A prayer I repeat when I have trouble sleeping comes from the traditional Stations of the Cross liturgy. It goes, “I adore You, O Christ, and I love You. By Your holy cross You redeemed the world.”
Charlie Mackesy contemplating the central Crucifixion panel of his triptych for St. Paul’s Church in Hammersmith. The third panel shows the homecoming of the Prodigal Son, while the first panel, originally intended to be the Laughing Jesus, was left unfinished to suggest the Christian life as a work in progress.
Even while saying these words, and believing them, I often wonder: But how exactly did Jesus redeem the world? The Christian faith has many mysteries. Foremost of these, probably, is the Trinity. Often it’s said that the Trinity cannot really be understood, it can only be believed.
Well, take me for a fool, but I’ve always felt I understood the Trinity. It’s a mystery, yes, but there’s also a certain inevitability about it. More on that another time …
The Cross, however, is not inevitable. In fact it’s just the opposite—pure grace. To me the biggest mystery in Christianity is the Cross, and how exactly it brought about my redemption.
I know the theological theories, of which there are seven standard ones: Ransom, Satisfaction, Scapegoat, Penal Substitution, Recapitulation, Government, and Christus Victor.
While I’ve studied these, and can say I ‘understand’ them, somehow none of them has ever really satisfied me. They all seem purely rational explanations, which do not really touch the numinous, luminous, and deeply emotional power I feel as I contemplate the Cross.
A while ago I began praying about this, asking God to show me the real meaning of the Cross. What is the true secret, not just of its power, but of its efficacy? How exactly does it redeem me, and the world?
And lo and behold, an answer came to me. A rather simple and obvious answer, but one that satisfies me more than all the others.
Think of the Cross as shaped like a great key. If this is so, what lock does it fit? The lock is the human heart. So for me the question is not, What legal transaction took place on Calvary? but rather, How does the key of the Cross open the human heart?
Emotional mysteries call for emotional clarifications, not just rational ones. When I look upon the cross, whether it is a plain cross or a crucifix (one bearing a corpus), I am not so much preoccupied with thoughts as with feelings—spiritual feelings. I feel, for example, that it should be me hanging there, not the holy Son of God. I feel stricken with the torture that Christ endured for my sake. I feel something of what it must have cost the Father to watch His only Son being brutalized to death. I am stunned with shame and horror that this is how humanity—including me—behaved toward God in the flesh. I am overcome with sorrow, not just at “man’s inhumanity to man” but at man’s inhumanity to the living God, an inhumanity that inundates this whole earth every day.
I use the word ‘inundate’ deliberately. We live in a time of increasing floods and natural disasters, deploring these ‘acts of God.’ But how often do we truly own them as acts of man? How often do we deplore our own sin, the flood tide of iniquity in which we are drowning?
Well, I could go on, describing the sort of feelings we may have, or should have, as we confront the Cross of Christ. Herein, I believe, lies the real meaning of the Cross, this overwhelming freight of emotional realization which, if we let it, can spring us loose from the prison of our own frozen hearts and draw us into the very heart of God.
This is why Jesus died so horribly—to break the chains of our sin and to capture us with His wholehearted love. This is how He redeems the world.
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