The Cross of Christ

Perhaps the most central - and challenging - facet of a Christian understanding of the world, is to come to grips with the role which the death (and subsequent resurrection) of Jesus Christ plays in dealing with the dissonance of sin and evil that both surrounds and infiltrates us as human beings. To do business with Jesus is, ultimately, to do business with his execution, and to wrestle with the reality that Jesus claims to have endured that suffering willingly, and for our benefit. From the outside looking in, this is the real puzzle of the Christian faith; it all seems a bit over-dramatic and unnecessarily grotesque. If all we’re looking for is a good example, or some helpful teaching, all this talk of blood and suffering and sacrifice just muddies and complicates things for us. At the end of the day, however, this is the very heart of both who Jesus is and what he sought to accomplish in the world. To deal with Jesus is, ultimately, to deal with the cross; there’s just no avoiding it.

To understand the significance of the death of Jesus, we must first understand something about the nature of death itself, and how it affects us. On a basic level, death is the void – the abscess, the black hole – at the center of our existence. Through the ages people have tended to personify death, to relate to it as a force or a presence. In reality, though, death isn’t a presence; it is an absence. It is, really, nothing at all; death is not a thing in itself, it is merely the hole where something else ought to be. Simply put, death is the absence of life.

Much as the sun is the ultimate source of energy which makes biological life on our planet possible, scripture tells us that God is the source of life itself; the true center of all reality and that which holds it all together. Our story, as human beings, is that of a rejection of God as the center and source, attempting to play god rather than be with God; essentially locking ourselves in a dark room and attempting to be our own sun. Walking away from our creator and source, we rejected God as the center of our reality. The trouble was – and is – that we have nothing in our own hands with which we are able to fill that void. Where there was once a life-giving sun, there is now only a black hole – an emptiness, a chaos – a void, consuming and draining life rather than giving it. We walked away from the source of life and, in that moment, as a people we discovered death.

The destructive power of nothingness is an awesome and terrible thing to behold. And, though we’d rather not think about it most days, it is the fear of that great void that is the engine of much of our day-to-day existence. Like astronauts, separated from the vacuum of space by a paper-thin sheet of Mylar, our carefully crafted lives tirelessly strive to give us the illusion of security, in the face of an awesome emptiness and futility that we can’t really bear to think about seriously, lest we just go nuts. Whether it’s nations warring violently over natural resources or the more subtle interpersonal warfare of jockeying for recognition, influence and financial status, we people kill each other – literally and figuratively – in our efforts to just hang on for a little bit longer to that life that we feel so inevitably slipping away. For all our posturing and grand esteem for ourselves, we are frail and afraid. The world around us behaves and feels as if it is spinning apart as a result of our cumulative insecurity and the attempts to combat that insecurity with our own resources. This is the reality and the power of death.

Even death itself would not so affect us were we not painfully aware of how tragic the whole situation is. There is something at the soul of humanity that just cries out that we are not meant to be temporary and futile beings. There is just something about humanity, however much we may attempt to deny it, that echoes with eternity. This is the beauty in the midst of the brokenness; the beauty that the world most deeply longs to be restored.

It is in this context that we can begin to understand the mystery and the significance of the death of Jesus. Death – this void in existence created as a result of our desire for self-sovereignty – is a real problem. It has real consequences. If we are to ever get past it, then, it follows that we need a real solution. God, in his inexplicable desire to see humankind restored to rightful, life-giving relationship with himself, offers the only solution possible: death must be defeated. The void must be filled. The emptiness must be overcome. As we lack the resources to do so, God furthermore proceeds to accomplish this himself, on our behalf.

Death – and all the present consequences of chaos and brokenness that it yields all around us – could not be ignored. It couldn’t be passed over, explained away, or walked around. It had to be entered… and overcome. In Jesus, God did what would otherwise be impossible for God to do; namely, die. Stepped directly into our own black hole and was, if only for a moment, overwhelmed by it. As it turns out, however, the fullness of life that is inherent in Jesus was too much: having consumed life itself, the emptiness was no longer empty, the void found itself filled. What we could have never accomplished on our own, Jesus accomplished on our behalf.

Jesus died the death we were already dying in order that we might have the life we could never live on our own. As such, the cross of Christ stands as the turning point of human history, and the moment which all people must ultimately do business with, determining for ourselves how we will respond.