Holy Week 1961 – Wednesday

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

How did He by dying save us all? The Cross is a symbol of victory. What is it in the death on the Cross that makes it a victory? What is meant by saying Christ on the Cross is “the power of God unto salvation?” The Cross, we have been saying this week, is the encounter of human sin and divine love. More than that, it is the greatest victory ever won. This is a great mystery and yet we must try once more to deepen our understanding of it. How did He by dying save us? How is the Cross a victory?

Jesus’ death on the Cross was neither accidental nor unfortunate. It was a divine necessity freely and willingly undertaken. Why the necessity? Why insist that there can be no forgiveness of the sins I commit apart from the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ? After all we ourselves treat those who do us wrong with an easy-going tolerance that we expect from God—“That’s all right,” we say, “I’ll forgive you—Let’s forget about it.” In the same way many people take divine forgiveness for granted.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Whenever I do anything wrong, others besides myself are involved—my family, my school, my profession, my country, my fellow Christians. If a bank clerk forges the books and embezzles funds, the bank must express its disapproval and disown the act at once by punishing the offender—otherwise it will lose its own good name. Here lies the primary necessity for all punishment. It is the means by which a community disowns certain acts done by its members in order to vindicate and maintain its standards. When we sin, God is implicated for we are all His children and His workmanship and depend on Him for every breath we draw. Whenever we use the power He gives us wrongly and commit sin with that power God Himself is involved in our sin and responsible for it unless He disowns it by some clear and definite act of disapproval. This means that sin must be punished. It cannot be ignored by a God of righteousness if He is to remain righteous. He who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity cannot just say, “That’s all right—I forgive you.” If God is to remain good, He must disown the bad we do and bad we are.

Whatever else forgiveness means it cannot mean failing to punish sin. The Cross is sin receiving its terrible punishment. There on the green hill far away we see the wrath of God against sin. It can never afterwards be said that God ignores sin or condones it. Nor can there ever afterwards be any excuse for us to ignore or make light of sin. When the last laugh about sin has died away and the last ounces of pleasure has been extracted from it, one fact still remains—the fact of Jesus hanging on the Cross.

Sin cannot be ignored by a God of righteousness. Sinners cannot be abandoned by a God of love. So, God solves the problem by coming to the rescue Himself. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” In order to vindicate His righteousness and uphold the Standard of eternal Goodness, God wills that sin shall be punished. But He will also that He Himself shall bear the punishment. Punisher and Punished are one. We must constantly remember that the Father and the Son are one, acting with one mind and one will. He who knew no sin was “made to be sin on your behalf”. This is the bold way the New Testament expresses the trust that Jesus felt the burden of human sin as though it were His own. “Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows—He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities—and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” Jesus deliberately accepts the suffering and the burden of human guilt, and He staggers beneath the weight of it.

There can be no forgiveness until God has been delivered from all complicity in the sin He forgives. But even then, forgiveness is impossible until the power of evil has been broken, and the poisonous infection it sets up has been cauterized and prevented from spreading. Left to itself evil breeds further evil. Whenever we do wrong, we create an evil infection which passes beyond our control. What has been the effect of my sins in other peoples’ lives? Some have been led to sin by my example. In others the wrong I did them has borne fruit in bitterness and resentment, in others it has led to cynicism and disillusionment. Suppose I have a friend who loves me very greatly and is truly good. When I do him some wrong, he will not pretend it does not matter. He hates the sinful thing in me. He accepts the pain of the injury and bears it without allowing it to embitter him or make any difference in his love to me. Then the power of evil I initiated is absorbed and neutralized and destroyed because it is brought up against something stronger than itself which it cannot overcome and on which it has no effect, and which takes away the power to do further evil.

All our sins whoever else may be involved are ultimately sins against God. Forgiveness is solely possible if we can be assured that our sins have failed to have any effect on the divine goodness by separating Him from us. This is exactly what Christ shows us on the Cross—“Forgive them, they know not what they do”. There He bears the injury we do Him in such a way that the power of evil is neutralized, absorbed, prevented from spreading further. Throughout His Passion there was never a trace of resentment, anger, or thought of revenge. “When he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not.” Love went on loving in spite of all the hatred. Goodness continued to be good in spite of all the assault of evil. That is the victory of the Cross. Evil was conquered when instead of cursing His enemies He prayed for their forgiveness.

For the first time since man first sinned, evil failed to find any response in man. Never for a split second did the power of evil move the Christ one hair’s breadth from the Father’s will. The Cross is the crowning act of a life of undefeated goodness. The Cross is not a defeat needing the Resurrection to reverse it. It is a victory so decisive and permanent that the Resurrection follows inevitably to seal and confirm it. The shout of triumph from the Cross is “It is accomplished”—man’s forgiveness, restoration, salvation—accomplished.

The Christian Faith unhesitatingly asserts that as a result of the mighty work accomplished by Christ on the Cross, the relationship in which we stand to God has been radically and permanently changed. On the Cross, God who was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself found the means of forgiving us completely. This is the incredibly Good News. A general pardon, free and complete is granted to all who have sinned—not for anything we have done or could do to deserve it but simply of God’s love and at His own cost. He paid the price, and His free pardon is waiting for all who will accept it.

“There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven to let us in.”

Most ethical religions make righteousness the condition of any approach to God. There can be no divine welcome for the sinner until he has ceased to be a sinner. But the Lord Christ receives us and reconciles us first in order to reform us afterwards. He welcomes us as we are for “God commendeth his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” to transform us from sinners into Sons.