Psalm 110 and the cross of Christ

Psalm 110 is one of the most cited passages from the Old Testament in the New, and its popularity continued through the first centuries of the church.  It is not hard to see why.  For one thing, the Lord Jesus quoted it in reference to his own identity.  But even without that, the picture of the triumphant Priest-King, seated in victory at the right hand of God speaks powerfully of the Messiah and his glory.

For us, the Psalm can feel harder to appropriate.  There are elements of the structure which are confusing, and in particular it is not immediately obvious who is speaking at each point.  I think this can be cleared up relatively easily, just by noting the difference between LORD (a placeholder for the divine name, YHWH) and Lord (the Messianic King-Priest).  In verses 1 to 4, David reports the address of YHWH to the Messiah (who is David's lord); YHWH tells the Messiah that he will have victory and eternal priesthood.  In verses 5-7, David sings to YHWH, celebrating the fact that (just as YHWH promised in verse 1) the Messianic King-Priest is indeed at God's right hand, and is indeed accomplishing victory.

Probably the toughest bit for us, though, is the end.  "He will crush kings on the day of his anger.  He will judge the nations, piling up corpses..."  The image of the nations filled with the slain is of course deeply unpleasant, but more than that it sits uneasily with our vision of Christ and his victory.  Isn't this, in fact, the polar opposite of the gospel?  Christ suffered death to deliver his enemies from death, right - not to inflict it on them in vast numbers!  So what do we do with this end of the Psalm?

I think the answer, at least in part, is in passages from the New Testament like 2 Corinthians 5.  This passage is all about the Apostle Paul's missionary motivation.  What is at that drives him out to preach the gospel, at such cost?  One part of the answer to that, it seems to me, is that Paul sees humanity around him through the lens of the history of Christ.  That is to say, he doesn't look at the people around him and then try to work out how the gospel is relevant to them; rather, he considers Christ's story to be the central story of all humanity.  He has reached this conclusion, on the basis of his knowledge of Christ: "that one died for all, and therefore all died."  All died.  Paul, realising that Jesus truly is the Christ, sees his death as an event which has validity and reality for all humanity.  All died.  This is so because Christ took the place of sinners ("[God] made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us...") and suffered the judgement of God on sin - and in so doing, executed the judgement of God on sinners.  Sinners were put to death in him.

And so the Apostle, looking out across the nations, sees them filled with corpses, those slain by the judgement of God executed by - and miraculously, marvellously, in - the Messiah.  This is why the nature of his victory requires a Priest-King, after the order of Melchizedek: his great Kingly triumph over the nations is a Priestly sacrifice of himself.

Because Paul knows that Jesus is risen, he also knows the story doesn't end here.  Psalm 110, after all, envisages the Messiah's enemies coming to serve him; how can they do so if they are all slain?  But Christ died for all so that those who trust in him might rise with him; he put an end to their sinful humanity so that they might share with him in the new humanity, by foretaste in the outpouring of the Spirit ("he will drink from the brook by the way") and then finally in the physical resurrection.  Paul's missionary motivation, then, is that all the people around him are dead, really dead, because of the cross; they just don't know it yet.  But this judgement carried out in Christ is not the final word for humanity.  To submit to this judgement, to accept (in baptism) the death executed on sinful humanity in him, is to find the door opened to resurrection life, and to have a certain hope that as our King and Priest is seated at the right hand of God, so we will be seated with him.

The death of the sinner

As we approach the end of Holy Week, I've been thinking again about the significance of the death of Jesus Christ.  I've noted before that a central element of the New Testament presentation of this significance which I think is often missed in contemporary reflections is the death of the sinner in the death of Christ.  That is to say, when Jesus died on the cross, sinful humanity died a warranted, judicial death in him.  To unpack that a little:

-A real thing happened when Christ gave up his spirit and died.  It is not 'as if' we sinful people died there; we actually really did.  In God's sight, we died in his death.  The reality of this is, so to speak, crucial.  The foundation of the believer's response to the death of Jesus is faith expressed in baptism, and in baptism we are said to be buried with Christ.  But this can only be the case if antecedent to our recognising and entering into this being dead in Christ we had actually died with him.  In Christ, we really died.  (That might mean we need to rethink what death actually means!)

-The death of Christ was the death of sinful humanity per se.  The Lord Jesus took on our nature (not, note, an individual human being, but human nature).  He carried that nature through temptation and cross, and ultimately to the point of death.  Though he was not a sinner, it was the nature - the flesh - of those who were sinners which he had vicariously assumed.  There is no future, then, in sinful humanity.

-The death which was carried out in Christ was a death sentence, a warranted judicial death.  It was, in fact, the execution of God's just sentence on sinners.  I've been thinking a little, provoked by this post from Ian Paul, about the extent to which we can say, with the hymn, that in Christ's death 'the wrath of God was satisfied'.  This sits at the heart of the understanding of the cross as penal substitution - the idea that Christ bore the punishment merited by sinful humanity.  I think we can and should say, and sing, that God's wrath is satisfied, but amongst other qualifiers I would add that this only makes sense if we understand that God's wrath was satisfied by the removal of the object of his wrath.  It is not that there is a conflict in God - he really loves humanity, but he is wrathful against sin - and so to resolve the conflict he exhausts his wrath on Jesus, like a child punching a pillow until they've let out all their anger.  No, God's holy love and holy wrath are one and the same, and in his holy love for sinners he pours out his holy wrath on them (in the person of Christ) until sinful humanity is done away with.

-The heart of the gospel is that all this happened in him.  That he voluntarily assumed our place, identified with sinners, and carried their case through to death - this is amazing.  When we recognise who he is - the very God against whom we had offended, the God whose holy wrath burns with all the heat of his infinite holy love - well, then it is simply breathtaking.  That my death took place in him, that the death which awaits me is merely the shadow of death with nothing of judgement in it, this is the wonderful significance of the cross.  The key question, I think, which it provokes is: if all this happened to me in him, what then is to happen in me?  And the answer to that is essentially that being dead in him to sin, I ought to (and must) die in me to sin; that by the Spirit I am to be enabled to make real in my life and experience what is already real in my very being, because real in him.

Dead with Christ

I've written about this briefly before, but over the past week or so as we've particularly remembered the atoning sacrifice of Christ it has struck me again: we (evangelicals, I guess) are pretty good at talking about the glorious truth of Christ's substiutionary sacrifice, with its happy consequence that we no longer face the wrath of God.  We are less good at talking about the glorious truth of Christ's representative sacrifice, with its happy consequence that we are no longer the sinners we were.

To unpack that a bit, we say quite clearly that Jesus bore the penalty for sin that we deserved, thus taking it from us.  He, the righteous one, stands over against us and takes from us the burden of our guilt, suffering in our place.  We say that, and let's be clear: we can't say it enough.  This is glorious, it is Scriptural, it is beautiful.  Bless the Lord.

But we don't say, or at least we don't say nearly so much, that when Jesus died as our representative on the cross he really brought about our deaths.  But that is a big part of the New Testament message.  "One has died for all, therefore all have died."  "We have been united with him in a death like his...  our old self was crucified with him."  "I have been crucified with Christ."

These verses, and many others - I would argue that this is the dominant theme of the NT presentation of the atonement - are saying something different from substitution.  They follow the way of Christ into the presence of sinners, accepting solidarity with sinners at his baptism, maintaining that solidarity throughout his ministry ("a friend of tax collectors and sinners") - not resisting or avoiding the appearance of guilt, crucified between two obvious malefactors.  Born in scandal, living with sinners, dying with criminals; he, the sinless one, with us sinners, really with us.  And in his death, therefore, us with him, really with him.  And therefore dead, died, executed.

This has hugely important consequences. 

Why is God satisfied in the atonement which Christ makes?  For sure the penalty is paid, but there is more: the sinner who stood opposed to God is taken away, crucified and dead in and with Christ his sinless representative. 

Why should we do mission, taking the gospel out?  For sure because of the good news of substitution, but even more because in Christ the death sentence on sinful humanity has been pronounced and carried out (2 Cor 5!); the situation for all people, each individual person, has changed, and they need to know.

Why should I live a distinctive and holy life?  For sure the sacrificial death of my substitute is a powerful motive to love, but the standard New Testament appeal is not to gratitude but to simple reality: you, the sinful old you, died; how can you continue to live as if that old self was still around?

Maybe I've just missed it, but I don't think this theme is big enough in our preaching and teaching.

The Triumph of the Christian

A Triumph was a Roman celebration of victory, granted by the Senate, in which the victorious general entered Rome followed by the captive leaders of the vanquished, a display of captured booty, and his own victorious troops.  The New Testament contains, I think, four 'moments' which could be thought of as Triumphs, each of which is illuminating for understanding what victory as a Christian looks like.


The first Triumph is recorded in all four Gospels (Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11; Luke 19:28-40; John 12:12-19), and of course we celebrated it yesterday on Palm Sunday.  Jesus enters Jerusalem, accompanied by his followers, who shout his acclaim.  Although it is not explicitly identified as a Triumph in the text, the echo of the Roman ceremony would surely have been picked up by the readers of the Gospels, as it has been by the church - hence the traditional description as the 'Triumphal Entry'.  Luke records that the disciples were prompted to their cries of praise by remembering "the mighty works they had seen"; I think it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that Jesus' followers saw his progress from Galilee to Jerusalem as a protracted running battle (consider the many encounters with demons), a battle which Jesus had won and which led to the victorious entry to the capital city.  At the same time, the humility of Jesus shown in his Triumph stands in sharp contrast to the self-aggrandising display of your typical Roman general.  There is something incongruous already in this Triumph.

The second moment of Triumph brings home this incongruity.  In Colossians 2:13-15, the Apostle Paul describes God's Triumph over "rulers and authorities" - spiritual powers of evil.  These powers are overcome and led in Triumphal procession precisely at the cross of Christ.  (Whether verse 15 should end with 'in him' [that is, Christ] or 'in it' [that is, the cross] the crucifixion is still in view from verse 14, and indeed the whole wider context).  The actual victory is won at the cross; the real Triumphal procession towards which the entry into Jerusalem could only point takes place on the first Good Friday.  It's a Triumph that looks like a defeat, a celebration of victory that looks like a crushing humiliation.  Jesus is dragged to Calvary carrying his cross, stripped, and lifted up to the mocking view of all, and yet it is precisely as this happens that the rulers and authorities are 'stripped' of their power to harm, exposed as the empty things they always were, and dragged in Triumphal procession behind the crucified Son of God.  The death of Christ is the Triumph of Christ.

It is because of this deep incongruity - the suffering and the victory - that the third moment of Triumph takes the shape it does.  The Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 2:14 describes his own missionary journeys as a Triumphal procession, led by Christ.  In this use of the image we are looking at a different part of the Triumphal parade; in Colossians it was the captive spiritual powers which were in the focus, but now it is the soldiers following the victorious general who come into view.  Paul's work is a Triumph, as Christ leads his Apostle through the world, proclaiming his victory.  But because it is his victory, won at the cross, this Triumph necessarily has a curious shape; read the rest of 2 Corinthians and it is clear that for Paul his ministry was primarily suffering.  He was weak, powerless, almost despairing - and yet this was a Triumph!  This is necessarily the shape of all faithful Christian ministry, and all Christian life; conformed to the cross of Christ, and yet in that cross sharing in his Triumph.

The fourth moment of Triumph comes at the end, when the kings of the earth lead the redeemed of the nations in to the New Jerusalem, every enemy having been finally vanquished and utterly destroyed.  Only at this point will the incongruity disappear, the tension resolve itself.  They were faithful to death, they lived the cross, and now they receive their reward.

So, victory.  The Christian life is a Triumph, a following in the path of the victorious General.  It is a celebration and a display of the victory he has won.  And yet that victory is the cross, which means that Triumph can never become triumphalism.  The victory parade is a parade of suffering, weakness, and foolishness.  Until he comes.

The unique sorrow

When Israel lamented the destruction of Jerusalem, that terrible event was portrayed as incomparable.  "Look, and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow..."  "What can I say for you, to what compare you, O daughter of Zion?  What can I liken to you, that I may comfort you..?"

Is this just grief-stricken hyperbole?  From what I know of the ancient world, the fate of Jerusalem was far from unique; from what I read in the news, much the same is happening around the world today.  It could, of course, be hyperbole.  The authors of Holy Scripture were men fully caught up in the national life of Israel and Judah, and felt keenly the national grief at the loss of Zion.  It would be no surprise if they gave vent to that grief in their writings.  But I think there is more behind it.  The suffering of Jerusalem is unique because two unique circumstances stand behind it.

The first is that the sin of Jerusalem is unique.  Jeremiah writes:

For cross to the coasts of Cyprus and see, or send to Kedar and examine with care;
see if there has been such a thing.
Has a nation changed its gods,
even though they are no gods?
But my people have changed their glory
for that which does not profit.

 No other nation has so rejected its gods - and those gods were just their own inventions, which could easily be changed at will!  But Israel has uniquely turned away from God, the Living God.  The sin is unique.

And the second circumstance stands behind that one.  Israel was a people uniquely privileged with knowledge of God, uniquely party to a gracious covenant with him.  "Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live?"  "He has not dealt thus with any other nation; they do not know his rules."  Israel's unique relationship with God means that their rejection of God is a unique sin, and their suffering is the unique punishment of God on that unique sin.  No matter the historical resemblances to other situations, the internal logic is utterly different.

When one man died on a cross, his historical circumstances were far from unique; indeed, two other crucifixions occurred on either side.  But this man was unique, because he uniquely bore the guilt of all human sin.  And he was unique because he only stood in total unity with God, as God the Son incarnate.

Is there any sorrow like his sorrow?

Preaching the Passion

Some pointers on preaching the passion narrative, mainly for my own benefit as I prepare for Friday...

1.  Tell the story.  Ideally read a decent chunk of the Biblical narrative, but then in the sermon make sure that what comes across is that something happened.  We can hardly dwell too long on the fact that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was a real thing that took place in real space and time.  All the theological and soteriological significance of this event depends on the fact that it was an event.

2.  Don't forget the resurrection.  None of the really important things about the cross can be seen except from the viewpoint of the resurrection.  Okay, that is an overstatement - some people did see (thief on the cross, centurion by the cross), and other people ought to have seen (because of the Old Testament - cf. Road to Emmaus) - but in general it is a mistake to preach the cross as if we didn't know the rest of the story.  The resurrection reveals that the one hanging on the cross is the King, reigning even in his death; the resurrection reveals that this sacrifice is acceptable to God; the resurrection reveals that God has vindicated himself in his justice and grace at the cross.  Even the identity of the sufferer is not truly revealed without the resurrection.  So, preach Friday with one eye on Sunday; or perhaps better, preach Friday as if it were already Sunday morning.

3.  Avoid painting Jesus as a victim.  The Jesus of the gospels is a sufferer, and indeed an innocent sufferer.  But he isn't a victim.  Reading the gospel narratives, at what point is Jesus not in control?  Even when bound and flogged, isn't he the King?  Doesn't the ironic crown of thorns actually mock the mockers?  There are all sorts of reasons, some of them apparently good, to present Jesus as a victim; there are lots of victims in the world, and we want to bring home that God is with them in their suffering.  But there is no way we can make the gospel narratives portray a victim.  He is a co-sufferer, but he is this as the Lord.

4.  Don't give the impression that God was at the end of his resources.  The cross of Christ was not a fall-back position, or a last ditch attempt to redeem a terrible situation.  God didn't give himself away at the cross; he didn't empty the tank to save us.  The cross was always the plan.  If there are aspects of the gospel story which do seem to point in this direction (e.g. the parable of the tenants, with its sequence of servants ending finally in the sending of the son), read in the context of the whole gospel we have to say that the giving of the Son represents not an exhaustion of God's grace - not the final last effort of God - but the fullness and wealth of God's grace.  It as at the point of his death, when he gives himself for us, that God shows the inexhaustible riches of his love for fallen humanity.  He's rich, not broke.

5.  Don't put the ball in our court.  We can easily give the impression that the cross of Christ only has significance if we respond to it - as if God in Christ has done everything that he can, and now it's up to us to react appropriately.  Of course we should preach with an appeal; of course we want people to respond to the cross of Christ.  But the point is that when we preach Christ crucified we preach the sovereign Lord.  In him, sinful humanity is put to death; in him, God's judgement is taken from us, falling instead on the willing Judge.  This is true in him.  Our appeal is not: please complete in your own heart Christ's unfinished work!  Our appeal is: accept the truth about yourself as it is in Christ Jesus!  The cross of Christ does make an appeal, but it does so in the form of a claim: you are no longer free to wander on your own way; Christ's death is for you, in your place, and therefore it is death pronounced on your sinful existence.

Crucified

God promised that there would come a man who would crush the ancient serpent, defeating once and for all time the rebellion of men and angels - though he himself would be bruised.

God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son, the son on whom all his hopes for the future were pinned, the son who was himself the fruit of God's promise - and then at the last minute, when hope was gone, stopped the knife and sent a ram instead.

God rescued his people from Egypt, but not without blood, for in truth their firstborn were not better than the firstborn of Pharaoh, and an animal had to die - the slain lamb painting the doorposts of the house, death on the outside and life within,

God gave his people animal sacrifices, rivers of blood through the generations, hands laid on goats to transfer sin and guilt - so that sin could be done to death, and sinfulness sent away to the wilderness.

God spoke to his people through the prophet Isaiah, at the point of their great rejection of him, and told them of his servant, the one would who would himself be rejected by the people - and yet would bear sin and transgression to death.

God sent his own Son into the world.  Crucified, he achieved all that had been symbolised and promised.  Here is Satan defeated.  Here is the loving Father offering his only Son.  Here is the rescue from sin by blood.  Here is the sacrifice which does to death our rebellion and removes our guilt.  Here is the Servant who submits to taste death for all.

O love of God! O sin of man!
In this dread act Your strength is tried;
And victory remains with love;
For Thou our Lord, art crucified!

One-way traffic

So, reality is Jesus-shaped.  I want to say that in as unqualified a manner as possible, without any hedging or quibbling.  I take it to be a foundational truth - perhaps the foundational truth - that everything is about, and revolves around, Jesus Christ.

But now let me qualify our experience of that.

My qualification comes in the form of traffic direction.  When we are talking about Jesus and reality, our thinking needs to follow the one-way system.  We move from Jesus of Nazareth - his life, death, resurrection, and ascension - to reality.  Jesus and his story is the first stop, and from that we can make interpretive moves in the direction of the world.  We cannot move the other direction.  We cannot start with reality and make interpretive moves in the direction of Jesus.

The point is interpretive control.  We may, and must, interpret our experience of reality in the light of Christ, and as we do so we will not be surprised to find his story reflected there.  We may not, and must not, interpret Christ in the light of our experience of reality.

The reason is the cross.  The story tells us that Jesus the Christ died in the place of a sinful world; and that in his death, the world itself died.  As a Christian, the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.  That means that I can no longer interpret my own experience of the world in a straight-forward way.  The story tells me that I, the interpreter, have died.  It tells me that the world, the interpreted, has died.  Moreover, it tells me that I do not know what the world will finally be, or what I myself will finally be.  All my experience is provisional, even my self-experience.

The story tells me that I don't have access to the world as it ought to be, or as it was made to be.  Nor do I have access to myself as I ought to be and will be.  My whole experience of the world stands under the sign of the cross - my experience, with the world itself, is judged and condemned, in order to be raised at the last day.  Then I will know what it was all about.  Now I can only know Jesus, and the world in him and through his death and resurrection.

Dead in his death

I think we don't talk about the death of Jesus enough, or at the very least we don't talk about it in certain ways.  We talk about Jesus dying in our place, we talk about Jesus bearing God's wrath - okay, we could and probably should talk about these things more, but they are there.  What we don't talk about nearly enough is the fact that when Jesus died, we also died.

The New Testament is really, really clear on this.  Because one has died for all, all have died.  Objectively, it is true that the end of sinful humanity under God's judgement has taken place in Christ's death.  Subjectively, it comes to be true that the end of my personal sinful humanity has taken place in him at baptism.  Or didn't you know that when you were baptized it was into his death?

It is not only that Jesus died so that I wouldn't have to; it is also Jesus died and I died with him.

This is one half of the basis for the NT appeal to live a holy life as a new creation.  How can you do otherwise?  The old self is dead; the old way of doing things is dead.  (The other half is resurrection, and the vivifying power of the Spirit to enable a new way of doing things).

One important implication is that my sin is always in the past.  Sin is never the future.  Even the sin which I will commit tomorrow is decisively in the past, because it belongs to the old self which is dead.  It cannot therefore define me.

This is no fiction.  Sanctification is not by imagining that the sinful self were dead and seeking to live out our imagination.  It is real, real in Christ Jesus.  Faith means letting that reality as it is in Christ be my subjective reality today by the Spirit.

Being wise

Christians often pray that God would give them wisdom, and it's right that we should do so.  Most often we pray that God would make us wise in a particular decision.  Again, perfectly correct.  It's just an acknowledgement that God is involved in, and indeed sovereign over, the decision-making process, and that the outcome is in his hands.

Still, I do sometimes feel like we're not really asking for wisdom, but just for the answer.  Do we want God to make us wise, or just to have him point us in the right direction for this particular decision?  Sometimes wisdom is not much more to Christians than sanctified common sense, sanctified clear-headedness, or even just sanctified 'getting it right'.  To put it another way, wisdom is all about the process and the decision; it has no content of its own, it is just the way to get to the right outcome.

In Scripture, wisdom has content.  In the Old Testament, wisdom begins with the fear of YHWH (Ps 111:10, Prov 1:7), and works itself out in devotion to his law (Deut 4:6).  That is why wisdom is a tree of life, and why such exorbitant promises are attached to the pursuit of wisdom.  To be wise in the OT is not really to have a canny sense of what to do in a given situation, or to leap to the right conclusion.  To be wise is to know God, to fear God, to study God's ways.  Wisdom has a shape.  It is about following God, perceiving his work and way and conforming our lives to his revelation.  Wisdom is often linked to creation (e.g. Ps 104:24), because the Scriptural authors saw in God's creation his way of working, and sought to follow it.

In the New Testament, the content of wisdom is filled out with a personal name: Jesus.  It is Jesus who is the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:30), and in him that all the treasures of divine wisdom are to be found (Col 2:3).  Wisdom is knowing God through Jesus.  In Jesus Christ, we see how it is that God works, and so in continuity with the OT, we are encouraged to get on board with God's actions, methods, activities.  Wisdom is something that we can learn from Jesus.

The hard part is that this wisdom is particularly the wisdom of Christ crucified.  God works through the cross of Christ, through the crucified Jesus.  That is why in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 Paul is insistent that wisdom will not look wise.  Wisdom will look foolish, because it hinges on crucifixion.  Paul rejects the wisdom of the world, which moves easily from here to there, from where we are to where we want to be, in favour of the wisdom of God, which he reads in the cross of Christ.  Far from being sanctified common sense, this is senseless and foolish from a human perspective, but it is nevertheless divine wisdom.  It is the way God has gone, which means it is the way things work, which means it is the way we ought to walk.

In practice, I think this means that when we pray for wisdom we should first of all seek the answers to our prayers at the cross of Jesus.  In making this decision, which outcome looks cross-shaped - which outcome looks like dying to live?  Which outcome looks like the humanly-foolish, divinely-wise action of the cross?  I think that will often mean running precisely contrary to common sense.  In life, if something is going well, we continue it; the cross may mean giving that thing up to death for eternal gain.  In church, we often assume that growth or success should be continued - if we're growing, let's plan for growth!  But where is the cross?  How do our decisions reflect the Calvary road?

Wisdom is cross shaped, which means it often will cut across what seems good to us.  It often will look foolish.  But Jesus Christ, and him crucified, has become to us wisdom from God.  We should follow him.

Lent 2

But the self-humiliation of God in his Son is genuine and actual, and therefore there is no reservation in respect of his solidarity with us.  He did become... the brother of man, threatened with man, harassed and assaulted with him, and with him in the stream which hurries downwards to the abyss, hastening with him to death, to the cessation of being and nothingness.  With him he cries - knowing far better than any other how much reason there is to cry: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mk. 15:34).  Deus pro nobis means simply that God has not abandoned the world and man in the unlimited need of his situation, but that he willed to bear this need as his own, that he took it upon himself, and that he cries with man in this need.

CD IV/1, p. 215

The cross from two vantage points

Sometimes I stand at a distance and look at the cross, and see that Jesus suffers there alone. He is there, and I am not. He is dying, and I am not. He is enduring the wrath of God, and I am not. All of which is amazing, because everything that he is going through is everything that I deserve but will now never face.

That is the glorious gospel truth that Christ is my substitute.

Sometimes I look down from the cross, and realise that Jesus' suffering there includes me. I died with him. I am there. My old, sinful self died as he died. My old identity as a sinner died as he died. My old way of living and looking at the world died completely as he died. Which is equally amazing, because it means that I can be a new person now - I can change.

This is the glorious gospel truth that Christ is my representative.

The cross from two angles

The Bible gives us two perspectives on the crucifixion of Christ, and the two perspectives teach us two very different lessons.

From one perspective, the cross of Christ represents a divine transaction. The Son of God, in full agreement with his Father and out of love for his people, goes to the cross willingly, bearing human sin on his shoulders. He endures the just consequences of that sin, is punished in the place of those who will trust in him. He willingly surrenders his life, tasting death for others so that those others might live.

From this angle, I learn this: Christ bore the cross for me, so that I need never bear it. My sin is paid for, and there can be no wrath for me.

From another perspective, the cross of Christ represents a human injustice. The innocent Christ is flogged and tortured, accused falsely and strung up by sinful people. He suffers because of the envy and fear of the priestly caste, the pride of the civic leaders, and the cowardice of the Roman governor. He is hated because of what he represents: the righteousness of God in a world full of unrighteousness. And he is killed, ultimately, because people living in the darkness hate the light.

From this angle, I learn this: Christ bore the cross for me, so that I might understand that I also have to bear it. In this world, the Christian will look foolish and weak. The Christian will represent something that the world finds repellent. If we try to get away from that, we refuse to take up the cross, and thus we refuse to follow Christ.

Good Friday

The most important thing that has ever happened in (or out of) the history of the world is remembered today. I've been pondering something that was said at the time.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The speaker was of course Jesus. He was already crucified; it would not be long before he died. His suffering - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - was more than I can describe. But this is the heart of it. Forsaken by God.

How forsaken? Bear in mind, this will only make sense if you acknowledge and confess with the church that this man is also the eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Divine Trinity - a person who has always enjoyed perfect relationship with God the Father. But then also bear in mind that acknowledging and confessing this makes it impossible that he should be so forsaken. God forsaken by God?

Pondering this cry from the cross, I find myself staring into a deep abyss of profound agony and profound love. God the Holy Trinity - the one whom the church delights to call indivisible - is, in some sense at least, divided. As Christ takes on his shoulders the sins of the world (my sins!), he stands before the Father as the guilty one. He, the guilty one! And God is too pure to even look upon evil... What agony.

But what incredible love. God the Holy Trinity sees the world of humanity cut off from himself - cut off from the relationship we were made for, by our own will and act. Does he reject us? No. He takes it into himself. Jesus Christ will be the cut-off one. The alienation and mess of our rampant atheism and godlessness will be taken into the nature of God himself. What was an external relationship of judgement is taken in and made an internal one.

My Lord, what love is this?