“From beginning to end, the Holy Scriptures testify that the predicament of fallen humanity is so serious, so grave, so irremediable from within, that nothing short of divine intervention can rectify it.” - Fleming Rutledge
In late May of 2005, I preached my first sermon to the first congregation that had invited me to be their pastor. I had preached “practice” sermons in seminary classes before. I had preached several weeks as a summer intern. But this was my first sermon as a full-time preacher. It was in a little chapel with magnificent windows looking out over Moose Meadow at the base of Mt. Republic, just a few miles from Yellowstone National Park.
The view was of the kind that made listening to sermons difficult but was also the kind that made it easy to believe in the glory of God.
I don’t remember the exact words that I used, but my opening line was something to the effect of, “Today, I am beginning what I hope to be a life-long commitment to standing up before a group of people every Sunday and preaching foolishness.”
My passage that morning was 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 which begins, “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18) and continues, “for the Jewish people demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks” (1 Cor. 1:22-23).
The center of the story of Jesus is his crucifixion and resurrection. When Paul refers to “Jewish people” and “Greeks,” that is his way of saying, “everyone.” Everyone, whether Jewish or Gentile in their ethnicity, finds the message of the cross as either the very power of God or as a stumbling block (nobody anticipated a suffering Messiah) and foolish (why would the death of one person mean something for other people, let alone God’s salvation plan?).
The message of the cross is the power of God.
There is no getting around the fact that a cross is a blunt instrument. It was the Roman Empire’s weapon of choice to stop movements from happening, not to ignite them. The leader of rebellions would be executed on a cross in order to show the Empire what happens when people cross them. It was the most humiliating way the Romans could come up with to kill someone.
And yet from the earliest moments of the Church, the “message of the cross” was declared to be the very “power of God.” The symbol of defeat was the means of God’s victory.
The message of the cross is also a blunt instrument. It confronts us. It confronts us because over and over again the Scriptures tell us that Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried for us.
For us. Jesus’ death was for us. Here are just a few samples.
For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.” (Galatians 3:13)
…And through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:20)
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. (1 John 3:16).
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:6)
Jesus died for us. “For us” in these passages means lots of things. He died in our place as a substitute. He took on our iniquity. He died on our behalf as a ransom. He died for us to make peace with God. He died for us as an act of love which then becomes an example for how we are to love others.
But all these verses imply that the human predicament is so dire that nothing short of the death of Jesus could remedy it. When I trace that logic down hill from the theoretical and the theological to my own life it means that my predicament is so dire that nothing short of the death of Jesus could remedy it.
Jesus lived the life I should have lived. Then died the death I should have died. So that I could have the reward that only he should be given.
This is a stumbling block to the religious. And it is foolishness to those who are irreligous. But for those who are able to really see how their own heart works, this message is the most incredible news possible. “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - Through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25)
In the introduction to Fleming Rutledge’s magisterial work The Crucifixion of Jesus, she makes the observation that “the religious imagination seeks uplift, not torture, humiliation, and death.” We want to be inspired. We want a three-step program to make life work smoother. We want to think “at least were not as bad as….” Instead, we get: “Christ crucified.”
The cross, of course, offers a low view of humanity. We are so bad off that nothing less than the cross would cure us. My Presbyterian colors shine through here. I remember my preaching professor say that the doctrine of total depravity is one doctrine he never had trouble accepting. Human history and the human present bear testimony to this. “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us” is what we often confess in worship. We are a mess. (I prefer “pervasive depravity” to “total depravity”, but it doesn’t work with the traditional acronym TULIP).
But the cross offers an even higher view of God. You are so beloved by the living God of the universe that He goes to the greatest lengths (or maybe better put, the most humiliating depths of the cross) imaginable to rescue you.
Those who see the necessity of the cross, perhaps counterintuitively, are not the dour, rigid and lifeless religious fanatics you would expect (either those so often characterized by popular culture or the ones that are all too often real people in real churches). Instead, when the message of the cross becomes the power of God in a human heart the result is joy, humility, and often a winsome, self-deprecating humor. There is a lightness that flows from the grace of God. “My sin - O the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin - not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more: Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my Soul!”
My commitment to continue to preach foolishness - Christ crucified - twenty-years later stems not from of a preoccupation with sin but with our Savior. One only makes sense in relation to the other. As Flannery O’Connor wrote of her character Hazel Motes, he knew “that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”
The beauty of a confession like the Apostles’ Creed is that it does not allow us to avoid Jesus. I believe...he was crucified, dead, and buried.
* Many people stumble over the following clause in the Creed, “he descended into hell.” I don’t know the history well enough to give a full explanation here, but some question whether this phrase was in the original Creed in the first place. The Biblical evidence is limited (most point to 1 Peter 3:19). Others suggest that “hell” here should really be translated “hades” or the place of the dead - meaning Jesus was really dead and not simply in a coma or something. For what it is worth, I have continued to say this phrase because I think it interprets nicely what Jesus quoted on the cross from Psalm 22 - “My God, my God, why have thou forsaken me?” Jesus experienced on my behalf the full meaning of the God-forsakeness that I deserved so that I don’t have to.
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