|
© Copyright - material in this site may not be reproduced in any media without the express permission of the Web Master. Care has been taken by this site to ensure that all necessary copyright permissions have been obtained. If this is not the case in any instance, this is an inadvertent error. Please contact the Web Master and this will be rectified. |
The Triumph of the Cross by Fr. John-Mark Titterington The Bible story has been described as a record of God’s covenants with man. Some of those covenants hardly got off the ground, like the one with Adam, while others had a longer life like those with Noah and Abraham. By contrast, the one made with Moses is still operational among the Jews and in a way not originally intended, perhaps, among Christians. The temporary nature of some of these covenants is shown by the fact that they were, later on, renewed in some way during Israel’s history. But these renewals proved to be equally temporary as the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews says in Chapter 8:6 Jesus "is also the Mediator of a better covenant which was established on better promises." Most of that epistle to the Hebrews is about the new and final covenant which Jesus Christ made with His Church, and St John puts this one in perspective with Jesus’ claim:- "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up"(John 3:14) and later in the same Gospel, Jesus prophesied: "I, when I am lifted up, will draw all men to myself"(12:32). Then, at His last Supper, after Judas the Betrayer had left, He said:--"Now is the Son of Man glorified, and in Him God is glorified" (13:31) What exactly was this "glory"? The New Testament never faces this directly and so everyone has their favourite answer to that question. Mine certainly is St Paul’s apparently simple statement in 2 Corinthians which is very important and full of meaning. He says "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself"(5:19). Here reconciling means bringing the world together and making it "at one" How did He do this? Just to reply "by dying on the cross" is too simple an answer as thousands died in the Roman Empire in that way, So what then is so special about Jesus’ death? The answer is several things. First He chose to give Himself up to that death at that particular feast (ie Passover) by careful planning over a long period of time. And secondly, that self-giving is important because of Who He is, Jesus the Incarnate Son of God, born of the Virgin, Mary. Even so, it is highly unlikely that we would ever have heard about Jesus of Nazareth were it not for His rising again on the third day just as He had foretold. In the same vein, He foretold His final departure from this earth which He achieved by His Ascending into Heaven in broad daylight in front of many people, and also he promised that He would cause the Holy Spirit, the Comforter or Paraclete, to come upon His disciples and remain with them and His Church for all time. In other words, the answer is a package deal and all the five different parts of it have to be held in a proper balance -- the Incarnation; the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension and the Sending of the Holy Spirit. All are important and to stress one results in distorting the full picture. Be that as it may, Jesus did seem to suggest in St John’s Gospel that He thought that His coming Glory was to be achieved in the next three days, through His Passion and Death and Resurrection, and this is the faith of the Orthodox Church. So we can speak of the Triumph of the Cross and the Glory of the Resurrection. In passing, here it is helpful to put in a health warning. This is because the Western Church seems, and I emphasize that word, seems to concentrate in its teaching, upon the death of Jesus on the Cross at the expense of the other parts of the equation. A well-known Evangelical writer, in a magazine article earlier this year, said "…central to the ministry of Jesus was not his birth, his teaching, his miracles, or even his resurrection, but His death and crucifixion." This, we believe, does not reflect the faith of the New Testament as a whole, nor that of any of the Fathers of the Church. We are called to hold together in a delicate balance, the "faith once delivered to the saints", as St Jude says(v.3) and this is not easy. When the scriptures were first translated into our language there was a difficulty because there was no English word to convey the meaning of the Greek word "katallagee" which was their way of describing the reconciling of two who had been separated. So William Tyndale promptly invented a new word by joining together three short English words "at – one-ment". Unfortunately, it was never pronounced like that, and the nice-sounding word "atonement" disguises what it really means Again very unfortunately, it often came to signify in the West the novel doctrine of the "substitutionary atonement" which meant that Christ endured the Cross in place of the human race, as a punishment by which he satisfied the wrath of God. This is not Orthodox teaching, We believe that Christ died voluntarily on the Cross as a representative of the human race and thereby offered to God a "sacrifice of praise". By making Himself a "ransom" to death and the devil, He conquered them by His death, as He cleansed the human race of sin which is the "sting of death"(1 Corinthians15:56). That is nice, neat theory but not something which seems to apply to ordinary people. So, Jesus was concerned to "earth" His Passover from death to life, and at the start of those momentous three days, Jesus did just that by means of an evening meal with his disciples, which is now usually called His Last Supper with them. At that meal, He took a small loaf of bread and said "This is My Body" which must have puzzled the disciples. His next words were said holding a cup of wine, "This is My Blood of the New Covenant which is shed for many for the remission of sins"(Matthew 26.26). This would be a bit more understandable to the Jewish disciples, as the former Covenant had been sealed with the blood of bulls and goats. Now, Jesus is claiming that the new covenant will be sealed by His Blood in order to reconcile "the many" ie everybody. And we note that when He said this, Judas was still present in the room. So in those three great days, Jesus announced the setting up of a new covenant, not with one race but with the whole world The next day, He triumphantly sealed this Covenant with his Blood on the Cross and on the third day, Pascha, by rising from the dead, He proclaimed the glory of having trampled down death by His death, and made it known to all the world by His rising again. By these action-filled three days, God was indeed in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.(2 Corinthians 5:19) We then believe that Jesus is our "Passover" from death to life and by whom we are reconciled, or achieve at-one-ment with God. This is the true triumph of the Cross, which in turn is made manifest by the glory of His Resurrection. |
