Meditations on the Crucifixion and What It Means for Us: Crucified with Christ

Preached at Silverton Friends Church, November 10, 2024

Last time I was here, I talked about the Law being crucified with Jesus. I made the point that human behavior is no surprise to God, that God in the moment of creation knew that the crucifixion was necessary. I mentioned that God not only created but intervenes in creation, and not in a particularly predictable way. I also want to repeat the point that God exists outside of time; this means all times are present to God, the crucifixion is continually visible to God.  

This eternal present of God helps us understand why, even though God warned Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because “in the day you eat of it you will die,” the story goes on for Adam and he dies physically much later. To God, the death is present in God’s now, as is every death of every creature. There was and is only one remedy, and Jesus is that remedy.

Likewise, in God’s now the resurrection of Jesus is always present. In this stunning event, a body entering decay was raised from the dead and united with the spirit of that person for eternity, a new body that cannot decay and is glorified in ways we can only guess from the resurrection—recognizable by scars and mannerisms and relationships, that can eat our food, but also can walk through locked doors and materialize at will. The Bible teaches us that this is our destiny as well, because we have died with Christ.

St. Paul tries to explain the cosmic proportions of the resurrection in Romans.

 

Adam is a prefiguring of Jesus Christ in his effect on those who came after.

And if Adam involved all humanity in sin and death, how much more does Jesus involve all humanity in the grace of God. Adam’s trespass brought a condemning judgment, but Jesus’s free gift brings many trespasses into favorable judgment. 

Just as through one human, sin, error, trespass, disobedience came into the harmony of the cosmos, with sin came death, and death passed through all humans because all sinned—to repeat: if by one man, Adam, death ruled over humanity, how much more will life gain the upper hand, and people will receive abundance of grace and the gift of being set right with God and will reign in life by the one man, Jesus.

Therefore, as by the disobedience of one man all were condemned, so now by the obedience of one man all are set right with God and brought into life.

So just as sin has ruled through death, even more grace rules because grace makes people who they are meant to be even into eternal life. 

So in our history, the crucifixion is a one-time miracle that redeems us from sin and death. But in God’s eternal now, Jesus is dying on the cross.  

At the same time, if we can call it time, Jesus is harrowing hell, and leading the powers and principalities as captives, and rising triumphant over sin and death. Jesus is redeeming us in the eternal now.  If it is possible to imagine, there is no past and present in God’s now.

So how is it that Jesus accomplished this redemption? He includes us, God includes us, in the crucifixion, and in the resurrection. Jesus didn’t only die for us, he died with us. 

Rom 6:4, 5 

For if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.

 Paul writes the following in Galatians. 

Gal 2:16-21 We are justified by the faithfulness of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faithfulness of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law.

As a Christian I want to find out what it means in my mortal body and time to be crucified with Christ so that it is no longer I who live but Christ in me.  I have been a Christian since childhood, and my commitment to God has become more complete as I have increasingly understood God’s commitment to me.  Significant milestones included having several experiences that made the crucifixion vivid to me; finding that my sense of who I am was almost totally wrong and allowing God to rebuild me as God sees fit; realizing that just as the glory of God is most clearly revealed through the visible wounds of the risen Jesus, so it is revealed in my own brokenness more than in my strengths; understanding that God is closer to me than the air I breathe and more necessary to my continued existence; realizing that God does the loving of God’s own free will and nature, not because I am so lovable. 

I’ve had at least one spiritual experience that depends on this eternal now of God.  I recovered memories of abuse and the misery of despair and grief and self-blame and aloneness that inhabits that experience came along with the flashbacks. I went to my friends, Howard and Margi Macy, and asked them to pray for healing of my memories. In this instance, they invited me to remember as vividly as I could bear, and as they prayed, I felt in my whole self that Jesus entered into my body for that experience to bear it with me.  This memory is as vivid as any I recovered. I was able to know experimentally that the Jesus on  the cross enters entirely into human suffering and feels it with us, whether we can see that or not. But seeing this truth personally healed the feeling of being alone and abandoned to misery. I came out of that saying to myself, “I am crucified with Christ, which also means Christ is crucified with me.” And I heard more in Jesus’s statement that what we do to the least of these we do to him.  This is not a figurative statement.  

Because I cannot deny the eternal redeeming work that is God’s now and also in our now, though for us sequentially, I listen for and try to obey the promptings of the Holy Spirit; this is often humbling and healing.  I pray in order to get to know God.  I read the Gospels to get to know Jesus better.  One of the best things I ever did for my faith was to read Mark three times in three weekends and fall in love with Jesus.

Julian of Norwich lived in the 1300s, the century of Black Death, which carried away 2/3 of Europe’s population. In Norwich, she would have known about the Peasants Revolt in 1381, not least because the Bishop of Norwich led armed forces against the peasants’ army, caught and executed one of the leaders on his own authority.  This makes fascinating Wikipedia reading, especially if placed in comparison to our own attempted revolt in 2021 and the ensuing unrest and now election of that party. And she would have known about the burning of followers of John Wycliffe, who translated the Bible into English. These folks were derogatorily called Lollards, and the Catholic Church considered them heretics. The Bishop of Norwich was keen to keep this heresy down, perhaps because they argued that people in positions of religious authority should not also hold positions of power in the government.  And Julian, despite living alone in a two room cell off the church building, was often sought out for spiritual guidance, so would have counseled many folks whose lives were disrupted by disease, revolution, and religious persecution.

So we can listen well to her when she says that Jesus said to her, “iI is true that sin is the cause of all this pain, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” This was said so tenderly, without blame of any kind toward me or anybody else. . . .

…our Lord showed two ways of understanding his meaning. One was the bliss to which we are to be brought and how he wants us to rejoice in it. The other is the comfort of our present pain by our knowing that it will all be turned to honor and our gain by virtue of his passion; and we should know too that we never suffer alone but with him whom we should see as our ground; also when we see his own pains and his own emptying, this so far exceeds anything we might suffer as to pass beyond our understanding.

Beholding this much, we will be saved from grumbling or complaint in time of pain. And though we see truly that our sins deserve it, yet his love excuses us; and with his great courtesy, he does away with all our blame, beholding us with compassion and pity like children who are innocent whom he can never reject.” (pp. 55-57).

The Consuming Fire of God's Love

 Preached at  North Valley Friends Church

September 22, 2024

The Consuming Fire of God’s Love

When Leslie asked me to consider preaching at NVFC, I told her that I think I am always preaching one sermon in different guises, namely that God’s love must have an object and God’s creation is that object, that God loves you and me. Often this is a consoling message. As Jesus said, perhaps with a bit of wry humor, “are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and yet not one of them falls to the ground without my Father knowing. Fear not, for you are of more value than many sparrows.” Here is a bit of the flavor of Micah 3.  "Listen, pray, chieftains of Jacob and captains of the house of Israel. Is it not yours to know what is right? Haters of good and lovers of evil . . . who devour My people's flesh and strip their skin from them and crack open their bones.  And they cut it like flesh in the pot and like meat in the cauldron" (The Hebrew Bible, "Prophets," tr. Robert Alter, 2015).

It was a surprise to me to find that it took only a few hours to see that this message too is about the fact that God loves us, you and me.  This is a message about God’s grace.

But first, I want to respond to Micah. I notice that he addresses three classes of people with power in their culture: priests, judges, and prophets. These define morality for the rest of their society. They tell other people what is right and wrong. But Micah accuses them of cannibalism towards other people, skinning them, breaking their bones, sucking out the marrow. To bring this into non-figurative terms, they destroy the lives of those for whom they define the rules, those in their care, under their influence; they take away their lives in order to enrich their own. They are predatory. 

We can look at those in our own society’s leadership who also cannibalize others, who remove from them the means of life; who destroy others to add to their own abundance; who ruin others’ chances to live fully and freely. 

And while it is comforting to point the finger at corruption above us in the power structure,

it would be a mistake to hear Micah talking only to those at the top of his culture. For this to have relevance to us, we need to consider that power includes greater physical strength, greater prestige and social capital, greater ability to decide who gets in and who must stay out—gate keeping. We need to recognize our own power over others, whether it is coercive or manipulative or accidental. We need to admit when we have misused our power, our privilege, depriving others of the ability to thrive and become their whole selves.

We can hear echoes of Micah’s message in the words of Jesus, first to the religious leaders, but then to everyone who has ears. I won’t rehearse all of the condemnations of the actions of the scribes and Pharisees, but I’ll remind you of this one: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and uncleanness. You bind heavy loads on others’ shoulders but you are unwilling to lift a finger to help them carry those loads.”  I will remind us, remind me, that Jesus also said, shockingly, that anyone who makes it hard for a little one to trust God would be better off drowned, and that whatever is done to the “least of these” is done to Jesus Himself.  And also that not everyone who says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do what Jesus’s Father and our Father says to do. And further that those who look on their hungry, thirsty, ragged, imprisoned neighbors and do nothing to alleviate this distress are not part of God’s sheep, not among God’s people. How much worse to actively contribute to or even cause another’s misery.  Jesus is not less demanding than Micah, and perhaps, given that he is talking right to us, is even more so. No wonder the liturgical confession includes both what we have done and what we have left undone.  

When Jesus was asked the greatest commandment, he said, “Love God with everything you are and have, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus knew he had to add the second, which he said is like the first, because we can talk ourselves into believing we love God while we are doing harm to our neighbor. But also, this contains in it the truth that when we harm others we also harm ourselves, and conversely that love for others and love for oneself go arm in arm.

We have seen that Jesus shares Micah’s outrage about the misuse of power and influence. So how can we move from admitting our selfishness and apathy and self-indulgence at others’ expense to a better understanding about God’s love for us, God’s grace toward us? We need to recognize that God’s grace may look a lot like judgment, God’s grace is surgical, and our response to this intrusive grace of God makes all the difference.

I owe much of my understanding of God’s intrusive and uncomfortable grace to three writers: George MacDonald, Flannery O’Connor, and Julian of Norwich. George MacDonald was a novelist and preacher in the 1800s whose writing was hugely influential on C.S. Lewis.  He writes in one of his Unspoken Sermons, “The Consuming Fire”:

Nothing is inexorable but love….Love has ever in view the absolute [the potential] loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more…Therefore all that…comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. (18-19)

Let us have grace to serve the Consuming Fire, our God, with divine fear; not with the fear that cringes and craves, but with the bowing down of all thoughts, all delights, all loves before him who is the life of them all and will have them all pure. (20)

…the fear towards God will be one with the homeliest love. Yea, the fear of God will cause a person to flee, not from God, but from the self, in terror lest that person do [wrong to ] God or [to] a neighbor .… (21)

In sum, God will love us into our best selves, and whatever we carry around with us that prevents us being that best self will have to go. This is the work of grace for us.

I learned a similar view of God’s grace from Flannery O’Connor, a mid 20th century writer of novels and short stories. Her self-satisfied characters are often jolted awake by God’s grace in a way they would never have chosen. Their casual American Christianity is not enough. I’ll mention one character and how God’s grace destroys in order to redeem.  In “Revelation,” a good solid Christian woman named Mrs. Turpin is attacked in the doctor’s office as she is making banal conversation about who is and who isn’t trash. A young woman throws a book at her, raising a bump on the forehead, and shouts, “Go back to hell where you came from, you fat warthog.”

What makes this traumatic moment redemptive is that Mrs. Turpin turns immediately to God and complains about being treated like this, while all the while wondering why God would send her this message. And because she turns toward God instead of away, and in recognition of her willingness to learn despite her anger and humiliation, God gives her a vision of the redemption of humanity, beginning with those she places at the bottom of the heap and ending with her kind of people. She sees the vast stream of human beings moving into glory, and her own kind of people are at the end of the line.

She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were [singing] on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.  She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead…In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. (The Complete Stories, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 508) 

And finally, to Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchorite from the 1300s. She had a near-death experience in which she had a vision of Jesus. She meditated on that vision for the rest of her life and gained profound understanding about God’s love and God’s intention to redeem and make all things well.  Along the way, she hears Jesus say this:

“For I will wholly break you of your vain affections and your vicious pride; and after that I shall gather you and make you meek and mild, clean and holy by oneing (uniting) you to me.” ( The Revelation of Love, tr. John Skinner, 86)

So what can we take of comfort and consolation from Micah 3? We can rejoice that God’s love always intends what is best for us and always builds up what is best in us; we can trust that God will make us good, and we can welcome the intrusion of God’s grace when we are not good as we face the both the consequences of doing harm and the divine surgery that will save us.  We can understand that God’s grace is not about excusing but about remaking, about healing, about redeeming what is perverse, wounded, and lost.  We can take heart, even as we tremble, that God’s love is inexorable and will do us good.

Jesus our Mother

 Many years ago in the 1970s, I wrote the following poem, which is a Good Friday poem. So I titled it, “Nativity” and included this epigram: “John 19:34.” I may have overestimated my readers’ desire to dig out the Gospel of John, so I’ll include that verse here.  

But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear,

And at once there came out blood and water.

Here’s the poem.

Nativity

John 19:34

and there poured forth water

the breaking of the amniotic sac

--approaching birth

and there poured forth blood

the placental afterbirth

--completing birth

and there sounded a shout

the pain of labor and the victory of delivery

and the kingdom of God lifted up its infant voice

and wept.

It meant a lot to me to consider that in the crucifixion of Jesus was a moment that was essentially maternal. I thought at the time that my insight was original, and it was to me, but it was not in the life of the Church Universal.

First of all, Jesus described himself as a mother in this passage, Matthew 26:37:  “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you kill the prophets and stone them which are sent to you: how often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you would not.”  This maternal imagery is in line with imagery from the Old Testament which refers to taking refuge under God’s wings, a maternal metaphor. 

Second, I discovered the following prayer from the 11^th century, which set my heart ablaze.

Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you:
You are gentle with us as a mother with her children;

Often you weep over our sins and our pride:
  tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgment.

You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds:
  in sickness you nurse us, and with pure milk you feed us.

Jesus, by your dying we are born to new life:
  by your anguish and labour we come forth in joy.

Despair turns to hope through your sweet goodness:
 through your gentleness we find comfort in fear.

Your warmth gives life to the dead:
  your touch makes sinners righteous.

Lord Jesus, in your mercy heal us:
  in your love and tenderness remake us.

In your compassion bring grace and forgiveness:
  for the beauty of heaven may your love prepare us.

1033-1109 Anselm of Canterbury (Benedictine) (Common Worship: Daily Prayer © The Archbishops' Council 2005 and published by Church House Publishing.)

And I came to Anselm’s lovely prayer from preparing to teach about Julian of Norwich, who wrote the following in her Revelation of Love (translated by John Skinner). 

Our own true Mother Jesus, he who is all love, bears us to joy and endless living. . . . He is compelled to feed us, for the precious love of his motherhood makes him a debtor to us.  The mother may suckle her children with her own milk, but our precious Mother Jesus, he may feed us with himself.  . . . The mother may lay the child tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus, he may lead us homely into his blessed breast by his sweet open side and show within in part the Godhead and the joys of heaven, with spiritual certainty of endless bliss. . . . The property of true motherhood is kind [natural] love, wisdom, and knowing, and it is good. . . . And even though some earthly mother might allow a child of hers to perish, our heavenly Mother, Jesus, may never suffer us to be lost, for we are his children. . . . 

 . . . 

The blessed wound of our Saviour is open and rejoices to heal us; the sweet gracious hands of our Mother reach out ready and diligent about us.  For in all this working he uses the skills of a kind nurse who cares for nothing but the salvation of her child.  His task is to save us, a duty he delights to fulfill.  And he would have us know it; for he wants us to love him sweetly and trust in him meekly and mightily. . . . 
. . .
Thus our life is grounded in our true Mother Jesus in the foreseeing wisdom that he has from without beginning, with the might of the Father and the high sovereign goodness of the Holy Spirit.  For in taking our humankind he brings us life, in his blessed dying upon the cross he bore us to endless life.  And from that time until now, and even until Doomsday, he feeds us and helps us, according to the high sovereign kindness of his Motherhood that answers our kindly needs of childhood. (New York: Doubleday, 1997.)

It is so meaningful to me to have the Motherhood of God affirmed from the Old Testament on through the Gospels, and to have Jesus specifically named in the prayers and revelations of saints of the Church as our Mother in his work of redemption and restoration. If you, like me, have a need for a compassionate Mother in the heart of God, the Church has room for you.