate in kind, he did not act to save himself at the expense of the truth, to react violently, to call down wrath. Instead Jesus brought the presence of God to bear on those who suffer and are lost. We proclaim in faith that he was raised up in a way that shows overwhelming evil does not have the last word even today. The sign of the cross is a heartbreaking but powerful proclamation that Jesus is the model of other-directed love, and it is an invitation for us to walk in his footsteps.
God’s presence with and in Jesus on the cross, which the resurrection confirms, is the exact opposite of societies’ accepted ideal of force and manipulation and deprecation for the sake of good order. The wisdom God has declared in Jesus that there is a different way, and that there is no place and no time God is not with us, even at our worst, for Christ is in our midst.