The Cross: Radiant Sign of Faith, Hope, and Love

“After this I beheld and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations and kindred’s and people and tongues, stood before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb. And all the angels stood round about the throne and about the elders and the four beasts and fell before the throne on their faces and worshipped God saying, Amen: Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might, be unto our God forever and ever. Amen. And one of the elders answered saying unto me, what are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they? And I said unto him Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, these are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.

They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” (Revelation 7:9-17) (Also read Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; John 10:22-30) In the year 96 AD, the churches of the great city of Ephesus along with their sibling congregations across Western Asia find themselves undergoing persistent, violent persecution. The boot of Caesar Domitian presses against their necks. These churches confess a first loyalty to Yeshua HaMashiach and to the world HaMashiach promises: grace, justice and peace. The churches express their loyalty to this dynamic loving community with the first Christian creed: “Yeshua HaMashiach is Adonai!” They articulate that creed in an empire ruled by a tyrant brooking no competition. The only lord in that empire resides in Rome. Citizens differing from that perception and affirming loyalty to anything or anyone other than the Roman emperor become fair game for arrest, imprisonment, perhaps execution. Caesar will crush those churches. He will disperse, silence and eradicate their members.

I.) “Not so fast!” insists one of those prisoners. John, banished to the prison island Patmos, just off the coast of what we now call Western Turkey; John, refusing to bend to the tyrant’s rod. John writes a letter to those menaced churches. He reveals a vision illuminating a radical hope, promising that no matter how terrible, how bloody, how cruel and how brutal the assault by the emperor’s Gestapo on the life of those churches, no matter how ominous the fear, how intense the violence, how wild the chaos; John asserts that the emperor’s evil intent to ravage and desolate those churches will not have the last word. Have you got that? The slaughtered Lamb; the crucified Mashiach according to our seer John of Patmos, bears the ultimate and final word on the value and destiny of human life. In that slaughtered Lamb; the crucified Mashiach; amid all that infamy and malevolence those early churches face, we encounter the promise of the Resurrected crucified Mashiach. It is almost as if the slain Lamb becomes the shepherd. Concentrated in this one symbol pointing toward the cross, we see joined the substance and core of faith, of hope, of love.

II.) Faith, you ask? Here at the cross? How do you see the substance of faith here? What could the substance of faith be here? Just this: “in face of wars and rumour of war,” in face of a troubled, chaotic, often heartless dog-eat-dog world, in face of cancer, AIDS, the terrible afflictions threatening and snuffing out our lives; in face of our living precariously with the misunderstandings, the self-deception and conflict souring our lives together; in face of a world where our best intentions turn upside down and inside out, where our most generous dreams collapse or inflict injury; in face of cold, unheeding forces so often swirling about us, we confess our faith in YAHVEH who, through all life can dish out, loves us, hangs on to us; never lets us go. Now, we take that on faith. On faith!In so many ways the observable, objective facts of our life deny a loving YAHVEH. Indeed the bare fact of the cross of Yeshua itself denies a loving Creator. If ever there existed a place where mercy fails, where human and divine abandonment evidence themselves; if ever an occasion arose where goodness loses, where innocence gets trampled, where the worst human beings can do to one another happens; it is at the cross.

To be able to say in face of the hard, cold facts of the cross that love grounds the universe reflects a decision of faith when facts seem to belie it. So why then, does faith in a G-d of love flourish at the foot of the cross? What do we witness here at the cross of HaMashiach that enables us to trust in a loving and gracious G-d when much in our world, most specifically the cross itself, screams a shrill and rabid “No!” Oh friends, what in faithwe see here of divine love is this: at the cross of HaMashiach we witness the lengths to which love goes to restore wholeness to those for whom it feels most tenderly. We witness here the risk love takes when it seeks its lost and rebellious children. In the cross of HaMashiach we encounter and are ourselves embraced by a divine grace risking death itself to restore our broken relationships, to heal communal wounds, to weave together again a harmony so that this scrapping, tangling, fighting human race of ours might become, in truth, a family of YAHVEH. In faithwe trust this YAHVEH of love.

III.) But what about the love itself? How do we see that evident in the cross of HaMashiach? Again friends, you know love does not calculate the cost when it comes after someone. You know that “love is a spendthrift” in pursuit of someone it will not give up. Many of you reading this teaching know the pain involved in forgiving someone who betrayed you, slandered you, misread your motives, shamed you, walked out on you, crushed you; turned your heaven into hell. You know how stark and loveless life can be. What saves the relationship? What brings healing? Is it revenge? No!!!! Revenge brings satisfaction maybe, but healing? Never!!! Is it requital? Are you kidding? Requital brings a measure of justice perhaps, but never healing. What brings healing we can only describe as grace, forgiveness: the risk love takes that though it may be battered and bruised, reconciliation overarches everything. Love itself is ready to pay whatever the personal cost to bridge the gulf, reclaim the bond and heal the wound. How can this be? How does the cross provide hope in this world where hope seems so precarious, moving into a century where violence and blood flow daily? How does the cross radiate hope in a world where as soon as one barrier falls, another is erected; where tragedy riddles much of our existence and death finally ends it? Is there any hope? Is there really a new future?

IV.) Again, I beg you look at the cross. See in the cross our hope. This cross on our Communion table is... empty. As powerful a reminder as the crucifix may be of our faith in the costly love of YAHVEH, this empty cross, the Resurrection cross, standing here at the head of our nave confronts us with power taking the worst we can do to one another; indeed, power that takes death itself and makes through it a new creation. I wish I could explain this to you. I can’t. I can only testify to a stunning paradox: an empty cross means that the power of YAHVEH lies not in preventing hopeless situations; it means that the power of YAHVEH lies not in staying crucifixion, not in intervening to stop the catastrophes, human tragedies and monumental stupidities in the world. Our hope lies not in some cheap movie miracle. No way! We see the foundation of our hope in the empty cross as it points to the power of YAHVEH in taking the body of the crucified and transfiguring it into a new being. Divine power lies not so much in deterring tragedy but in transforming it. In the cross we see power alive and at work amid the most hopeless situation, bearing with us, submitting to the worst, yet even then working to bring out of tragedy, triumph; out of peril, promise; out of death, life. Do you want an illustration? Look around you. Why else would you; or your neighbour; why would anyone wear a cross on his lapel or drape one around their neck? Surely not because you want to show off an instrument of blood, torture and death; the ancient equivalent of the electric chair. Hardly. You wear it, as a sign of love that will never give up and a hope that will never be daunted; power that transforms. That Divine promise lies behind the epiphany John describes to his imperilled churches; that promise inspires the Durer woodcut with a slain Lamb on a rainbow signalling hope; that promise holds not only for Christians in the first century or the sixteenth but for you and me and our churches as we seek to follow and serve Yeshua HaMashiach amid the challenging conditions of the twenty-first.