God's Unflinching Desire

Every era and every culture has to interpret (and some times reinterpret) the Cross from its own experience. The first Jewish believers, steeped in a culture of animal sacrifice, saw in the Cross the ultimate sacrifice for human sin. Romans, who knew what it meant to have to buy back forfeited family property, saw in the Cross the ultimate act of redemption; Christ securing the purchase of those lost in sin. In a fourth century sermon, John Chrysostom described how the fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden brought death and how the fruit of Christ’ blood on the tree at Golgotha brought life. For John, the Cross represents the restoration of the Divine intent for all of creation.

I remember reading once about a missionary who labored for years on a South Pacific island attempting to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. The biggest challenge was not winning their trust nor was it learning the language. The biggest challenge was this: the native culture so valued treachery that when they heard the story of the Passion, based on their experience, they thought the hero in it all - the person they most wanted to emulate - was Judas. The missionary spent years learning about the culture in order to find a way to explain the Cross the natives would understand and appreciate.

We study the bible and the biblical era in order to understand its culture so that we can understand their perspective on the Cross. Words like sacrifice, atonement, and redemption are meaningless to us apart from that culture’s experience of them. The Cross is all these things… and so much more. These are aspects of the Cross, but no single human word, experience, analogy, or metaphor can sum up the totality of the Cross.

All of this is to say that I search diligently for an image of the Cross that resonates with our own culture and era; and I do so knowing that such an image will shed light on the meaning of the Cross while at the same time being a grossly inadequate representation of it. I described this image in a sermon a few weeks ago and want to restate it again this morning.

I make sense of the Cross in light of relationships, specifically the relationship between God and all of creation. Every human relationship yields both joy and pain. While there are many benefits to being in relationship with another, there is also always a cost. Sometimes that cost is so great that the relationship suffers, and sometimes it ends.

In the relationship between God and creation, and especially in the relationship between God and humankind, there is much joy and blessing. There is also great cost and pain for God. We call this cost and pain ‘sin.’ Sin is our actions toward God, towards one another, toward creation, and even toward our very selves which cause God pain and threaten to break the relationship we have with the Most High.

You may recall that a few weeks ago I drew on the analogy of a parent’s love for an unruly and rebellious child. A parent’s love can be strained, but not easily broken and the hope is the child will return to a right and loving relationship with the parent as he or she matures. We are like the unruly and rebellious child while God is like the long-suffering parent.

The story of Noah and Flood is grounded in this understanding of sin. Human action so pained God that God set out to destroy all that had been created, save for the life in a small ark. But after all was said and done God realized the pain of breaking relationship with us was greater than the pain of enduring our sin and, as the story goes, God set the rainbow in the sky as an ongoing reminder to God not to break away in a response to our brokenness.

So for me, the Cross is the ultimate sign that God desires to be in relationship with us and will bear whatever it costs to do so.

This morning we will use a Eucharist prayer fashioned from The Pastoral Prayer of Aelred of Reivaulx. We encountered Aelred at one of our Wednesday evening services and this prayer, which we did not hear then, lends itself beautifully to the Sunday of the Passion. He prays:

Lord, you see in my soul
the traces of my former sins
my present perils,
and also the motives and occasions
for others yet to be.

I think his notion that our sins – past, present, and future – are ever before God is important because it highlights the price God pays to be in relationship with us. Aelred continues:

You see these things, Lord,
and I would have you see them.
You know well, O searcher of my heart,
that there is nothing in my soul
that I would hide from you.

For Aelred the idea is not to hide from God or to pretend we are something we are not, but to open to God all that we are because God seeks to heal, not to punish. His prayer concludes with this:

This, then, is what I ask, O Font of Pity,
trusting in your mighty mercy
and merciful might:
I ask you, by the power of your most sweet Name,
and by the mystery of your holy humanity,
to put away my sins
and heal the languors of my soul,
mindful only of your goodness,
not of our ingratitude.

In the phrase “mindful of your goodness” I see my understanding of the Cross; that it is the ultimate sign God’s desires to be in relationship with us and will bear whatever the cost of this will be.

This morning, this painful morning when our shouts of “Hosanna” become cries of “Crucify him”, we are reminded in the most vivid way possible that God suffers by being in relationship with us. But we are also reminded that God does this willingly. In Christ on the Cross we have a demonstration of God’s unflinching desire to be in relationship with us. Our sins, while painful and destructive, can never separate us from God. Christ on the Cross tells us this is so.

The Great Thanksgiving crafted from
The Pastoral Prayer of Aelred of Reivaulx:

The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Lift up your hearts.
We lift them up to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give God thanks and praise.

It is a right and good and joyful thing,
always and everywhere, to give thanks to you,
Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
For our sins he was lifted high upon the cross,
that he might draw the whole world to himself;
and, by his suffering and death,
he became the source of eternal salvation
for all who put their trust in him.

Therefore we praise you,
joining our voices with Angels and Archangels
and with all the company of heaven,
who forever sing this hymn
to proclaim the glory of your Name:

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.

Lord, look at our souls’ wounds.
Your living and effective eye sees everything.
It pierces like a sword, even to part asunder soul and spirit.
Assuredly, Lord, you see in our souls
the traces of our former sins
our present perils,
and also the motives and occasions for others yet to be.
You see these things, Lord,
and we would have you see them.
You know well, O searcher of our hearts,
that there is nothing in our souls that we would hide from you,
even had we the power to escape your eyes.
Woe to the souls that want to hide themselves from you.
They cannot make themselves not to be seen by you,
but only miss your healing and incur punishment.

So see us, sweet Lord, see us.
Our hope, most merciful, is in your loving kindness;
for you will see us,
either as a good physicians sees, intent upon healing,
or else as a kind master, anxious to correct,
or as a forbearing father, longing to forgive.

On the night before he died for us,
Jesus gathered with his disciples,
and seeing their sins and shortcomings,
took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and shared it with them
saying,

“Take. Eat. This is my body which is given for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.”

Then our Lord took a cup of wine, gave thanks, and shared it, saying:

“This cup is my blood of the new covenant
given for you, and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.
Whenever you drink this, do this in remembrance of me.”

Therefore we proclaim the mystery of faith:

Christ is died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

We bring before you these gifts of bread and wine,
praying that the Holy Spirit would sanctify them
to be the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ our Lord.

And we pray that your Holy Spirit would sanctify us
in heart, soul, mind, and strength.

This, then, is what we ask, O Font of Pity,
trusting in your mighty mercy and merciful might:
We ask you, by the power of your most sweet Name,
and by the mystery of your holy humanity,
to put away our sins and heal the languors of our souls,
mindful only of your goodness,
not of our ingratitude.

All this we ask through your Son Jesus Christ.
By him, and with him, and in him,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father,
now and forever. Amen.