CROSS is for real

"Holy Cross" is the name of the church in Minneapolis I once belonged to. It is also September 14.

But how strange! "Holy cross"? What an impossible combination is "holy" and "cross." Something "holy" belongs to God, is intimately a part of His work or even of His own being. But how could The Holy One have anything to do with an electric chair, a noose or a guillotine--let alone a cross. Such instruments are unholy: associated with death, evil-doers, even gore. So if a cross is God's, is it a cross God uses to terminate opponents of His kingdom? According to some of the Lord's biggest fans (the prophets), He indeed uses instruments for that purpose: His sword, captivity, His fire and locusts.

But the Holy Cross is not how God does in evil-doers. Rather, it is where His Son is done in as an evil-doer. Yet this outrage is God's own means of pardoning a whole world of evil-doers from their guilt and death sentences. That kind of mercy is indeed intimately a part of God's being and work, so the Cross must be holy despite appearances. The cursed and ugly cross is God's means of blessing the cursed and of making the ugly shine with the beauty of holiness, of pulling us from hell to heaven.

But to speak more plainly, God's means is not really the Cross itself but rather Jesus' personal ruin. So why then focus on the Cross? Why have a day of observance for that rough-sawn, rude symbol of contempt? Is it important? Only in that it is where God's great rescue of humanity took place. The Cross, like a tree, roots Jesus' death into our earth and into its history. So His self-sacrifice with its vindicating resurrection is no theory about God nor a timeless myth to suggest God's nature, but a datable ("under Pontius Pilate" and "on the third day") and place-able (outside Jerusalem) event. So we focus on the Cross to gain what pilgrims to the Holy Land gain: a sense of the "happened-ness" of biblical events. By being where the events took place pilgrims are made aware that these are not wonderful fiction, but God in fact did these things right down on our earth. So contemplating the solid wood of the Cross reminds us of our Lord's acting in real time to save us.

Jesus on the Cross by Ediberto Merida Cuzco, Peru

No wonder that in the spring of 629 A.D. the Roman emperor Heraclius, having recovered the Cross from the Persians after 15 years, in his excitement put it on display in Jerusalem, initiating Holy Cross Day. The date of September 14, however, derives from an earlier celebration and earlier emperor, being the day in 335 A.D. of the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, erected by Constantine near the spot where the Cross first stood.

Modern skepticism may ask whether Heraclius really had what he wanted to have (especially since the whereabouts of the True Cross go unmentioned for 300 years after the Crucifixion, when it was said to be found during excavations for the basilica). But even while we ask, we can understand Heraclius' enthusiasm to have a physical artifact to connect us to history's greatest event.

Modern skepticism may even ask whether Constantine had the right place to locate the basilica. But even if he was off by a few yards or a few miles, there is some place about Jerusalem where the Atonement took place, and that is our joy. It takes a place for anything to happen. Real events, unlike wishful thinking, need places to happen in, so we say they "take place." Our comfort is that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ took place with all the irrevocability of a deed done where He savingly took our place.

But in another way this is itself a problem. For in placing and dating Jesus Christ's saving action we become aware of how far away and long ago it is from our lives. How does what He did back then affect me? Really, how does it?

Events affect those immediately involved, of course. And certain events, like the battle of Gettysburg, in time prove to have diverted the flow of history into a particular channel, affecting whole nations and making all subsequent history be what it would not otherwise have been. In that sense, all are affected by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For the world has been changed through the faith, church, doctrine and life that the Holy Spirit created from those events. From the Christianization of the Roman Empire to the American colonists' congregationalist and pluralistic convictions, by now the whole global A.D. village would be un-imaginably different--what would it be like?--had Jesus Christ not died and risen again.

Such great, cultural tides are important, but they are not how the Cross affects me. They are not the completion of the redemption which took place. So, again, how does what happened there and then get to me here and now? Through what medium, if not cultural history, does the Cross impact me? Perhaps through a piece of the Cross itself, or the holy grail? No, I have not seen them.

The medium is humbly ordinary. It is the telling about the Cross. "We preach Christ crucified." The wire through which the power of what happened at the Cross is transmitted effectively into my life is---the simple telling about it. We hear that the Son of God divested Himself of His heavenly privileges to take on our fragile, mortal, compostable flesh, in which He let Himself be killed in cruelty and contempt in order to atone for my wrongs and absolve me of guilt. Will not hearing such great news affect a person powerfully--at least if it is believed? Can the report of such a certain salvation, at such great cost, done solely out of Christ's grace--can that leave a person unimpressed? (Again, if the story is believed.)

Now, this story has its powerful effect on a person usually only gradually. Sometimes suddenly, yes, but usually the story's effect fits our Lord's agricultural parables of steady but slow growth. In the testimony that follows this article, for example, you can read how the story's effect grew in the writer, surprisingly even into his workplace.

And what effect does this story have on me, when it brings the Cross's voltage and I believe it? Its effect is to put also me to death, though delightfully. This is obviously not medical-biological death. Not our bodies are brought to their end by the story. This "death" is the ruin of my perception that I am, or can be or should be, self-sufficient. The story tells me that the very best thing about me is not from me. The most important thing about my life is nothing that comes from out of me, but is the gift of eternal life that I receive because of the profundity of Christ's love for me. This dwarfs to insignificance my accomplishments and failures, my faults and talents, my good works and my sins. Through the telling of the story, with my believing, His love and salvation become my greatest joy and the foundation for all my living. "He died for all so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him who died and was raised for them," (2 Cor. 5:15). One early pay-off of this new basis of living is described in the following piece as an inner freedom from the burden of evaluations, which is faith.

I suppose it could be said that this death and resurrection of my self-understanding from self-based to Christ-based could happen in me even if the story were not true, so long as I believed it to be true. That gain, if it bore fruit, would be good but sadly temporary. For although I would be changed within the confines of my own biography, my status before God would be unchanged. For if the story is not true, if Christ did not die for my sins, then my sins, which even after my change are still daily abundant, are still mine and I remain a condemned evil-doer before God. My only hope is that the story that I believed, which changed me because I believed it, must actually have taken place. The Holy Cross is that solid, tangible place.

In this strange way, the Holy Cross is after all God's cross by which He terminates evil-doers, though not direly or directly. We who were born evil-doers come to an end by the Cross, through its telling. We end not bitterly or lastingly but we end to begin anew in Christ, in joy. The Cross is holy because it is savingly Christ's, both when it was His death for us and when it is our death into Him.

tbcm