From the River to the Sea

From the River to the Sea--March 5, 2018

"For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.' Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." [1 Corinthians 1:18-24]

The way of Jesus leads to the cross of Jesus, the same way that traveling to the North Pole will always mean going in a northerly direction... the same way that following the path of a river will lead you to the sea.  The same motion all along takes you to your destination, northward, seaward, cross-ward.

So it's the most natural thing in the world, in a sense, that our focus on the way of Jesus these last four weeks now take us to look at the cross of Jesus.  After all, in a very real sense, every moment of Jesus' life before Good Friday was a little Good Friday--little acts of giving himself away, surrendering his own interests to the interests of others, laying down his life for the well-being of others, countering the angry and arrogant voices of empire and temple.  Jesus' whole life was rather like a theme-and-variations in music, always playing the same melody, finally coming to its glorious climax on a hill outside Jerusalem, but with the same tune as when he washed feet or touched lepers or loved his enemies (and loved them enough to be honest with them, too).  The cross of Jesus comes because Jesus has lived the way he did, and the cross would not have meant what it means if Jesus had just beamed down from heaven late on Maundy Thursday as a full-grown man and said, "Ok, I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Pilate," and then died on a cross.  The cross means what it means as the culmination of everything that comes before it.

But we also need to be clear at the outset that talking about "the cross of Jesus" is something bigger than six hours on one Friday two thousand years ago outside of Jerusalem.  The cross of Jesus includes the actual event of Jesus' crucifixion, as well as the torture beforehand and the burial in a borrowed grave afterward.  But it is as well, the message, the news, the notion, that in this act of public execution on a Roman death stake we see God's greatest power, God's most infinite love, God's inexhaustible wisdom, and the reclamation of creation.  When Paul talks about "the message of the cross" as he does here in these verses from what we call First Corinthians, he isn't just saying that he ran around Asia Minor shouting, "A Jewish rabbi died by crucifixion back in Palestine.  Just saying." and then went on to the next town. The news about the cross is more than simply declaring a historical fact, but also the claim that this event in history has a particular meaning--that in Jesus' crucifixion, we get a glimpse of what real power, real wisdom, real justice, and real love look like.  That's because Paul is making the claim that in Jesus' death at the hands of Rome, we have none other than the Creator of the universe laying down everything in what looks like utter defeat and surrender to the arrogant and pompous powers of the day, in order to redeem and rescue all of creation.  And Paul is further claiming that unlike, say, any of the other countless crucified troublemakers during the age of Roman domination, Jesus' willingness to lay his life down rather than demand "Me First" means that Jesus wasn't outsmarted or outgunned by Rome and then forced to suffer Rome's punishment--Jesus' death on the cross was in fact Jesus' way of defeating, not simply Roman arrogance but death itself.

That means that "the message about the cross" is really a way of seeing.  It is a way of seeing everything, and it usually means turning the old perspective upside down.  So again, the "way" of Jesus and the "cross" of Jesus are really two sides of the same coin.  You can't live the way of Jesus without it leading to a cross, and similarly, the cross of Jesus carries with it a whole way of seeing, living, speaking, and interacting with the world.  When you finally reach the sea, after all, you discover that the sea is nothing but the same water you have been following all along the watercourse of the river.  And when we finally arrive at talking about what Jesus' death on the cross means, we discover it is the same substance as every word, action, choice, and decision that led to Calvary.  The cross of Jesus is not simply a death, but Jesus' death as a self-giving act in which God takes on all of our deathliness into God's own life, absorbs it in all of its scandal, and breaks its power over us.

That means for us who name the name of Jesus, we who make the sign of that same cross over ourselves and our children before they go to sleep and trace it in soil on the coffins of our loved ones as a sign of our permanent belonging to Christ, for us who wear the cross around our necks or on our lapels, there is no option of just wearing this sign as a fashion accessory and then going out to live self-centered, power-hungry lives according to the same logic of the world around us.  That is not a choice for us.  To make the sign of the cross over ourselves is to renounce the old logic, the old wisdom, the old ways of conceiving of power... and instead to see the crucifixion of a homeless rabbi in the backwater of the empire as the visible definition of all three--logic, wisdom, and power.

So, for example, we who wear the sign of the cross don't get to call on Jesus as "Lord" and then say things like, "I have to look out for my interests first around here!" or "You can't let people think you are weak in this life--you have to make 'em fear you to respect you!"  We don't get to sing hymns about "keeping near the cross of Jesus" and then decide that suffering love might be fine for messiahs, but not for us as a way of life.  We don't get to lament that there's not enough of Jesus taught in schools while we actively teach our own children that turning the other cheek is for wimps and that the only thing that matters in life is "winning." The cross of Jesus, in other words, is not an empty vessel that we can fill with whatever content we would like, but rather, it is its own perspective.

So in our continuing journey with Jesus these days, the challenge in front of us will be to let Jesus' cross so fill our vision that we can only see the world through his lens--the lens that uncovers the greatest power in the world in an act of total weakness, and that realizes the greatest wisdom in the universe looks like nonsense to the empires of history.

Let us dare on this journey, to let Jesus take us where he will--let us follow the path of the river all the way to the sea... and discover it has been the same water all along.

Lord Jesus, turn our vision and our thinking upside-down to see the power and wisdom of the cross, not just two millennia ago, but today.