The Revolutionary CrossRoad

We’re spending the season of Lent in a sermon series called the “CrossRoad.” (Listen here.) In his book The Day the Revolution Began, N. T. Wright reminds us that the cross was more than a momentary transaction to deal with individual sins (though it is also that!). The story is much bigger and deeper. The cross launched a Revolution in the ways we view power and kingdoms, and ultimately how we view God’s very nature. In Wright’s words,

A new sort of power will be let loose upon the world, and it will be the power of self-giving love. This is the heart of the revolution that was launched on Good Friday. You cannot defeat the usual sort of power by the usual sort of means. If one force overcomes another, it is still “force” that wins. Rather, at the heart of the victory of God over all the powers of the world there lies self-giving love, which, in obedience to the ancient prophetic vocation, will give its life “as a ransom for many.”

Paul picked up that on the cross Jesus was also exposing and defeating the powers that have held the human race in bondage since the very beginning. “Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col. 2:15). Jesus was not getting an angry God off our back, but dealing with a deeper problem plaguing the human project: idolatry. As Wright puts it:

“The diagnosis of the human plight is then not simply that humans have broken God’s moral law, offending and insulting the Creator, whose image they bear—though that is true as well. This lawbreaking is a symptom of a much more serious disease. Morality is important, but it isn’t the whole story. Called to responsibility and authority within and over the creation, humans have turned their vocation upside down, giving worship and allegiance to forces and powers within creation itself. The name for this is idolatry. The result is slavery and finally death.”

For too long Christians have pit Paul’s message of “justification by faith” over and against Jesus’ message of the in-breaking Kingdom. We’ve been taught that Paul preached the gospel and the emphasis is usually on the cross. Meanwhile, Jesus’ life and teachings in the Gospels is seen as a strange (and possibly unnecessary?) warm-up act talking about a Kingdom that really doesn’t fit well into Paul’s gospel of personal redemption. The last couple generations of New Testament scholars are helping us to see how the Kingdom and the Cross are part of the same story. As Wright says, “The New Testament, with the story of Jesus’s crucifixion at its center, is about God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven.”

Moreover, Wright emphasizes over and over that the goal of God’s rescue project centered on the cross was not to ease our guilty conscience, satisfy the wrath of an angry, finger-wagging God, or merely secure us a ticket to Heaven when we die. The goal is to restore God’s image bearers to their original vocation of being co-rulers over God’s good creation — of tilling the garden in peaceful communion with God, others and nature itself. In Wright’s words, “Jesus died for our sins not so that we could sort out abstract ideas, but so that we, having been put right, could become part of God’s plan to put his whole world right. That is how the revolution works.”

All of this is a way of saying the Cross paved a whole new path to follow and explore. The cross is not just the bloody instrument God happened to use in his rescue operation; it is an entirely new way to live, a new way to view power, a radically subversive way to overcome evil without resorting to the violent methods of the corrupt powers of earthly kingdoms. The cross is a narrow road to walk with others into a New Way of being human.

Do you want to walk this CrossRoad? Jesus warns us all that it will cost us something. If we do start walking down it, we’re going to need wise guides. One of my favorite “trail guides” is Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his classic must-read The Cost of the Discipleship. Here’s an excerpt to help getting your lungs acquainted with the higher altitude of Mount Calvary’s air. Baby steps and slow deep breaths!

Enjoy the view!