Cruciformed Love

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Matthew 26.45-54 Sunday, March 16, 2008 Passion/Palm Sunday Shelton, WA

CRUCIFORMED LOVE

What does God look like? Have you ever wondered that? Have you ever asked yourself that question? What does God look like? I’m sure we’ve all wondered; I’m sure we’ve all asked. And the truth is, if we’re perfectly honest, we all have an image in our mind of what God looks like. We may pretend we don’t; we may say we don’t, but we all do.

It is humanly impossible to think in total abstracts. Our mind is an image bank. It records images, it thinks in images, it relates in images. That’s how it operates. That’s why Jesus didn’t teach in propositions; he taught in parables. He used stories that tapped into the image banks of his listeners. He invoked metaphors that pulled up pictures in the minds of his hearers. Those pictures embodied truth in ways propositions could never convey. You know the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Well it’s true.

So what does God look like? When I say “God,” a picture pops into your head, an image is formed on the canvas of your mind. It’s automatic. We all do it. It’s unavoidable. It’s how we are made. We all—every one of us in this room (and for that matter, everyone everywhere)—have an image of what God looks like fixed in our heads.

What’s amazing, though, is when we begin to realize just how distorted that image of God has become over the centuries. It has been influenced by so

John Grant Page 1 5/10/2018 Page 2 of 7 0a6594f47fac40f8256896cb00b60c41.doc many extra-biblical notions and ideas that I think we’ve actually lost sight of what God is really like. Christian art (both classical and cheesy) has influenced our image and perception of God. Who doesn’t, at least for a fleeting second, think of Michelangelo’s portrait of God in creation when they think of what God looks like?

But you know, by far the most damaging influence has been done by poor theology. And worst of all, it has been done by poor theology that has taken on a sort of life of its own through the proliferation of popular Christian fiction, and even more so through the subversive influence of the Christian broadcasting industry.

So what does God look like? If history has given us a distorted view of God, if the Christian media industry has painted a fuzzy and vaguely heretical portrait of what God is like, then where do we look to if we want to see what God is really like? Where can we turn to if we want to get a clear picture of what God really looks like?

The answer, I believe, is Calvary. Calvary gives us the clearest picture of God. God is love, but not just any kind of love; God is a cross-shaped love… a love that bleeds for people.

Paul tells us that Jesus is the image of the invisible God (Colossian 1). To look at Jesus is to see God. And the clearest picture of Jesus is given to us at Calvary. It is to this moment, to this image, to this portrait that each of the gospel writers point. Calvary stands as the supreme glimpse into the nature, the character, and the love of Jesus.

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Over the past couple of weeks we’ve taken a look at this notion of a cross- shaped love. We spent an evening with Jesus and Nicodemus. The words, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” show us just how huge an effect the world’s pain and suffering has on God. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that God is so deeply moved by the pain and suffering in our world that he can’t just sit back and watch it unfold without doing something about it. It seems to me that God is so deeply moved by the pain and suffering in our world that he literally took on flesh and blood and became a part of that suffering and that pain… a cross shaped love bleeds with people.

We sat in the noonday heat at a well in Samaria. There we met a Samaritan woman. Rejected, unwanted, she lived in isolation and loneliness. Barriers had been built around her that kept her on the outside. We saw how love, a cross shaped love… one that was real… one that was genuine… one that was truly self-sacrificing, could cut through those barriers and restore the broken and rejected… a cross-shaped love is an all inclusive love.

We watched as love restored sight. Jesus came to restore goodness. Love— a cross-shaped love—does something. It spits in the dirt and makes some mud; it rubs that mud on the eyes of a blind man. And he sees. It reaches out to lepers and makes them whole. The lame walk, the deaf hear, the captives and the prisoners are set free… the blind see… a cross-shaped love responds to human need.

And just last week we stood with Martha and discovered love’s two greatest words, “Even now”… God’s amazing promise that even in the midst of death there is life, even in the midst of hopelessness Jesus comes to bring

John Grant Page 3 5/10/2018 Page 4 of 7 0a6594f47fac40f8256896cb00b60c41.doc hope. He is light in darkness; life in death… a cross-shaped love is a love that is filled with hope.

Today we come to the cross. It is the cross that gives a cruciformed love its shape. The cross is what pulls everything together. The cross is what gives meaning to all that has gone on before. All the images come together here on Calvary. The darkness, the rejection, death… they all converge on this hill outside of Jerusalem. Calvary is the pivot, the fulcrum, on which all of history turns. The cross changes everything.

Here’s what I mean. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that our world is a mess. Evil is everywhere. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this evil is destroying the goodness that God made—the goodness of creation, the goodness of relationships, the goodness of people. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the problem of evil is far bigger than any single act of evil; or for that matter, even the sum of all the acts. Evil is a force far bigger than the puny players who act out that evil.

One day, though, something far bigger than that evil came into the world to challenge the power of sin. But he wasn’t going to challenge evil on its own terms. There was another way, a way that had been at work all along working to restore goodness. He knew that to be great you must become slave of all. He understood that the power of love was stronger than the love of power. He came to break the old systems infected by sin and to establish a new system infused with love.

The result was inevitable. It could hardly be avoided. The rulers and powers of the established system did to Jesus what they did to all rebels:

John Grant Page 4 5/10/2018 Page 5 of 7 0a6594f47fac40f8256896cb00b60c41.doc they crucified him. They took him outside the city gate; beat nearly to death, they stripped him of his clothes, and nailed him to a cross. And there he hung until he died. That’s what you do with people who try to overthrow the system. You torture them. You embarrass them. You humiliate them. You kill them. In other words, you make such an example out of them, one so severe and so horrible and so violent, that no one ever tries it again.

Jesus took the full force of that evil to himself. All the sin, the full weight of the world’s evil, converged on Jesus that day on the cross. As a matter of fact, the convergence was so complete that it blocked the light of the sun. In those three hours of agony, the light of the Father’s love was completely blotted out by the cloud of evil that hung over the world. The cry, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani… My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was real. Jesus hung there alone.

Somehow we really need to get our minds around this. You see it is far more than just a theological truth that Jesus bore the sin of the world. It is politically and historically true. It happened. It really happened. And because it really happened, it really changed the world.

You see, the way evil works, the way it stays in circulation, the way it keeps going is by creating more of the same. It retaliates. One person’s pride causes another person to become jealous; one person’s violence brings out the violence in another. Every act of evil, every act of sin is not just a single, isolated incident. Every sin, every act of evil creates more of the same—it multiplies.

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On Calvary, all those multiplied acts of sin and evil converged on the person of Jesus. They threw their worst at him. They did their worst to him. And he took it. He didn’t retaliate. His only response were the words, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.” Jesus took the full force and fury of the world’s evil and he didn’t retaliate. In a sense he absorbed it; and by absorbing it, he diffused it. And for that reason evil lost its power. The cycle was broken. In the cross, everything has been changed.

So, where does that leave us? Our world is still a mess. We still see evil. We still see sin. We still see goodness being destroyed. Well, it is precisely here, at this very point that our messed up theology leaves us short. Here is where the proliferation of escapist theology, popularized through Christian fiction and the Christian media, has clouded and veiled the truth of God.

You see, what God did on the cross, through Jesus, was not something that gives us a way out of the world, a way to escape it. Instead, what God has done on the cross was to give us a way to redeem it, a way to reconcile it, a way to restore God’s goodness in the world.

Christian faith, faith in the crucified Jesus, is more than my individual belief that he died for me, and that now all I have to do it survive this wretched world until Jesus comes. Genuine Christian faith is the faith that on the cross Jesus in principle won the victory over sin, violence, pride, arrogance and even death, and that that victory can now be implemented.

The cross marks the beginning of a new age, a kingdom age. An age where we love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us; where we don’t repay evil with evil, but we repay evil with good; an age where we turn the other

John Grant Page 6 5/10/2018 Page 7 of 7 0a6594f47fac40f8256896cb00b60c41.doc cheek, where if a man asks for your tunic you give him your cloak as well; an age where a cup of cold water is shared, where slave and fee live together, where political, social, cultural, and barriers no longer divide; an age where God’s cross-shaped love is being lived out in our lives each and every day.

Yes, the cross of Jesus changes everything. But it is up to us to respond to that change. It is up to us to respond to God’s cross-shaped love. It is up to us to implement what Jesus has already won? It is up to us to implement what Jesus has already begun. Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to bleed with Jesus for people? Are you willing to embrace God’s cross- shaped ministry of love and reconciliation?

Gracious and loving Father; we are humbled by your great love, your unfailing mercy, your unending grace. Help us, O Lord, to so live for you that we truly do become dead to self and selfishness. Help us to be your cross-shaped servants, following you into the world to love where hatred is rampant, to offer mercy where retaliation is in operation, to provide grace where oppression and injustice prevail. Help us, Lord, to embody your love and to provide your healing. For it is in the mighty, merciful name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.

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