This is, understandably, one of the most important points in the life of Christ. These final three points in Jesus’ life are of absolutely pivotal importance. In fact, in some Christian circles, these final three (and, most often, just the first two of them) are seen as the entirety of the work of Christ. However, as we will see below, the ascension is indispensable to our understanding of the Gospel.
The crucifixion is a meeting of two very strong forces: The unbridled evil of humanity and the extravagant love of God. This is not the first time that these two forces have collided. They met in a partial and incomplete way throughout the entire history of Israel, where God’s interaction with the people resulted in a painful reshaping of Israel’s life and worship. It happened within the life of Christ, in his very person. Now, at the crucifixion, it happened between God and all of humanity.
The evil of humanity in the crucifixion is a theme that is not always taken seriously. Once I had a conversation where the other person saw the crucifixion as not being that bad of a thing from humanity’s point of view. This argument is based on the idea that, since the results of the crucifixion were so positive for humanity and since God’s will would not have been brought to fruition if Jesus had not been crucified, then the people who had Jesus killed were really not sinning inasmuch as they were carrying out the will of God and bringing about a blessing for all the people of the world.
However, I think this interpretation has more to do with a theological agenda that emphasizes the sovereignty of God at the expense of human agency than with the actual Biblical evidence. This view often refuses to recognize the fundamentally broken character of things like death, disease, war and other tragedies. The argument goes more or less this way: God is utterly sovereign. Because of this, we logically deduce that absolutely nothing happens without God’s express command, even if there are secondary causes involved (Biblical support comes from passages like Matthew 10:29, but such a reading has more to do with reading the theological conviction into the text rather than deriving the theological conviction from the text). If finally everything that happens is good because it comes from God as the “first cause” (to use Philosophical terms), then nothing is really ever tragic.
However, if the Christian doctrine of the fall of humanity teaches us anything, it teaches us that things are not as they should be, that all of the created order is broken and in need of redemption. Some of the implications of this observation will be fleshed out in the chapter on God the Father, but what matters at this point is to allow the cross to be a truly tragic event, something that ought not to have happened, for only when we allow the tragedy of the cross to stand will we understand the goodness of God, be able to make sense of how God acts to overcome evil, and foster in us as human beings the appropriate humility as we see the depths of evil of which humanity is capable.
There are two main points that we must consider when we reflect on the significance of the cross. The first of these is the cross as a sign of the evil of humanity. In spite of the fact that many evangelistic and revivalistic sermons operate this way, we never find the Biblical witness developing a doctrine of sin in isolation from the redemptive work of God in order to provoke an existential crisis to which the cross is the solution. Instead, we find that the moments of the greatest human evil are simultaneously the moments where God’s grace is most fully and clearly manifest.
The cross is the single most evil act of humanity in the entire history of world. This might seem to be a ridiculous claim from a purely secular point of view. After all, there have been many evils perpetrated over the years, some of which have been committed under the pretence of furthering God’s kingdom. One needs only to think of the elaborate purging of human beings throughout the twentieth century to see some of the depth of evil of which humanity is capable. And yet, though we can come up with many startling examples of man’s inhumanity to man, in the crucifixion, we are dealing with the murder of the Son of God. When God condescended to be one with us in our humanity, we responded by putting him to death. Joan Osborne wrote a song in the 1990’s where she asked the question, “What if God was one of us?” The answer, as was demonstrated when God did indeed become one of us is, “we would kill him.”
There is a sense in which God is the cause of this evil act. After all, if God had remained distant and aloof, finally unknowable to humanity and content to love without demonstrating that love, humanity would never have been provoked to such a pitch of evil. Indeed, we never would have had an opportunity to murder the Son of God if God had never become incarnate. And yet, though one might say that God “caused” the crucifixion in one sense, God brought about this tragic act, not by forcing the people to nail Jesus to a cross, but simply by bringing his holiness into direct contact with the sinfulness, evil and rebellion of humanity, exposing it for what it is, provoking it to its highest pitch, and standing in condemnation over it.
This is extremely important. When Jesus was speaking with the woman at the well in John, chapter four, he exposes her sins to her. While modern sensibilities might cringe at such behavior, the woman runs off, joyfully, and tells everyone that they should come and see this man who told her everything she had ever done, that is, has told her what a sinner she was. If Jesus had not plumbed her sin to its depths, she would always have been in doubt as to whether she could trust him. She could always convince herself that Jesus didn’t know how bad she really was and that, if he did, he never would have made those promises. When Jesus showed her that he knew her sin in all its stark evil, she knew that his offer could not be undone by her sin, but rather that her sin had become the bond by which she was united to Christ, because it was the forgiveness of her sin that proved to her the sheer depths of God’s love.
This is something of why the tragedy of the cross is important. If humanity had not been driven to the heights of evil, we might always run from God, somehow imagining that our personal sin could nullify the promises of God. As it is, the single most evil act of human history is taken up by God, endured, and utterly transformed into the very same act by which God unites humanity to himself. Therefore, we rest secure in the promises of the Gospel because if God can so transform the crucifixion, surely God can transform our sin.
The other major point that must be considered is the cross as a sign of divine love. Jesus himself interpreted his death this way when he told his disciples that there is no greater love than to lay one’s life down for his friends (John 15:13). It must be pointed out, however, that the love of God that is demonstrated in the death of Christ is not the same as the love demonstrated in classic stories of self-sacrifice. When Jesus died, it was not simply a human being dying, but God himself. God entered into our brokenness so completely as to take it to its ultimate conclusion. In the act of dying on our behalf and in our place, simply so that he would not have to be without us, God demonstrated to us that God loves us so much that he loves us even more (as astonishing as it may sound) than God loves God’s self.
The reason that the cross is a sign of divine love and not just a tragedy is because, though Jesus, an innocent man, was indeed put to death, he is by no means only a man. The Christian Scriptures portray the death of Christ as being pre-eminently an act of God. However, this act of God is not the same thing as the pagan idea that God is angry and can only appeased by the sacrifice of an innocent human being. Rather, it is a self-sacrifice on God’s part from within our humanity and within our guilt and moral responsibility.
This self-sacrifice of God is a sign that God not only loves us but loves us more than God loves himself. The justification for such a claim lies in the very facts. God, who has no ontological need (that is, a need latent in who God is) to become incarnate and die, chooses to do so because it is the means by which humanity can be reconciled to him. The fact that God would freely choose to redeem humanity in this way rather than to be only the divine community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, shows us that God’s love for us to be with him is greater than God’s love to remain alone as he has always been, that God’s love for us is indeed greater than we would ever dare to claim apart from the reality of Christ.
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