God was in Christ
2 Corinthians 5:16-21[1]
Through the ages, the images preachers and theologians have
used to depict God have created some significant problems. One example is
Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741).
It was required reading in my Sophomore American Literature Class in college.
Edwards drew the picture of God dangling sinners over the prospect of an
eternity of punishment like someone might dangle a spider over an open flame.
Personally, I’d have to say that seems cruel even for a human being, let alone
God. It certainly doesn’t convey the idea that God is gracious and
compassionate, full of mercy and unfailing love!
Unfortunately, when it comes to Jesus’ death on the cross, many of
us have some ideas that are not consistent with the biblical witness. It’s
common to think of Jesus, who loved us enough to give up his life for us,
standing in the gap for us with God, who is angry enough with us for our sins
that he is willing to consign us to eternal flames. Jesus may come off in a
positive light from that perspective, but that kind of a God is someone I think
we’d want to keep our distance from, rather than embracing as a loving father
who will not let anything in all creation separate us from his love.
Then there’s the question of Jesus’ cry of agony from the cross,
“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” I would say that most people take
that statement both too literally and not seriously enough. Jesus was quoting
the first line of Psalm 22, a psalm that expresses both anguish over
afflictions and also trust in God to sustain us. The same Psalm that begins
with “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” also affirms, “he did not
despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from
me” (Ps. 22:24). If we really take Jesus’ cry seriously, we have to include
this affirmation of faith in our understanding of it.
Again, we have to consider the implications for our image of God
if we really believe that God abandoned Jesus on the cross. The New Testament
presents Jesus as fulfilling the ultimate act of obedience to God’s will by
dying on the cross. Paul said it this way: Jesus “became obedient to
the point of death— even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). If God abandoned
Jesus at the moment of his greatest obedience to God’s purpose, then what
possible hope could you or I have that God will sustain us in our hour of need?
I’d have to say that’s also not a very inviting image of God!
I think our lesson from St. Paul for today might help us here. As
we find in the consistent witness of Scripture, Paul does not set an “angry
God” over against a “forgiving Jesus.” Rather, Paul says that “in Christ God
was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Now this could be
read in a couple of ways. We could read it to say that God accomplished the
work of salvation through what Jesus
did on the cross. That would be entirely consistent with the message of
Scripture elsewhere. But we could also read it the way the King James Version
rendered it, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.” In other
words, if we take the idea of the incarnation seriously, that God became a
human being in Jesus, then God was the one who was hanging on the cross. In
Jesus, God was the one who died for our sins. In Christ, God was the one who
gave himself up for us that we might have life.
This is an image that might sound strange to us. How could God
“die”? We’re used to the idea of God all-powerful as the one who rules over all
things, not the one who allows himself to be mistreated at the hands of lowly
mortals. We’re used to thinking of God as “above it all.” It may be difficult
for us to think of God allowing himself to be humiliated in this way. We’re
also used to believing that God is too pure to be tainted by our failures. How
could God take on our sins? All this may strain our ability to make sense out
of how to hold together God’s love and Jesus’ death on the cross.[2]
But the two are completely consistent with the Gospel message in
the New Testament. As our affirmation of faith for today puts it, when Jesus
died on the cross, he “was never more in accord with the Father’s will. He was
acting on behalf of God, manifesting the Father’s love that takes on itself the
loneliness, pain, and death that result from our waywardness.”[3]
The Study Catechism puts it a little differently: through Jesus’ death on the
cross, we see “how vast is God’s love for the world — a love that is ready to
suffer for our sakes, yet so strong that nothing will prevail against it.”[4] The Good News is
that Jesus completely fulfilled God’s will for us in his death on the cross.
I think sometimes we would like our faith to be easier. We embrace
the good news of God’s love for us. But we shrink back from the full
implications of that love. It is a love that will not leave us where we are. It
is a love that enters into our brokenness in order to bring us new life. And
because “God was in Christ” on the cross, we can also be assured that God’s
love is a love that nothing can separate us from. Just as God never abandoned
Jesus, so God never abandons or forsakes us in his love. Because “God was in
Christ” on the cross, he continues to draw us all into the eternal life he
wants to share with us.
[1]
©2019 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 3/31/2019 at
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2]
Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and
Papers from Prison. The Enlarged Edition, 360-61: “God lets himself be
pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world,
and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps
us. Matt. 8:17 [quoting Isa. 53:4] makes it quite clear that Christ helps us,
not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering …
Only the suffering God can help … That is a reversal of what the religious man
expects from God.”
[3]
Presbyterian Church in the United States, “A Declaration of Faith,”117th General
Assembly (1977), reissued by Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 1991, 4.4.
[4]
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), “The Study Catechism,” 210th General Assembly
(1998), question 8.
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