What the Cross Means to Me, Part II

Last week, we began discussing what the central event in Christianity – the death of Jesus on the Cross – means to me personally.  In summary, I said that it meant (1) I must matter to God, that (2) my sin must matter to God, and that (3) He reconciled these two things – His love for me and His hatred of sin – by offering Himself as a sacrifice for my sin.

This week, we pick up on that same theme by elaborating somewhat on the implications of this Great Exchange – the exchange of His life for mine. 

4. There is Someone standing between your stones and me.  There are many potential sources of condemnation; but from wherever it springs, the Cross means Jesus stands opposed to it on my behalf.  Much of my own condemnation comes from within – from myself – and Jesus is there to heal and pardon. (“But when our hearts condemn us,” the Bible says, “God is greater than our hearts”).  Some of it is religious – Jesus is there to intervene. (To paraphrase the Bible, Jesus told the religious leaders that while He was not there to condemn, Moses – in whom they put their trust – was their condemnation).

But quite a bit of condemnation comes from other people.  And there is no more beautiful picture of what the Cross means to me than the picture of the woman caught in adultery in the book of John.  She is caught in adultery; people pick up stones to kill her; Jesus tells her to go and sin no more.  But before that – He stops them from stoning her.

It is only God’s opinion of me that ultimately matters.  You see, when people throw stones at me – when they think me unworthy of goodness (which I am), when they think the stuff I’ve done is unpardonable (which, in one sense, it is) – I look to Christ.  And I find that Jesus is standing between their stones and me.  Their condemnation won’t make it to me; their stones will drop from their hands.

And in those moments when I truly feel that power of the Cross, it is a peace that is hard to describe.  To be free from other people’s opinions is like letting the weight of a thousand stones fall off of your back.  Thanks to the Cross, I can be in good standing with the only Person in the universe whose opinion really matters – at any moment I choose.

5. Freedom.  Louisa Fletcher once wrote these timeless words: 

I wish that there were some wonderful place

Called the Land of Beginning Again,

Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches

And all of our poor selfish grief

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And never be put on again.

The Cross means – there actually is such a place.  It means – freedom.  I was so burdened by my own guilt that I could not fly; the Cross allows me to soar like an eagle on a cloudless day.  I had no rest from myself; the Cross allows me the peace of mind like a calm mountain lake.  I was in a prison of my own making, lost in a dark abyss of despair and hopelessness; and the Cross means that I am free.

And each morning when I wake, I can leave yesterday’s burdens at the foot of the Cross. That shabby old coat can be dropped at the door; those sins and guilt and heartaches can be left behind forever; each new day brings a new beginning, a new start; a place to roam wild and free and unfettered; a Land of Beginning Again.

6. The limitless love of God. My world is all boundaries.  Montana ends at Lolo Pass.  My goodness ends when I’m mean to someone.  Musical integrity ends at Rap Music.  You get the point.

So I have a hard time imagining what it means for love to be limitless.  I mean, good means boundaries.  Thou shalt not commit adultery means that there is a line that should not be crossed.

Now, before you misinterpret what I’m saying here, I want to immediately say that Christianity teaches those boundaries are real and not imagined – which they are.  I personally believe more strongly than ever in those moral boundaries.

But my point here is to note that these boundaries are in a sense natural for me to believe in.  I get the point of them.  That’s the easy part of Christianity for me to believe in. (For a discussion of that part of Christianity, see this post).

The hard part is for me to understand how, given this obvious truth, God’s love can be limitless.  How can God possibly love me?  I mean, I and everyone I know is a wretched tangle of bad and good traits, hopelessly wandering through the well-worn paths of struggling to get by.  If God is good, how can He love that?

That’s where the Cross comes in again.  At Calvary, God surprises me with His shocking and infinite solution – He shows that His love for me is in some sense limitless – by offering Himself in my place.  His love for me knows no boundaries – nothing can separate me from it – he will offer literally everything that He can to save me; even to save me from myself. 

No matter where I go in this world filled with both beauty and tragedy, I often have a vision of a cross against the sky; a vision of the unchangeable and limitless love of God spread out against the landscape of my world.  It is like God is welcoming me constantly with open arms; like He is always saying trust in me and everything will be all right; like God is reminding me that, while my love is finite and derivative and dependent on how many lattes I drink and whether or not my bad back is acting up, His love is eternal, limitless, and unchanging.

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3 Responses to What the Cross Means to Me, Part II

  1. Uh-Oh says:

    Glad to see another post, as always. I have a bit of spare time and thought on this one, some of which may echo my previous comments.

    I get this strange loop going in my reasoning here, about where the guilt is coming from and how it is absolved. One could argue that the guilt comes from in part daily affairs and mistakes and all that which is natural, and part comes from failing to live up to Christian standards (i.e. literally inhuman standards of Christian morality). The second guilt-source doesn’t make sense to me as an outside perspective because it then becomes a loop of guilt – the judge is God, who finds you guilty, puts the gun to your head with one hand, and pulls it away with the other hand of mercy – and repeat for a strange damnation-love cycle. Which is why I thought it odd to think about the necessity for Christ (an aspect of or the actual God) to get willingly killed to absolve humanity of a punishment God himself decided was necessary. Now if humanity’s actions lead them to a place themselves (like wandering away into a pit, rather than wandering and then kicked into a pit by God’s boot), there could be an argument for that. But since God judges, it makes it weird for an outsider to understand.

    So to go most specifically into the post, the first point of resisting the condemnations of others is a bonus from the sounds of it. I guess trading imperfect condemnations for a supposed perfect one would be preferable, if you feel the need to have judgement passed on you in the first place. Since it happens all the time whether or not you are Christian (and quite a bit if you aren’t Christian in my particular society), I don’t know what else to say than I guess it sounds nice. My personal view on judgements is that humans judge in all sorts of manners and from all kinds of perspectives – I try not to judge the plights and statuses of others since it clouds objective viewing of them and ourselves plus runs the risk of disgusting conclusions like ‘pitying’ another human being in the sense of feeling sorry for them as if they are a lower creature than ourselves. And the same for a higher I guess, though that it more like an undue compliment than an insult… But judgements are useful things to have, and better perfected and controlled is what we should aim for.

    The fifth and sixth I want to mix together a bit. There is freedom gained from guilt when you reference the cross, but at the same time there is this nasty Christian notion I really do dislike that you worded perfectly, and that is this self-degradation of the unworthy sinner. When speaking the infinite love, you said:

    “I mean, I and everyone I know is a wretched tangle of bad and good traits, hopelessly wandering through the well-worn paths of struggling to get by. If God is good, how can He love that?”

    ‘A wretched tangle’? ‘How can he love that’? You might as well call yourself a pustulant spider hanging by a thread over hellfire for being a sinful human, right? I don’t like this at all, and honestly I think it would be insulting to a creator God to badmouth his best creation so. Not to mention I doubt many gods appreciate people reducing themselves by pathetic and pitiful self-harm like that, but I don’t know the Christian God’s tastes too well, and I’m sure my imaginations make up all sorts of delightful traits for preferred deities. My point is that it is a very Christian thing to do to build up this self-hatred, brought on by all this guilt about sin and being bad and all that, till it is unbearable, and then releasing it all on Jesus and the sacrifice and getting that ‘freedom’ that way. But it’s like a man who gets released from his chains for the first time in weeks, stretches and breathes in the fresh air for a few moments, then wanders right back into the prison to chain himself up again. Why? That doesn’t seem like a true freedom so much as a chain of self harm and absolution, like the pleasure gained moments after a self-inflicted injury with some people.

    I think a great counter to that would be to say that it would be weird for a person to do that and not really be free, but that the chains are sins, and humans simply wander back into them because they simply can’t help it and get stuck. However, it appears to me the chains that suffocate are more the Guilt over sin rather than the sin itself. Like Job said, paraphrased, that you see good men suffer and bad men profit all the time in the world, so much so that it hardly seems like sin is being justly paid for. And it isn’t (not in this world), which is sort of part of the lesson there. But a lot of good people get horribly stuck in that guilt over their past wrongs and sins because they reflect on them, and those are the chains that bind and are strengthened by Christian precepts of humanity being a sinful race worthy of eternal suffering.

    So then, mankind has a few choices to go with aside from the cross – they can be like that barbarian fellow who is innocent of sin and self-reflection and simply is immune to guilt about honestly anything. He’s a rather simple fellow though, driven by impulse and desire, and isn’t really interesting or deep in character, let alone morality. So we don’t want that. There is the guy who sets up his own rules and abide by those alone, but that how much a wild card it is what gets into that personal moral code! I think, as an incomplete answer, a person ought to try to absolve his own sins. He committed them, thus he is responsible for them, and thus is the best one to make good of what transpires because of them. It wouldn’t be right to punch someone in the face and then turn to the cop and say, “I’m terribly sorry, I really am. But can you take the blame for this?”

    Since I don’t believe in a supernatural judgement, there are only two actors here – you and the punched. There is no cop to punish or absolve you – In fact you are more akin to the cop than anyone else (aside from a human cop I guess, who will judge you and bugger up that first part of your nice post). It would be up to the ‘sinner’ to right it as best he could, and if he cannot – and many wrongs are irreparable directly – then he must make good from the bad. Use it as a moral example to avoid that action, motivate good action, do kindness counter to that, and so on. Only that way can guilt be absolved I feel, or at least harassed. But since it never erases the act and thus guilt might hang around afterwards like a residue no matter how much scrubbing, I suppose you’d need an ultimate sink for it – be that another or yourself. Maybe a certain mindset can allow a person to be at peace with that so-human stain then, and just accept it is a part of life? Tons of solutions exist, from merely forgetting to putting it onto a god or another person to just ‘dealing with it’. All I know is, if someone came up to me and said they’d die for all the wrongs I have done or ever will do to absolve me, I wouldn’t accept it because I feel that is wrong for another to suffer for something they’re innocent of.

    Anyway, I don’t see people as wretched tangles of good and bad. I see what you call a tangle as a mosaic of humanity, a stained-glass of all manner of shapes, colors, quirks, and shards that come together to make for a whole human being. Is that whole a good or bad thing? In gradients I suppose, but it is ‘art’ nonetheless, crude or refined as each individual work may be. And from a Christian perspective I suppose, that would be the art of God. So why not love the art of it?

  2. The Apologetic Professor says:

    Uh-Oh,
    A wonderful and insightful comment as always! Some replies:

    (1) I loved your comment about the fact that not feeling condemned by others is a kind of “bonus.” I felt that way a bit when I wrote that section, too — that is what the Cross means to me personally, but intellectually, it did feel in the piece like a bit of an add-on.

    (2) About the necessity/circular argument — I quite agree with you, up to a point — I don’t think the Cross was probably actually necessary in the logical sense of the word. But as I’ve written two additional upcoming posts about that, I’ll save those thoughts for another day.

    (3) Now, about your comments concerning the wretched tangle of humanity, I have much more to say. First, I thought all your comments were fair, well-articulated, and to the point. I don’t entirely disagree with you — but I think we do have fundamentally different points of view about humanity.

    (3a) In short: I think people are a tangle of good and bad traits. I would believe that whether I were a Christian or not. I don’t know whether it is insulting to call people what they are; but that’s what they are. I have never known a single person who did not do something really bad at some point in their life; all of them are selfish; all of them struggle to do the right thing; and yet, all of them — well, most of them anyway — seem to possess some desire to do good; they surprise you with sudden unnecessary kindness; they love their children; and on an on.

    To me, this isn’t about Christianity — it’s about what is. And any starting point for explaining what IS about us has to take into account the fact that, by our own standards, we both suck and amaze. Now, since you seem to grant the “amaze” part, I’ll focus on the “suck” part. To borrow from Chesterton, Christianity is the soap to clean us up — the soap being a doubtful and difficult thing to believe in. But the dirt isn’t doubtful and difficult to believe in at all — it’s everywhere, all around me, and I see it with my own eyes. I don’t need Christianity to teach me that we all suck in some very clear and objective way.

    (3b) Now, we’ve debated about this next issue before, so I’ll keep my comments here brief — but while I grant that Christianity does sometimes historically create “sins” and make people feel bad about them (e.g., it is a “sin” to not pray for your dead ancestors, give us money and we’ll absolve it), the kinds of things I’m talking about stretch way beyond that. Christianity didn’t invent the idea that a rich man taking the last food from a poor man, just out of spite and power, is bad. It didn’t invent the idea that lying to someone in order to steal from them is bad. Well, I see that kind of thing all around me, and whether I were a Christian or not, I’d think it was bad and wonder where it came from and how I can be bad enough to be tempted to sin but good enough to recognize it as sin.

    (3c) Now, in my own life, Christianity did not create the chains I walked away from — and it certainly does not teach me to walk back to them. Most of your description of the person that walked back to the chains is what Christ freed me FROM, not what He teaches me to do. So I actually could not really relate to that comment at all, as it seemed completely contrary to Christian teaching and my own experience of Christ personally. Christianity teaches me to recognize my chains as chains, yes — and then to allow Christ to make me free of them.

    (3d) Ah, yes, yes, I feel EXACTLY what you feel about wanting to pay for my own sins! Fairness. I wanted to believe that, too. I wanted to believe I was good enough to pay for my own life. I nearly killed myself trying to pay for my own sins, and then realized…I couldn’t. It was impossible. So, while that sounds nice, I do not think it is an option, for me.

    Intellectually, it also really isn’t an option as far as I can see. No person can possibly make up for all the sins they have committed, because once you commit a sin, it influences someone else, which influences someone else, and the thing is out of control before you can say “I want to pay for that.”

    Don’t get me wrong: I quite agree with the fairness sentiment. One of the things that distinguishes Christianity from other points of view is this: Almost all other points of view say what you said, what I would have said — do right and when you do wrong, try and make up for it. Christianity says that, too — but it also says “since you can’t possibly succeed, you should also ask for God’s mercy and help, and He’ll grant it.”

    (3d) Love the cop analogy, but as it deals with the necessity of the Cross (and is partially similar to an analogy about the President I’m using in a later post), I’m going to leave my comments about that for later. But I do think it captures, quite brilliantly if you don’t mind me saying so, the main issues at play here.

    (3e) You exchange my wretched tangle for a beautiful mosaic. But do you really mean that? Do you really mean that war and rape and pillaging and stealing and ethnic cleansing and hatred are all a part of the beautiful mosaic and that God, were He God, would smile and love the pure art of it? 200,000 people are killed in an ethnic cleansing in Africa — God smiles at the work of art? Because I don’t think so. I think that much of what we are IS a beautiful mosaic and God IS creating us like a work of art. Christianity teaches something very similar when it casts its vision for the human race. But I do not find it helps things to imagine that all the really bad stuff I see is really just a part of some larger beautiful picture that God enjoys. I am not inspired by that kind of God. Rather, I am much more inspired by believing that God, while He loves us and wants to make us into His beautiful vision, really dislikes the horrible things about us and finds them as horrible as I do. If someone breaks the work of art, there is nothing for it but to try and put it back together again, to re-paint it. Looking at the mess on the floor and calling it good doesn’t seem artistic to me.

    Of course, it raises the question of how God would have allowed that to happen in the first place. And now we come to one of the primary reasons I am a Christian — because I think Christianity provides the most sensible answer I’ve heard to that question. But as it is, really, a totally different question, I’ll leave it aside for another day.

    Thanks for the comments, Uh-Oh! Fantastic stuff.

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