Good Friday Reflections
Christians have a crucicentric gospel and for good reasons. To begin with, Jesus knew what destiny lay ahead of him in Jerusalem, and yet he believed that his death would not be the end of his kingdom message; rather, it would actually inaugurate the very kingdom he was proclaiming (e.g., Mark 9:1; 14:22 – 25).
Early Christian preaching identified the cross as part of God’s design for the renewal of Israel and for the salvation of all peoples (Acts 3:18 – 21; 13:24 – 30). Primitive hymns and confessions of the early church demonstrate that the death of Christ was a key article of faith and determinative for salvation in the early church (Rom 4:25; 1 Cor 15:3 – 5; 2 Cor 5:15; Phil 2:5 – 11; 1 Thess 4:14). The two emblems of the gospel, baptism and Eucharist, were reminders of believers identifying with and participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus (Rom 6:3 – 4; 1 Cor 10:16;1 Pet 3:21).
The message of the cross was central to the preaching of Paul (1 Cor 1:18 – 2:5; Gal 2:19 – 21; 3:1, 13). For the apostle to the Gentiles, the cross was the cosmic event that defined a people and purchased salvation (Gal 3:28; Col 3:11). All the canonical Gospels emphasize the crucifixion of Jesus as the climax of his kingdom ministry (Matt 27; Mark 15; Luke 23; John 19). The Catholic letters, especially Hebrews and 1 Peter, give significant attention to the death of Jesus as a sacrificial act that effects the salvation of those who trust in him. It is not too much to say that the first Christians preached, remembered, and ordered their lives around the story of the cross.
Unsurprisingly Christian leaders over the centuries have spent much of their time preaching, interpreting, and meditating on the death of Jesus. The second century author of the Epistle to Diognetus sounds much like Paul when he wrote: “He took upon himself our sins; God himself gave up his own Son as a ransom for us, the holy one for the lawless, the guiltless for the guilty, the just for the unjust, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal for the mortal” (Diogn. 9.2). According to Cyril of Jerusalem: “Every deed of Christ is a cause of glorying to the universal church, but her greatest of all glorying is in the cross”; and “He stretched out His hands on the cross, that He might embrace the ends of the world; for this Golgotha is the very center of the earth.”
John Chrysostom described what the cross achieved with these poignant words:
For the cross destroyed the enmity of God towards man, brought about the reconciliation, made the earth Heaven, associated men with angels, pulled down the citadel of death, unstrung the force of the devil, extinguished the power of sin, delivered the world from error, brought back the truth, expelled the Demons, destroyed temples, overturned altars, suppressed the sacrificial offering, implanted virtue, founded the Churches. The cross is the will of the Father, the glory of the Son, the rejoicing of the Spirit, the boast of Paul, “for,” he says, “God forbid that I should boast save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” [Gal 6:14]. The cross is that which is brighter than the sun, more brilliant than the sunbeam: for when the sun is darkened then the cross shines brightly: and the sun is darkened not because it is extinguished, but because it is overpowered by the brilliancy of the cross. The cross has broken our bond, it has made the prison of death ineffectual, it is the demonstration of the love of God.
The centrality of the cross was a leitmotif of the Reformation. For the German Reformer Martin Luther, true Christian theology was not a theology of glory (theologia gloriae) but a theology of the cross (theologia crucis). In his Heidelberg Disputation Luther wrote: “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross,” and “a theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.”
For Luther, it was not just a matter of setting before God your virtue and hoping he would crown it with salvation. Rather, for Luther, the cross meant that one had to lay one’s own sin and inability at the foot of the cross and beg for forgiveness from the God who is rich in mercy.
The cross has been no less significant for modern evangelicalism, with several significant works written on the cross and several edited collections that tirelessly assert the centrality of atonement. David Bebbington points out that in nineteenth-century British evangelical churches, the verse that inspired the most sermons was Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” In the early twentieth century, Peter T. Forsyth wrote: “Christ is to us what his cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what he did there ....Christ, I repeat, is to us what his cross is. You do not understand Christ till you understand his cross.” John Stott speaks for much of evangelicalism when he says, “There is then, it is safe to say, no Christianity without the cross. If the cross of Jesus is not central to our religion, ours is not the religion of Jesus.” The cross is the crux of the gospel and also impacts discipleship to the point that following Jesus entails cruciformity or being conformed the pattern of the cross (see Luke 9:23 – 24; Phil 2:5 – 11; Heb 12:3; 1 Pet 2:21).
NB: This is an excerpt from my Evangelical Theology.