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No doubt you are expecting me to write something about the cross; after all it's Good Friday and today we focus on the cross. So shall I disappoint you? Perhaps...
A friend said to me only this week that the cross is about God's disappointment and disillusion. I'm wasn't sure how to respond to that idea; it's not something that I'd heard before. I can get the idea that I'm all too easily a disappointment to God; sometimes He shows me what I'm really like, underneath the veneer, behind the mask, and I don't like what I see. I can get the idea that the disciples often disappointed Jesus, their understanding or lack of it, their faith, or lack of it, denials, doubt; I see myself in them.
But the cross showing us how disappointed and disillusioned God is – well, I'm not sure...I wonder how God the Father felt about having to send his son, knowing that there was no other way, no other means by which reconciliation and restoration, not just of people but of the whole of creation, could be achieved. Was he happy to do that? I don't know. Was he reluctant? I don't think so; I don't think God hesitated for one moment. His motivation was his sovereign choice to love unconditionally what he had made – including us. I am sure that God the Father was equally hurt by the break in the relationship he enjoyed with his son caused when Jesus bore our sin on the cross; this sense of God the Father's hurt may be something we don't think about – we tend to focus on Jesus, 'About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice..."My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"' (Matthew 27:46), but Father and Son were, I think equally estranged.
Was he disappointed and disillusioned that he had to go so far? Perhaps this idea opens up for us just how great a price was paid; the cost of the cross cannot, indeed, must not be underestimated. It is true to say that we cannot begin fully to understand, neither should we expect to, the full extent of that cost. But we can stand in awe, we can marvel, we can be amazed, keeping a firm grip on the childlike wonder that our Father should go to such lengths and never taking it for granted – never taking forgiveness granted, never taking reconciliation for granted, never taking restoration for granted, never taking for granted what God wants to do in us. He wants to put us back together, to repair our brokenness, to go on making us and remaking us, to restore the image of God in us, to make us like Christ. The cross is where it begins, is what makes it all possible – and only the cross.
Maybe God was disappointed; maybe God was disillusioned; but there is a sense of inevitability – caused simply because God loves us so much – we do catch a sense of inevitability - '...From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.' (Matthew 16:21). Jesus knew that his ministry would culminate in a cross and Luke tells us that Jesus '...set his face to go to Jerusalem.' (Luke 9:51, NRSV).
What we see in the gospels is Jesus determination and resolve and beyond that we see him loving us 'to the end'. I, for one, am glad about that. I'm glad there is a cross; I'm sad that it had to come to that. I'm glad because in the presence of a holy God I am impotent; there's nothing I do in my defence, nothing I can do to justify myself – that he has done it all is brilliant. That's the cross – the place I can shed my impotence, my sin, my disappointment, my disillusion, and know that it has been dealt with, all of it. It's the cross that makes the Covenant Prayer possible – that kind of surrender, that kind of submission, difficult, immensely difficult, but possible. Possible because God works from the inside out; the cross marks the start of what He wants to do, not for me, but in me.
Yes, I too am sad that the way had to be the way of the cross, but I am so please that there is a cross, one that didn\'t just do it\'s work at that time but continues doing it\'s work today and in time to come, a work of cleansing and healing, and we are told that because of this work that Jesus continues to do, we can BOLDLY approach the throne of God...go with confidence.[Hebrews4v16]...What a priveledge and all because Jesus was prepared to take the punishment for our sins....How gracious.. and so on this day [Good Friday] and every day I say thank you Lord so much.