Gracious God, help us to follow your way of the
cross which is the way of life. Amen.
Perhaps you’ve heard the expression after asking for directions, “Well, you can’t get there from here.” Indeed, sometimes given our starting point, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get to our destination. For example, by car, I can’t just start driving and end up in France. Or, given my age, there’s no amount of training or practice that will ever lead to me playing tennis in the tournament at Wimbledon. We can’t always get there from here.
When
it comes to our faith, it seems like one of these directional disconnects is
found between Christ’s crucifixion and his exaltation to the right hand of God.
As we’re considering how to interpret the cross this Holy Week, tonight we
consider the idea that scholars have called paradoxic exaltation. We heard in
the reading from Hebrews that Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith
endured the cross and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of
God. It might seem like we’ve missed some steps between the cross and the
throne – that’s the paradox. The cross is about shame, betrayal, cursedness,
God-forsakenness, and degradation. So how is it that the crucified one sits at
the right hand of the Father? It’s a paradox because it makes no sense. It
seems that there’s no way to get there from here.
And
yet this is a part of our faith – that Jesus is exalted to the right hand of
the Father. And it’s not so much that we proclaim that Jesus sits on the throne
of God and it just so happens that he had previously been crucified as if it
that were an irrelevant biographical detail. No, the idea behind paradoxic
exaltation is that it is through the cross that Jesus is exalted to the right
hand of God; that the crucifixion is also a coronation.
In other words, the cross
is not some tragedy in the story of Jesus that had otherwise been going well.
Rather, the cross is the culmination of Jesus’ life. From the start, Jesus was
on a collision course with the status quo, with the powers that be, with the
ways of the world. In his life, he followed the pattern he set forth in the
feeding of the 5,000: take, bless, break, and give. God took on flesh in Jesus,
was blessed by the Spirit at his Baptism, was broken on the cross so that he might
give life to the world. The cross is what the incarnation of Jesus was aimed at
from the start.
And when we consider the
imagery of the cross, we see that it was not a minor or incidental part of
Jesus’ life, it was his magnum opus. Consider the way you’ve seen Jesus’
crucifixion depicted in Scripture and art. There is a sign above his head that
reads “King of the Jews.” It is with God’s sense of humor and providence that
humanity’s taunting of Jesus was actually the truest thing that could have been
said in that moment. Indeed, on the cross Jesus is enthroned. To make it even
clearer, the world gave him a crown of thorns and God gives him the crown of
crowns as Jesus is elevated to the right hand of God. He is mocked by being
given purple robes, representing royalty. What was meant as bullying is, in
reality, exactly right. This is the king not only of Israel, but of the cosmos.
As we saw in last night’s reading from First Corinthians, the cross appears as
foolishness to the world though it is the wisdom of God. Though it seems like a
cruel joke, the truth of the matter is that the crucifixion is a coronation.
In the Book of Common
Prayer, there is a prayer we pray each Friday morning that says, “Almighty God,
whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered
not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in
the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace.”
That’s the paradox – Jesus suffered pains before the joys of Easter, he was
crucified prior to being glorified to the right hand of God, and we find life
peace not despite the death and horrors of the cross, but because of it.
There is a passage in
Philippians that scholarship think was a hymn of the early Church. It reads,
“Christ Jesus… emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human
likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient
to the point of death – even death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted
him.” It’s paradoxic exaltation. Since Jesus emptied himself and died, he was
filled with Resurrection life. Easter comes not merely because Jesus’ vital
signs ceased and he was a corpse, rather Easter comes because Jesus gave
himself fully and totally to the Father and was therefore fully and totally
made whole. We take for granted that Jesus is at the center of our faith, but
this week reminds us of why Jesus is at the foundation – it is not because of
his miracles, it is not because of his teachings, it is not because of his
compassion, it is because of his death on the cross that he is exalted to the
right hand of the Father.
And why this matters is
that the right hand of God is the place of power and judgment. Jesus is the
judged judge who becomes our judge. The one who decides our fate is none other
than the one who loves us so much as to die for us. This is why we can be
confident in knowing that all shall be well – because of the cross. Our murder
of God did not lead to the collapse of the universe or God’s rejection of us,
but rather became the means by which Jesus is glorified through a love that
defies all explanation.
In John 14, Jesus says
that he has gone on ahead of us to prepare a place for us. Our future is secure
because of the cross of Jesus. Through his death he has gone ahead of us as the
pioneer and perfector of our faith, as Hebrews puts it. Jesus has blazed a
trail through the valley of the shadow of death and has prepared our place in
the bosom of God for each of us. As Hebrews says, this was all done so that “that
you may not grow weary or lose heart.” Friends, Christ has endured the shame,
pain, and rejection of the cross for us. Paradoxically, in emptying himself to
such degradation, God has exalted him to the throne of heaven which means that
we have every reason to be confident and hopeful that no matter our failures,
no matter our doubts, no matter our deaths, a place is prepared for us in God’s
eternal and life-giving love. The cross is how we get from here to there.
