Good Friday, The Point of the Cross

Did you know that the devil is mirthless?  He doesn’t laugh.  He has no joy.  He has no sense of humor.  In Hell there is no laughter.  There is no reason to laugh.  Oh sure, there might be sarcastic cackling, or the odd spiteful chuckle over some gossip, but joy-filled belly laughter, the real good kind, there is none of that. 

  In Hell there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.  There won’t be sumptuous banqueting like there is in Heaven there will just be insatiable gorging and gluttony.  Hell is void of good, empty of happiness.

  I imagine, however, that Hell once came close to having a laugh.  I bet that the moment Jesus’ hands and feet were nailed to the cross, the devil gave out a mighty shriek of distorted, impure retched laughter, and the whole realm of hell shook with dirty glee.

  This was, after all, their crowning victory.  Hell would finally triumph.  Their arch nemesis, Jesus, the “Son of God”, was dead.  He’d no longer pose a threat to the devil’s plan to corrupt the earth. 

  C.S. Lewis captures this evil glee in his classic story, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.  Aslan the lion, the Christ figure, lies bound on an icy-cold stone table.  The White Witch, the devil, prepares to kill Aslan with a knife blow.  She crouches low, and whispers hatefully into Aslan’s ear:

            “And now, who has won?  Fool, did you think that by all

          this you could save the human traitor?  Now I will kill you

          instead of him as our pact was and so the Deep Magic will

          be appeased.  But when you are dead what will prevent me

          from killing him as well?  And who will take him out of my

          hand then?  Understand that you have given me Narnia for-

          ever, you have lost your own life and not saved his.  In that

          knowledge, despair and die.”[i]

  The moment the witch plunged the knife into Aslan’s heart, the moment Evil led the Roman guards to swing the hammer onto the head of the nails at Jesus’ hands and feet, all Hell broke loose!

But the devil, though cunning, is exceptionally short sighted.  What he thought was his final victory, his long-awaited ascension to the seat of power, was really the moment of his defeat.  Whatever poisonous laughter he could muster, was wasted. 

  You see, what the devil either forgot, or didn’t know, was that Jesus hanging dead on the cross was part of God’s plan.  Instead of disproving Jesus as the Son of God, the cross confirmed it.  The cross was not the devil’s idea it was God’s. 

  Atonement

  Jesus said, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him "John 3:17 NIV).  Did you catch it?  The world needed to be saved; we needed to be saved.  Saved from what, though?  The simple answer to that question is “sin”. 

  When God created the earth, it was perfect.  But then Man chose against God’s will, and sin entered creation.  God and sin cannot go together.  God hates sin.  However, God deeply loves his people, us, and could not stand the notion of sin separating us from him forever.  So God devised a plan to save his creation, his people.  He sent his son, Jesus, to be a savior.  Jesus would teach a better way, he’d model God’s way of life and invite others to follow.  But ultimately, Jesus had to die.  You see the penalty of sin is death.  Someone had to pay it.  That someone was Jesus. 

  The payment, the sacrifice, is called atonement.  Atonement means to bring together again, it is “at-one-ment”.  The only way that man and God could once again be brought together again, was through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus.

  We have all heard the phrase, “forgive and forget”.  It sounds nice, but it is ridiculous, unhealthy, and downright impossible.  Forgiveness costs.  Forgiveness is not forgetfulness.  “Forgive and forget” would be like an accountant, who pores over badly kept books full of fudged numbers and says, “leave it to me…I’ll just shred this paper and everything will be alright.”  It won’t be alright!  Setting things right, really right, not just a cover up, costs something. 

  “In the world, in our own lives, something has gone terribly wrong and has to be set right.”[ii]  I remember breaking a window as a kid.  I worried and cried as I awaited the punishment.  I thought about concealing it, or lying about it.  But I was found out, and something had to be done about it.  The fear of punishment is terrible.  But the fear of punishment is not as terrible as the thought that nothing will happen, that bad things don’t matter.  “If bad things don’t matter, then good things don’t matter, and then nothing matters and the meaning of everything lies like shattered glass”[iii] on the ground. 

  The Point of the Cross

  Thus is the cause of Christ.  Thus is the point of the cross.  Something had to be done to make right all the wrong that we humans had done, because the bad stuff matters.  The bad stuff, if left unchecked, would forever alienate God from his beloved.  Therefore, the cost to set things right was astronomical. 

  So, God permitted, orchestrated, the sacrifice of his own son in order that justice be done.  And Jesus obeyed.  He plunged headlong into the darkness, the filth and stench of death so that we would forever have a way back to God.  That is the point of the cross.  This is hard to swallow in our culture, our society that says, “I can do it myself”, the culture of individual freedom.  How foolish we are! 

  “The truth is that we are incapable of setting things right.  The truth is that the more we try and set things right, the more we compound our guilt.  It is not enough for God to take our part.  God must take our place.”[iv]

  In the Old Testament, faithful Jews would go to the temple to sacrifice animals—goats, sheep and doves—to try and atone for their sins.  Implied in those actions is that they could somehow set things right.  That is why Jesus’ death on the cross is such foolishness to so many.  However, nothing short of God’s own intervention, his supremacy over sin, could atone.

  When Jesus was nailed to the cross, so too, was sin--yours and mine.  Had he been less than the very Son of God, God himself, he would have resisted.  Only the Son of God himself could have so passively lay there and allowed his hands and feet to be pierced.  He knew what this meant eternally.  So, as Max Lucado writes:

  “the hands of Jesus opened up.  Had the soldier hesitated, Jesus himself would have swung the mallet.  He knew how; he was no stranger to the driving of nails.  As a carpenter he knew what it took.  And as Savior he knew what it meant.  He knew that the purpose of the nail was to place your sins where they could be hidden by his sacrifice and covered by his blood.  So Jesus himself swung the hammer…and as the hands of Jesus opened for the nail, the doors of heaven opened for you.”[v]

  Now do you see how foolish the devil looked as he sneered and chuckled over Jesus’ ‘death’?  On Sunday we’ll gather here again.  Only this time, we’ll celebrate, laugh, shout and be immersed in joy over the resurrection of Jesus.  But don’t go there yet.  Despite all its resurrection joy, Christianity’s greatest triumph—Jesus’ triumph over the grave—cannot be truly celebrated until we stare up at the cross and allow ourselves to feel the weight of it.

  Today, here at the cross, our eyes are fixed on the dying Jesus.  Here at the cross we see atonement, a way back, things set right.  “Here at the cross, we have come home, home to the truth about ourselves, home to the truth about what God has done about what we have done.  And now we know, or begin to know, why this awful day, awe filled Friday is called good.”[vi]

Notes