Why The Cross? Sermon Luke 23:1-49

Dear God, take our minds and think through them; take our hands and feet and work through them; take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire for you. Amen

I was talking with a pastor colleague of mine about a year ago and I was asking him how his Holy Week services went. He said that they all went well and that he thought that everyone who attended was blessed by the experience. He then began to laugh a little bit and he told me something his 10 year old daughter had said. Cassie is a very precocious young lady and after the Holy Thursday service she came up to one of the long standing members of the church and asked him “Why did Jesus have to die on a Cross?” Needless to say the man was stunned and had no idea what to tell her, but he gathered himself and began to explain it to her as you would to a ten year old telling her that Jesus had to die for our sins. She stopped him cold, “No, no, no, if God loves us so much why couldn’t he just forgive us without Jesus having to die.” “Go ask your father” the man replied.

This ten year old girl touched on a part of theology that has been thought about and debated for almost 2 millennia by most of the Church fathers and it is the same question I ask this morning. Why the cross? So many times we simply accept things theologically without asking why because we think that in asking why we are demonstrating weak faith and that the strong in faith simply accept biblical teachings without question. But I say that is backwards. That if we are going to explore our faith and move deeper in our trust of God then we must ask questions. So today let us explore this deeply important moment in the history of our faith.

I want to talk about three different answers to the question of why and then talk about the problems within them and then how all three of them can work together to give, in my opinion, a fuller answer to the question of why. The first answer I want to look at is by far the most popular and the most widely known answer called substitutionary atonement. This answer is also the oldest answer given starting to form within the thinkers in the early Church especially a guy by the name of Anslem. The basic idea of substitutionary atonement is that the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross paid for the sins of humanity. It breaks down like this. Atonement refers to a payment or rather a repayment of wrong committed, in this case it is humanity’s need to repay God for the sins it has committed. God has given us every blessing and every gift, a beautiful planet teeming with life, a brain that functions in ways we have yet to fully understand, every benefit in the world and we have taken those things and thrown them away in sinful selfishness. Because God is righteous and because God cannot be in the presence of sin humanity must atone itself for the sins it has committed. However, there is a problem humanity cannot atone for itself because we cannot do more good than what we are already responsible for to God. It would take something good to atone for the bad sin we commit. However, all the good we do, worship God, read Scripture, help the poor, are things that God already commands us to do and so we can never make up for the debt that we owe only God can pay the debt. So we are stuck, but God has a plan. Because only God can make up for the sins that we have committed and because it is humanity that is in need for atonement then there must be a God-man to do the job and so we have Jesus that is where the substitution takes place; substitutionary atonement.

There are lots of Scripture that seem to agree with this answer. The one that seems to be the best is from Isaiah 53. -Read Isaiah 53- So we see that in this line of thinking God’s sacrificial lamb was Jesus and the blood of Christ was shed for the sins of the world. This is nothing new to us here in the Bible belt, it is something we have been told most of our lives and I believe that it is true. Jesus is the substitute for us on the cross and lives his life so that we might have eternal life. However, there are problems with this line of thinking. First, God is pictured as a vengeful and wrathful judge who requires a sacrifice to atone for the sins of the world. This does not, at least in my mind, equate with a God that is love, like we see in 1 John 4. As we said a couple of weeks ago, how could the Father leave his only Son on the Cross to die? Secondly, this idea of the Cross equates violence with atonement, as Isaiah says “But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” It was through the pain of the Cross that our sins are paid for now for some of us this adds to the reverence of the moment, there is a feeling that God did this for me. However, for some this is problematic, if someone has been the victim of torture and violence then how can they want to serve a God who demands violence as payment for sin? So we can see there are some problems with this idea of substitutionary atonement.

Let us know look at another answer to the question of why the Cross called moral influence. This idea came more out of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the thinking of Eastern theologians. The basic idea of this model is that Christ’s death on the cross was not a atonement for sin, but was instead the ultimate demonstration of God’s love. In this model God does not desire atonement but sends Christ to Calvary to show the world that we have no reason to fear God because of our sin, because the forgiving love of God has overpowered the mark of sin. The Cross does not pay the debt of sin, but demonstrates that the debt has been forgiven by God and that humanity has no reason to fear penalty or wrath from God but is free to come to God. Another aspect of this answer to the question is that it brings Jesus into solidarity with all those in the world today and those in the past who have died because of violence and torture. Jesus became one of them on one hand so that God could fully understand what it meant to be “the least of these” and on the other hand so that through Christ all those who have done violence and tortured others can also be forgiven.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this point. There was once a Jewish man who returned to the site of his captivity in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. He was one of the lucky ones who survived that horrible genocide. He came there to remember and to mourn. Also there was one of the German guards who stood idly by while all this torture and death took place around him. The guard recognized the Jewish man and came up to him and dropped to his knees and with tears in his eyes he begged the man for forgiveness for the part he played. The Jewish man stood there and with tears in his own eyes he tried to forgive him, but he could not. He said he could not because he was not one of the 6 million that where systematically slaughter, he was not one the ones who were crammed into the ovens, only those people could offer forgiveness to the guard. And so Christ allowed himself to be tortured and crucified so that he could offer forgiveness not only to the downtrodden but to the torturers, not only to the oppressed but also to the oppressors, and through Christ all of those people the guards and the victims can come together and be reconciled to one another. This is the idea behind the second answer.

Each one of these ideas do not fully answer the question of why the cross, but when put together and seen as a whole answer then a deeper, more complete answer can be reached. In what ever answer you hold to the point is still the same the result is the same, Christ died so that we all might be reconciled to God, we might be reconnected to God. The verse in the story that is most powerful for me is 45b “and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.” The curtain that this verse is referring to is the curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the world. This is where God was said to dwell and only the high priest could enter and only one day of the year. However, the sacrifice of Christ which both atoned for our sins and was the ultimate demonstration of love broke the barrier between God and humanity. The curtain has been torn and through Christ we can have a one on one relationship with God. That is why Christ died on the cross, the exact reason we might never know, but what I do know is this God provided us with a means of reconnection, not just for a select few, but for the entire world, every man, woman, and child. As we move toward the Cross of Good Friday we remember that through this horrible, dark moment the love and grace of God shined forth and continues to shine forever.

Let us pray…

Grant, O Lord,

that what has been said with our lips we may believe in our hearts,

and that what we believe in our hearts we may practice in our lives;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.