Lord, my heart is not proud; my eyes are not haughty.
I don’t concern myself with matters too great or too awesome for me to grasp.
Instead, I have quieted myself,
like a weaned child who no longer cries for it’s mother’s milk.
Yes, like a weaned child is my soul within me.
– Psalm 131:1-2 NLT
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.
– 1 John 3:16(a)
What is the message of the Cross?
This is the question I must address every year at this time. Weeks before Holy Week, it rises amidst all the other things I must think about. I’m plugging along, embracing each week as it comes, spending time with God and creating space for inspiration for the messages and lessons I must impart each Sunday, while in the back of my mind some manic voice shouts, ‘Have you thought about Holy Week yet?’ And so the pressure begins to mount.
I’m not sure what that pressure is, really, other than the massing of my own insecurities and perfectionist tendencies. I think a lot of pastors feel it. Somehow or other, we once again have to talk about the Cross, and not just as we do throughout the year. It’s Holy Week, for crying out loud, and so you have to talk about the Cross in a special way! This is the big time. The show. People who don’t normally come to church may show up on Palm Sunday. They probably won’t on Good Friday, so you need to get the message of the Cross right then. Oh sure, you can talk about Palm Sunday itself sometimes, the Triumphal Entry and all that, but not every year, that would be too repetitive, so at least every other year, on Palm Sunday, you need to deliver a whizz bang message about the Cross. And remember, most of the people you’ll be speaking to have heard this story before. Many times. So you have to come up with something new. Something original. Something…clever.
Fortunately, there are all sorts of ways to talk about the Cross. The New Testament writers, tasked with expressing the most extraordinary event in the history of the universe, were inspired to paint various word pictures that help us capture the Cross and it’s meaning. The Cross is a place of victory. It’s a hospital where humanity’s wounds are healed. It’s the place where the price was paid for the forgiveness of sins. It’s our ransom. It’s our moral model for how we are to live. It recalls us to our true identity in God’s sight. It restores our union with God. It is the place where God enters into our suffering. The list goes on and on. There are any number of entry points to the message of the Cross. So there shouldn’t be any problem coming up with something to share.
But sometimes, there is. And I know that sounds crazy. But when you’re the pastor, you tend to remember everything you’ve every said about the Cross. Every sermon. Every illustration. Every clever approach to make it sound new. And you can’t help but think (hope?), even though you’re certainly wrong, that everyone else remembers too. And so, the pressure. How do you come up with something new, something original, something clever, in speaking of the Cross this year during Holy Week.
I felt this pressure this year. Big time. The week before Palm Sunday, I sat down to write my sermon, and hours into it, felt as if I’d written nothing more than four pages of theological gobbledygook. And so, a couple days later, I started from another angle. I didn’t even finish a draft of that one. I couldn’t seem to capture what I was trying to say. And so, my brain hurting, I abandoned the project for a while.
I eventually completed the sermon (I returned to my original, modified it slightly, and realized it wasn’t so bad). But even so, I felt as if this whole exercise, this whole exhausting effort at trying to capture the message of the Cross in a single message, was ridiculous. And, of course, it is. Because the truth is that all of our efforts to capture that message are destined for failure. How can you possibly capture the meaning of the Cross in a single message, or even in a lifetime of messages? At the end of John’s Gospel there is a telling notation: ‘Jesus did many other things. If they were all written down, I suppose the whole world could not contain the books that could be written.’ How equally true is that of the message of the Cross! For all our theories, all our word pictures, all our attempts to capture the meaning of the Atoning work of Jesus Christ, all our cleverness, we have never, will never, come close to capturing its essence or fullness. What happened there is beyond words. There’s a reason theologians refer to the events of Holy Week as the paschal mystery. The message of the Cross, the meaning of the Cross, the elusive understanding of the Cross will forever remain just that – a mystery. Trying to explain it with words is like trying to contain the whole of Niagara Falls in a tea cup.
Hence, the pressure.
And so, here’s a message that doesn’t try so hard.
What is the message of the Cross?
It is that we mean everything to God.
And here is where, despite my earlier comments, I risk being clever.
I recently finished reruns of The Office, a comedy that features one of the great love stories of the ages. Yes, besides Romeo and Juliet, Captain Von Trapp and Maria, and Heathcliff and Catherine, you have to put Jim and Pam. Their story captivated audiences for nine years running this century. But if you know it, you know that near the end of that run, they hit some bumpy times.
Pam, who struggled with self-esteem, was really having a hard time when Jim attempted to start a new business. The time away, the time apart, made Pam feel as if she weren’t enough for Jim. At one point, she tells him so, and Jim, well, Jim is just crushed. After all he has done to show Pam how much he loves her, he realizes that he hasn’t done enough.
And so, he asks the video crew that has been filming their story for nine years (that’s the premise of The Office) to help him out. The crew assembles a montage of key moments in their love story, moments that highlight just how much Pam means to him. Pam watches the video and then Jim hands her a letter. It’s a letter he’s had for a long time. He had almost given it to her once before they started to date, but chickened out. But now, in the fullness of time, he shares it.
As he hands the note to Pam, he simply says, ‘Everything you’ll ever need to know is in that note.’ Pam reads it, and with tears in her eyes, looks at Jim, who simply says to her, with a heart full of love, ‘Not enough for me? You’re everything.’
And just like that, Pam knows she’s enough.
She knows that in Jim’s eyes, she is everything.
Here’s the funny thing: we never learn the contents of the note. It remains, and still remains all these years later, a mystery.
And that, more than anything else I can say, is the message of the Cross. It’s God’s love letter to us. The note that tells us everything we will ever need to know. That no matter who we are, where we’ve been, or what we’ve done, we are, in God’s eyes, everything.
When I was a kid, my Mom hung a plaque on the wall that said, ‘I asked God how much he loved me. ‘This much,’ he said, and he stretched out his arms, and died.’
No matter what else the Cross means, no matter what theories we might propose or explanations we might offer, in the end, they really don’t matter much. In the end, all that can remain a mystery.
What matters is that God loves us.
What matters is that we’re his everything.
Under Christ’s Mercy,
Brent
