The Cross: Medicine of the World
Second Sunday in Lent, February 28, 2021
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 • Romans 4:13-25 • Mark 8:31-38
Wrestling with issues of faith is always challenging, and yet always so profitable. I don’t think I’m alone in finding the cross shall we say...complicated.
For many years I couldn’t handle it at all. The cross was a revolting instrument of torture. I was not going to hang one around my neck – as I heard someone once say, it would be like wearing an electric chair as a pendant.
And yet, I knew that I needed to wrestle with this cross. I might want to slide over any scriptural references; try to avoid what I considered ‘the uglier hymnody’. But I needed to do better than that. You can’t be a Christian and duck the cross forever.
A turning point for me was that amazing Dali picture “Christ of Saint John on the Cross”. I’m sure you’ve seen it. The luminous Christ high on a cross looking down on the Bay of Lligat, inspired by a vision of St. John of the Cross. It’s breathtaking and cosmic. And I knew that it was time to stop running away.
https://www.dalipaintings.com/christ-of-saint-john-of-the-cross.jsp
In our gospel passage for today, Jesus is beginning to teach his disciples how things are going to play out. He’s trying to prepare them for the really bad stuff that’s going to happen. I don’t think this is Jesus being omniscient. He knows that if he continues to challenge the Jewish leadership by what he says and does, there are going to be consequences because they cannot tolerate either the challenge to their teachings or to the peace. If the people rebel, the Romans will respond with violence. Jesus knows that if he continues with his teaching, he will be arrested, tried by the Jewish courts and handed over to the Romans to be hung on a cross: the punishment prescribed to Jewish insurrectionists.
Jesus did have a choice. He could have shut up shop and gone home. But he wasn’t going to do that.
When he’s telling the disciples about the unfolding of events I don’t pick up any sense of a triumphal journey towards martyrdom. I don’t hear any fascination with this dreadful end. Jesus is very open and straightforward. And of course they are outraged, with Peter as their spokesman. How can this happen to their hero who has God on his side? They do not want to give up their version of the Jesus story with Jesus as their Messiah, overthrowing the Romans and restoring Israel to its former glory.
Jesus knows he is walking towards the cross. And while I would say he’s not going as far as choosing it, he is also not avoiding it. He, who was tempted by Satan those forty days in the desert by the powerful things he might accomplish, could have remained attached to the idol of his own power. He could, as today’s collect writes, have chosen to remain ‘separate and safe’. But he doesn’t: he continues on the way of the cross.
And why? For the healing of the world. A healing that has been in progress for the last two thousand years and will continue.
What healing you ask?! How can any good come out of such a dreadful death? An innocent human successfully tortured to death by the proxy of his own people? How obscene is that?
Jesus had to keep walking towards the cross because there was so much we needed to learn. We needed and still need to be taught so many things so that we could be healed. And for these teachings to survive and not be lost like so many in the annuls of history, they had to be delivered with a dreadful, unforgettable, earsplitting bang. Which is exactly what happened on that so called Good Friday, and the subsequent days revealing the extraordinary fact of the resurrection.
We needed to know that death is not the end. It may look like it is from our limited perspective, but it isn’t – for anyone, not just Jesus. And we needed to know that nothing can ever separate us from God, and God’s love for us. As Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We needed to know that God so loved the world that God came to us, to live among us, as John’s Gospel tells us:
God so loved the world as to give the Only Begotten One,
that whoever believes may not die but have eternal life.
God sent the Only Begotten into the world not to condemn the world, but that through the Only Begotten the world might be saved.
And we needed to know that in the cross lies our salvation. Salvation, that beautiful word meaning saving: saving from sin, saving from perishing, saving into new life. As Paul writes in first Corinthians:
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.
We needed to know all these things, and more. Could we have learned them by a different means? Yes: I think there are no limits to the inventiveness and creativity of God. I am certain that God is trying to reach and teach all peoples in all times and places in whatever ways they might be able to hear. For us Christians, we have the gift of the cross, as well as the record of the life of Jesus and the presence of the living Christ.
And the cross of Jesus is no ordinary cross. It is the quintessential instrument of transformation, and quite a beautiful one at that, gathering into its outstretched arms all the agony, tragedy and betrayal in this world. Taking them all in love. Healing and transforming us into new life.
I share a motto of the Society of the Holy Cross, shared with me last week with a wise friend:
Crux est mundi medicina
Or, in translation: The Cross is the medicine of the world
My journey trying to have a better understanding of the cross of Jesus is far from over. The message and the invitation of the cross are immense. God is both demonstrating powerful truths, and inviting each one of us into the transformational, healing, whole-ing process of choosing life through Jesus Christ, ‘the new covenant’, as this morning’s collect tells us.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
I end with the first Anthem from the end of the Good Friday Service in our Book of Common Prayer:
We glory in your cross, O Lord, and praise and glorify your holy resurrection; for by virtue of your cross, joy has come to the whole world.
May God be merciful to us and bless us, show us the light of God’s countenance, and come to us.
Let your ways be known upon earth, your saving health among all nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God; Let all the peoples praise you.