Resurrection Lutheran Church, St Catharines

By the Holy Cross the LORD Has Provided My Salvation

It sure can feel like a miry bog, a pit of destruction and desolation. Jeremiah was thrown into such a pit when he proclaimed the Word of God to the governing officials who didn’t want to hear it. Joseph was thrown into a pit when his brothers had heard enough about the dreams through which the Lord communicated his plans. It happens. You speak the Word of the Lord and the world throws you into a hole, a jail, a grave.

It does happen, and sometimes more subtle but no less deflating. The atmosphere at school or work is thick with a threatening fog that chokes back your words that would speak the truth of God’s good and gracious will for all, contrary to the harm and devastation that is peddled for progress. Trying to be faithful to the will of God in such a society is like stomping through a miry bog. It is tough slogging, dirty, exhausting, until you feel like you cannot take another step, like a mastadon in the tar pits.

Even though you are speaking out of love, pleading for common sense, so that they might be saved from grave harm through their choices and damnation at the judgment of God, family members are convinced that you hate them, that you cannot possibly understand them, that you are trying to trod them down underfoot to maintain an air of superiority over them. So, the response, like that of Joseph’s brothers is to knock you down a peg or two, to make sure you know that they are not going to stand for it. And with their rebuffs and retorts and rejection, they cast you into a pit of gloom and despair. They leave you alone, deserted, abandoned, cut off from all communication and compassion.

You think perhaps it will be better being cast off and alone. At least you won’t be struck down and stomped on by a cruel and heartless world. At least you won’t have to hear the vitriol being spit in your face. At least down in the pit they cannot reach you anymore. But it is even worse being down there alone, because there alone you still smell the stink of arrogance and breathe in the poison of malice. And you feel the weight of guilt.

From the pit of destruction and the miry bog you become aware that you have not been entirely free from pride and hatred either. It was there all the time harbouring in your heart. This is not a pit out of which you will be able to raise yourself. This is not a bog from which you deserve to be pulled out. Your own thoughts, words and deeds have gotten you stuck.

And above you looms the cross. It is about the only thing you can see from the depths. From there it stands an instrument of torture and punishment. It is a monolith of both justice and pain. It is what you deserve as much as any of those who have attacked you, or slandered you, or struck out at you. It is the great symbol of God’s justice, His condemnation of the sin, and the inescapable shadow of His holy and righteous Law. It is the verdict that declares that you deserve worse than a pit of rejection and isolation. It is to the pit of hell that go those who harbour hatred and self-righteousness.

But with your desperate cry to the LORD, your perspective of that hard and cruel monument changes. Its shadow shortens as you are lifted up out of the gloom. Even its shape transforms as your eyes emerge from the darkness and you are brought up into the light of God’s grace. It is not cold, hard wood, awaiting your turn for torture and death. There has already been a figure affixed to its beams.

There is no room for you on this cross of God’s justice and righteousness. It has already been occupied. It’s threatening posture is obscured by the body that was nailed upon it to pay the price for the sins of the world. The sins of those who cast you off and for all of your sins, too. God Himself has reformed the fearsome look of the cross by veiling it with His own body.

The LORD has inclined to your cry, and in the words of absolution proclaimed to you, the Lord Almighty lifts you up out of the miry pit and sets you firmly upon the rock of Calvary, where you can see the cross clearly. It is not a cross awaiting you as its next victim. It is a cross that bears evidence that all of your crimes against humanity, against God, and against yourself, have been paid by God Himself who became man to hang on that cross for you and to set you free from the pit of hell and despair.

The cross no longer bears any significance by itself. There are still many bare and empty crosses around for all to see, but God has born testimony across all of the world so that no one sees this shape anymore without seeing Jesus. The bare cross has been transformed before the eyes of all the nations. That is why so many have such emotive reactions when they see this simple shape. They love it or they hate it because they know it communicates the love of God for you. And they love God for that or they hate Him for it.

God has accomplished salvation in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the cross. In all of the mighty acts of deliverance that God has demonstrated throughout history, from rescuing Noah and his family in the flood, and the people of Israel from a life of slavery in Egypt, to the healing of the blind, deaf, and lame, and even the raising of the dead; none of them compare with what has been accomplished through the death of Jesus on the cross. For there God was sacrificed and atonement was made for all. The holy and sinless body and the precious blood of the divine was given in payment for the sins of the whole world.

The sacrifices of bulls and goats and lambs prepared us to embrace the great love of God. For it was a brutal reminder of the cost of our salvation. Just think about how much you mourn the death of your animals. It is a great loss indeed, even though it cannot compare to the loss of a child. And so, infinitely more tragic is the suffering and death of the God of infinite love and grace for His creation.

In response to our blatant acts of disobedience against the laws He established for our blessing and peace, and the not so blatant arrogance and self-righteousness we hide in our hearts even as we point out to others their transgressions, One finally came to actually listen to what God had been telling mankind from the very beginning. The message of God’s love and justice and peace and righteousness, ignored or dismissed or pushed aside by every single descendant of Adam and Eve, was fully embraced by just one man.

Instead of trying to operate a pay-off system of sacrifices and offerings and good deeds to cover the bad, the eternal Son of God came into this world to do what God wishes all of us would do. He listened to the communication of a loving heavenly Father and He found delight in obeying His will. The entire Bible proclaims this loving will of God for the salvation and blessing of mankind, and the Son of God became man in order to do for our account what none of us is willing to do. He fully obeyed, and in doing so, He did what God has been telling us from the beginning.

Jesus Christ, without any sin of His own, gave His holy and precious divine life for our sins. The Book of Hebrews tells us that this is even what today’s Psalm is about, being drawn out of the pit to testify of God’s great love and mercy for the world:

It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, He said, ‘Sacrifices and offerings You have not desired, but a body have You prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings You have taken no pleasure. Then I said, “Behold, I have come to do Your will, O God, as it is written of Me in the scroll of the book.”’ (Hebrews 10:4-7).

It was God’s will that we be made holy, forgiven of all of our sins and impurities, through the offering of the holy body of Jesus upon the cross. That is why God took on a human body in the person of the Son, including an open ear to listen and obey the will of the heavenly Father. It was for our salvation, the forgiveness of sins, to transform the cross of God’s fearsome justice into a form that proclaims God’s beauteous mercy.

Jesus’ ears are open—to the will of the heavenly Father, and to my cries that come from deep in the pit of despair. He hears when we cry to Him because all of the world hates us. He hears when we cry to Him that we know we are sinful and deserve the pit of unquenchable fire. And He hears His Father’s will that we be saved.

This is the proclamation of the cross. It proclaims that God’s Son was listening. He obeyed the Father’s will and took our place. He came into the miry bog of this life of rejection and cruelty. He went to the cross of sin and shame. He went down into the grave of death. He descended into the very pit of hell, so that the proclamation of the cross would be known far and wide as the Gospel of salvation. The lifting up of Jesus from the dead on the third day to stand firmly on the rock of His glory shouts the good news of forgiveness and mercy to troubled sinners who feel the depth of sin and despair.

The cross and the form of Christ upon it shout God’s righteousness to punish sin fully and completely. It testifies to God’s faithfulness, keeping His own Word of promise for a Saviour. It declares His grace and the truth that He has provided salvation for sinners at His own cost through Jesus Christ His Son. This is not a message to be silenced out of pride or out of fear. It is a message that opens our ears to the will of God for the salvation of the world, and it enables us to bear patiently whatever a wicked world might do to us, knowing that our God inclines His ear. He hears our cries, and will continually lift us up even out of our own sins.