Holy Week 1961 – Monday

“There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.”

Ever since you learned to sing this hymn for children written over 100 years ago in Ireland to explain the Passion or Suffering of our Lord, you have wondered, I am sure, as I have about the meaning of the Cross of Jesus Christ. Every year in Passiontide the Church asks us to stop and think again upon the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, knowing that the full meaning of the Cross is beyond our reach, and yet knowing that the Cross means our salvation.

Did you ever read a biography of some famous man in which no less than a third of the space is devoted to a detailed narrative of his death? So far as I know there is only one such biography. It is the Gospel Story of Jesus Christ. In most cases we read pages of a man’s achievements and in the last chapter we have a few pages about the man’s death.

Not so with the Gospel. One third of the narrative is concerned with His death. It is obvious that from the very first Christians regarded the death of Christ as of utmost importance. In our day the world acknowledges Christ as the greatest and best teacher the world has ever known. But the early Christian writings – the Acts and the Epistles – have very little about His teaching, while there are references to His death on every page.

These references sound no note of sorrow or regret. There is no suggestion of how much was lost to the world by the early death of Jesus of Nazareth. Normally when a great personality dies we think of the loss to the world and of how much might have been accomplished if he lived longer. No New Testament writer ever implies “If Jesus had lived longer He would have transformed the world.” Instead the New Testament glories in His death – never doubts that He accomplished the work which He came to do and that His death was essential to His work. He came to save mankind and He accomplished it by dying on the Cross. His dying words “It is finished” do not mean “It is ended” but “It is accomplished”.

The whole Gospel Message centers on the Cross. St. Paul summed it up by saying “We preach Christ crucified.” Missionaries went out to the world proclaiming not Christ the teacher, but Christ the Crucified Savior. By His death He won for mankind salvation and redemption. What was it in Christ’s death that made it the power of God unto Salvation? The truth is that the full meaning of the death of Jesus cannot be explained any more than any of the great truths of the Christian religion can be completely understood or explained. We can do a lot of thinking about them and we can make some advance in grasping what they mean for us but we cannot understand them completely – How God became Man in Jesus, Son of Mary – how bread and wine becomes the Blessed Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, how Christ dying on the Cross brought our redemption – these are blessed truths of the Christian religion. We can understand parts of these truths, but the whole truth us more than any human mind can grasp or express.

“We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.”

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ outside a city wall is a fact of history. It happened on a Friday some nineteen hundred and thirty years ago. It is a manifestation on earth of certain truths which are eternal. Chief among these truths are the nature of God and the nature of sin. God is love not only today but eternally. God’s love for His creatures is always poured forth as it was in the life and death of Jesus. The incarnate life was not a unique instance of Divine love. It was a unique showing forth of that love in history. When we see the love of God in Jesus we know what the love of God means always.

But the Cross reveals also the nature of sin. People talk lightly about sin as they talk lightly about the love of God. It is supposed that sin means doing evil things or at least things that cause harm and suffering. But sin is something much deeper than any outward action. It lies within ourselves. It is putting self before God. It means choosing our won way instead of God’s way. Sin is self-will. The Cross shows the real nature of sin. It shows what sun will do when brought face to face with God. Sin found Jesus standing right in its path. He would make no terms with it. So sin tried to destroy Him by nailing Him to the Cross. Sin, therefore, is something inherently hostile to God. In the Crucifixion, behind the particular sins of particular men, there was the underlying selfishness and self-will which is the essence of sin and which is rooted deep in the human heart. All the ordinary sins of ordinary men spring from this root – greed, hatred, malice, ill-will, unkindness, slander, lust, and all the rest have their source in self-will, self-pleasing, self-love. The sin that is in ordinary reputable human nature found itself face to face with the love of God in Jesus Christ and the result was the Cross.

Human sin and Divine love came face to face not once only on a green hill far away. All through human history they are face to face. And always something must happen of which the Cross is the symbol. The least part of the pain of the Cross was the physical suffering. The horror of the rejection of God’s love was the agony of the Cross. And this helps us to understand in a small way what men’s sins always mean to God. The historical fact of the Crucifixion is a symbol of what is eternally true. All men, when they sin, “crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh.” In a very real sense the Cross of Jesus Christ is a present reality and will be until human sin is no more.

“O dearly, dearly has he loved!
And we must love him too
And trust in his redeeming blood
And try His works to do.”