Holy Cross 14.9.25
Some of you may have plucked up enough courage to watch the BBC series this summer ‘The Narrow road to the deep North’. The series is based on a book of the same name by Richard Flanagan and I say ‘plucked up courage’ because a lot of the story is based in the jungle as Australian Prisoners of War are forced by their Japanese captors to build what we know as the Burma railway. It is a story that is brutal. In the drama, we are shown how two soldiers manage to slip away from their work party. They were counted out of the camp at the beginning of the day and counted back in at the end of the shift, but the soldiers’ absence was noticed by the guards at the work site and reported back to camp. In response, all of the prisoners are summoned and the camp commander calls upon the two soldiers to present themselves. They don’t. They know that their punishment will be brutal: it might even be death. Australian ‘mateship’ kicks in, no-one will dob their mates in. In the drama, the commander becomes increasingly angry until he simply picks a random member of the brigade to be beaten. He presumably expects the man’s friends to come to his rescue, to name the offending soldiers, but no. With everyone stood watching, the stand off continues for hour upon hour. The unfortunate victim is incessantly punched and hit and then beaten with rods. The violence becomes increasingly extreme and desperate. The man is tortured in front of his friends. No one moves for no one is allowed to move. In extreme pain the man is eventually left gasping for life on the floor of the camp as the monsoon rain pours down. His face sinks into the mud. He is dead. The book ends with this murder being presented as the reason for the trial of its perpetrators for a war crime. This one death of an innocent amongst hundreds and thousands of others in the jungle.
The story gives us an entrance into understanding ‘the cross’ on this Holy Cross day– though the word ‘understanding’ is not really appropriate in that sentence. We all know that the cross is the Christian symbol. We all know of the cross’s centrality to our faith and yet attempts to ‘understand’ it will always fall short. What the cross does or achieves produces any number of aresponses. Jesus’ last week, most especially the events around his death (the occasion of it and the manner of it) occupy some 50% of the gospel writers’ work. His teaching is important. His healings were a feature of his ministry, but the gospels all focus in upon his death: his crucifixion. Similarly, the epistles won’t let go of the cross. They don’t just expound or wax lyrical on what Jesus said. Rather, they wrestle with the meaning of Good Friday (and Easter, we should add).
So Paul, in one of his first letters wrote: 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. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1.22-24)
In the letter to the Ephesians the cross is described as the means by which God brings people together: Jews and Gentiles formed into a new community.
But now in Christ Jesus… He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross. (Ephesians 215-16)
The cross – and let’s be crystal clear, we’re talking about the cross of Christ not just any cross – is the means of God bringing about the reconciliation of all things (the whole created order) to God.
He (The Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son) is the image of the invisible God… in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1.15ff)
One of the ways of approaching the cross is through the word ‘for’. Jesus, the Christ, the Lord – and each of these titles is important for our understanding- dies ‘for us.’ His death deals with the Sin of the world (let alone our individual sins (plural). Reflections on the cross then divide. Some hear the word ‘for’ to actually mean ‘instead’ of us. This is where my story from the TV series connects. The unfortunate soldier beaten on the jungle floor dies ‘for’ the two who were guilty: in the twisted morality of the POW camp, they are the ones who should have received the punishment, not him. But the example only takes us so far and is heavily flawed. The soldier who was murdered did not volunteer for this death, let alone deserve it. This ‘for others’ leaves guilt and shame in its wake: it doesn’t deal with them, doesn’t set the men free.
Another way of understanding ‘for us’ would be to include the will and purpose of the person who dies. Another story from the 2nd World War comes to mind. That of Maximilian Kolbe. A Franciscan Friar and intellectual, he was swept up with other intellectuals into the concentration camps in 1941 and secretly exercised his priestly ministry there. Following a prison escape a fellow inmate was chosen to be put to death as an example to the others in the camp: Kolbe offered himself instead and was killed by an injection of phenol. This ‘for’ is different because it was chosen. It was borne out of love for others. It leaves a legacy of freedom and gratitude, not of guilt and shame.
There is at least one other way of understanding ‘for us’ – in 1 Peter the writer uses the phrase ‘for you’. Jesus’ death is given to us as an example of how we are to live, bearing with one another. Peter writes
If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, where is the credit in that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps.
Here, the scripture offers us Jesus’ death as an example to be followed. Somewhere in our DNA as Christians there must be a cross: it is marked on our foreheads at our baptism and again at our confirmation. We carve crosses into the ground to give shape to our church buildings, and we carry them ahead of us in procession. The Way of the cross is offered as a way of life through death. As Paul put it ‘have the same mind amongst you as was in Christ Jesus who ‘though He was in the form of God…humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross’. The cross here isn’t just something ‘out there’ that achieves something ‘for us’, it becomes something internalised, something ‘within us’ that shapes how we live as a whole, not just how we deal with struggle or injustice.
Which brings us to John’s Gospel chapter 3 with its reference back to the book of Numbers and the strange Old Testament story of Moses and the people of God in the wilderness. The people there were plagued by deadly snakes because of their disobedience, but as well as judgement God also offered them a means of deliverance. The story says that if they looked towards a brass snake that Moses would raise up in the camp they would live. This is a peculiar story. We’re not told how this snake’s image saved the people. Of itself the brass snake didn’t couldn’t save them for only God can save. It seems that they received life as they placed their trust in God and the way they showed this was by looking towards the brass serpent.
So hear again the verses of our reading
For ‘just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
We will never understand the cross but it is God’s means of offering life. We will ponder and we will wonder about the cross and the ‘how’ of it will in all likelihood elude us, but the ‘why’ of the cross is crystal clear. The ‘why’ of the cross is Love. The ‘why’ of the cross is the nature of God: for ‘God is love’. The ‘why’ of the cross is that a God who is Love cannot but come to be with us. The ’why’ says He must be with us in all things. The ‘why’ says He must die our death if He is to truly to share all of our life. And the ‘why’ of love means that He must share our utter helplessness in the face of the meaninglessness and despair of our final enemy, Death. Maybe that’s where the power of the cross lies: God ‘for us’ – yes, but also in God with us, in all things and through all things always and forever. All life transformed and redeemed by His presence.