March 29

March 29, 2009

The Cross: The Victory of God
a sermon on Colossians 2.13-15
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

When I announced this sermon series on the cross in the March issue of the church newsletter, I told about my experience of becoming ordained. Back when I was coming up through the ranks in the Nashville Presbytery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, grilling the candidates from the floor of presbytery was a solemn duty and a joy. I probably came in for more questioning than some because I had grown up Baptist. All of us, however, were thoroughly questioned. The idea is, at a presbytery meeting, a candidate for ministry stands up front, and people ask the candidate questions about theology, personal faith, and church life until everyone feels confident the candidate is up to code. In theory this could happen in our presbytery, but I’ve never seen it. Usually the chair of the committee on preparation for ministry asks a couple of questions, then the moderator opens the floor for additional questions, but rarely do questions come.

Once I was ordained, I had a favorite question I would ask to every candidate: “Explain the various understandings of the atonement in Christian theology, tell us which one is most significant in your preaching, and why.” I confess part of my motive was mischief, trying to stump a friend with a tough one. But the larger part was, this is a good question to ask a potential preacher. “What do you preach about the cross?” That’s what I was asking. I think all of us can agree that’s an important question. “Tell me what Christians have said about the cross; then tell me what you say about it when you preach.” I’d like to think that if you’ve been taking notes during this series, you could answer that question easily. Not that anybody asked me, but today I’ll give my answer.

I’ve been explaining the five ways scripture explains the death of Jesus. Jesus set an example for us to follow. He gave his life as a ransom for many. Jesus was our substitute, taking the punishment that should have been ours, so the cross meets our need to deal with guilt. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, so the cross meets our need to be loved. And, on the cross Jesus triumphed over sin, death, and evil; so the cross meets our need to be free from fear.

I am fond of all of those answers. You will hear all of them in my preaching if you listen for them, but you will hear two of them in particular. Jesus is our substitute. That’s such a helpful and powerful way to think about the cross. I use that one a lot. There is one that I like even more and probably use even more. It is the one I offer to you today, the last one in my list: On the cross, Christ triumphed over sin, death, and evil. The cross is the victory of God.

Let me walk you through the plot of this answer: God is all powerful, and God is the creator of all that is. Nevertheless, there are things in this world—let’s call them “powers” for now; our scripture reading talks about “principalities and powers”—and these powers stand against God and work against God’s gracious will. Because God is loving and powerful, he will not tolerate this. So he sent Jesus to defeat theses powers. Jesus went to Jerusalem one Passover to force a showdown. The powers brought out their heavy artillery. From the selfish corruption of the religious leaders and the greed of Judas to the calculated indifference of Pontius Pilate, the powers brilliantly executed their best work. Injustice, hatred, violence—all the worst in humanity was proudly on display. In the end, Jesus hung on a cross. Death—the ultimate weapon of the powers—claimed him as its victim. Evil triumphed. Sin triumphed. Death triumphed. Or so it seemed …

Even Jesus’ friends thought he had failed … until Sunday morning. On Sunday morning the Father raised the Son in the power of the Spirit. With the resurrection of Jesus, new creation had begun! The powers were defeated. They had done their worst, and it wasn’t enough. Death itself didn’t work anymore. Instead of being a weapon of destruction it became a door into eternal life. It turns out, God has a mischievous sense of irony. The cross on which Jesus suffered a humiliating death was actually God’s victory over the powers. It looked like their triumph over him, but the resurrection revealed the cross for what it really was all along, the victory of God and the end of sin, evil, and death.

I favor this understanding of the cross for several reasons. One, I am naturally a pessimist, so I tend to see life in terms of struggle. Yet I also believe God gives us the victory. So we fight on with courage and resolve, because even in defeat we are victorious. Two, no other answer holds Jesus’ death and resurrection so close together. You have to do that. They go together. We really ought to think of them as one event—one thing God did to rescue us and give us eternal life. Three, I have a mischievous sense of irony too. There is something about God using the results of human sin and evil to conquer sin and evil that appeals to me. In this view, the cross is a kind of judo. Death kills death. Preachers in the early age of Christianity compared it to David killing Goliath with his own sword. Even if you don’t like the military images, you have to like the core message: Love is stronger than death; grace is stronger than sin; good is stronger than evil. The cross was the great cosmic showdown, and Easter proves who won.

OK, that’s the basic idea. Let me run you through some of the background. This answer enjoys strong scriptural support. Paul was fond of it, as we see in our scripture reading. He liked military images, and his readers did too. When he talks about Christ triumphing over the powers and making a public example of them, he had in mind the old Roman triumphal processions. After a successful campaign, the victorious Roman forces had a big parade through the streets of Rome. The soldiers marched and carried their standards. They showed off the loot and prisoners they had taken from the enemy. All the citizens celebrated. Paul says the cross was like that. God’s foolishness was wiser than human wisdom. God’s weakness was stronger than human strength. What was held up on the cross for all to see was not the humiliation of Jesus but the victory of God. Other passages in Paul and the rest of the New Testament draw on military images to describe the cross as God’s victory. The book of the Revelation loves them too. Again with brilliant irony, it says the Lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered, and when we see this Lion, it is a Lamb who has been slain [5.5-6].

The gospel of John portrays the passion of Christ as his victory. It emphasizes that no one took his life; he laid it down, in order to take it up again. Jesus himself described his work in these terms. Once when some scribes attributed his miraculous healings to the power of Satan, Jesus said that made no sense. He compared Satan to a strong man and himself to one who ties up the strong man and plunders his house [Mk 3.27]. So Jesus saw his mission in terms of binding and plundering the forces of sin and evil.

Ultimately, I think, this answer has its deepest roots in the Old Testament. Go back to the Red Sea. The children of Israel watch helplessly as Pharaoh’s chariots and cavalry bear down on them. This was no metaphor or poetic language for them. Evil had a sharp metal point. But God made a way through the Sea. He didn’t tell them to fight. He told them to stand and watch while he delivered them. The Song of Miriam and Moses in Exodus 15 praises God: “I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” The Old Testament echoes with praise for God who saves his people with his mighty hand and outstretched arm.

In the Old Testament, the powers of sin, evil, and death often take the form of tangible things, such as an invading army or a disease. Yet always victory belongs to God. When God’s people were taken into exile by the Babylonians, the prophets promised a new beginning, a new covenant. They promised things would not be as they had been before. They would be better. God would not only restore his people to their land, he would restore their hearts to him. After about 50 years they returned to their land, but even by the time of Jesus, 500 years later, they were still looking for some of those promises to come true. They were still waiting for God’s Messiah, for a Savior. Nothing is more natural than that the Messiah and his people should talk about his work in military language. What proved surprising was that Jesus defined the enemy differently than others did. They hated the Romans. He did not. He set out to destroy sin, sickness, evil, and death. His was a fight of a different kind, and if people did not understand that, is it any wonder they did not recognize his cross for what it was—not defeat, but victory. …

The cross is God’s victory over the powers, but you can’t get those words into your mind without two questions jumping up immediately to protest. One question is: Who or what are these powers I keep talking about? Sure, I lifted the word from Paul, but what did he mean by it? The other question is: If the cross was God’s victory over things like evil and death, why do we still have so much evil and death? You cannot think of the cross as God’s victory without figuring these two things out.

First question first: If the cross is Jesus’ victory, who or what did he defeat? The answer I give is: sin, evil, and death. Sin, of course, is that selfish streak inside us that wants our way and who cares about God or other people? It’s that little part of me that wants to rule to the world, to be God. It is the broken place in my heart that prevents me from loving perfectly as I ought. All those bad things you do—lying, gossip, murder, and the like—those are symptoms. Sin is the disease. Jesus destroyed sin’s power. His death for us and his resurrection provide healing or our souls. He is the great physician—and physicians fight disease. He will make us whole and set us free. Though our victory over sin remains partial, he will see us through to total victory. Someday, when he raises us from the dead, we will be a pure and holy and beautiful as he is.

Evil I use as an umbrella term for everything that stands against God. It’s hard to define, but we know evil when we see it. And we see it often: in events in our world and community, in our own hearts. God wants good for his creation. What we get is often war, poverty, greed, disease, road rage, despair, and loneliness. Take all the bad stuff and slap a label on it. The label says evil. By his death and resurrection, Jesus conquers all of that. He has guaranteed that God’s will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. Evil is living on borrowed time.

Death is easy to define. But what is it? Is it our absolute end, a final destruction? Is it a just punishment for creatures in rebellion against their creator? That’s what it was … before Jesus’ death and resurrection. Now, instead of a dead end, death has become a door. Once our enemy, death is now a loyal servant of our Lord. For those who are in Christ, death is not the end, but the beginning. On the other side is neither oblivion nor suffering, but new creation. You see, God did not create us for death. He created us for himself. And the cross and resurrection of Jesus is how he changed death and claimed us for himself. To use military imagery again: We were death’s captives. (Think of the children of Israel in slavery.) Jesus liberated us.

So that is how I define the enemy: sin, evil, and death. But the New Testament gives a more interesting view. Paul writes about powers and principalities. The idea is this: There exist very real but invisible spiritual forces that cause evil in our world. They stand above human beings and institutions, but they also work through these. So when you read in the New Testament about principalities and powers, it is talking about spiritual beings or forces and also the ways they are incarnate in the world. That’s tough, so let me explain. Human institutions, such as government and business, often have built in systems of injustice. Paul, for example, could point to the Roman imperial government and say, “Those men running the thing are not God’s enemies, although they are doing evil when they persecute the church. God wants to liberate them from the evil that is in their own hearts and also the evil that is in the system.” Or take the example of Jesus’ trials. It wasn’t any one person who put him on the cross. It was the interests of lots of people and groups. The Pharisees opposed him because he didn’t fit in their religious system. The temple authorities considered him a troublemaker. Pilate didn’t care about justice so much as what was expedient. The whole system these people were in pushed them to do evil. Another example is the holocaust. Many ordinary people who might not have hurt a fly on their own got swept up into the spirit of the age. “Everyone was doing it you see.” “It was the government.” The system gave them every excuse. According to the New Testament, not just our hearts but also our cultures, societies, and institutions are fallen. This is one reason we cannot save ourselves, even when we work together. Working together makes us capable of doing more—both more good and more evil.

The beauty of this New Testament way of looking at things is, you never point to another human being and say, “There’s God’s enemy!” A person may be doing evil and opposing God, but God’s will is not to destroy but to liberate that person. And Paul is the best example of that I can think of. Every Christian in the first days of the church knew Paul was an enemy. What did Jesus’ victory mean for him, though? Not his destruction, but his conversion, his liberation!

So scripture teaches us to oppose evil wherever we find it—in our selves, in systems or institutions. We have to stand for what is right, especially when the tide is pulling the other way. But our real enemies are not other human beings, but spiritual forces. And, Paul always reminds us, they have been defeated.

OK, you say, fair enough, but if they have been defeated, why do we still have so much sin, death, and evil? Once, a chess master played a promising young player. The master won in 15 moves. “Wow!” exclaimed the young player with a note of pride, “You took 15 moves to beat me.” “No,” answered the master. “Not quite. I beat you in 12 moves. It took you 15 moves to realize it.”

That anecdote answers our question well. God has defeated sin, evil, and death. Victory has been achieved, but not fully realized. It is like when the allies pressed into Germany at the end of World War II. Germany had lost, but the fighting wasn’t over yet. Even after Japan officially surrendered, a few small groups of Japanese soldiers held out on isolated islands for years. The last one surrendered sometime in the 1970s. He had spent 30 years in the jungle, still fighting a war that had ended long ago.

Because of the cross, we know God has won. Final, total victory will come when he decides the time is right. Until then we have the opportunity to realize his victory in our own lives. We do this as we fight temptation and the sin within us. We do this as we stand up for justice and truth and goodness in our community and world. Part of our mission, as his people, is to implement his victory wherever we can.

And that leads me at last to end of the sermon, when I ask: What practical difference does this answer make in our everyday life? Plenty! But let me give you two quick things.

1. You do not have to be afraid. “We are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” [Rom 8.37-39]. You do not have to afraid of death. And that is wonderful by itself, but there is so much more. You do not have to be afraid of anything. Nothing can separate you from his love.

2. You have the courage to battle evil, because you know the victory has been won. The world is full of suffering, and God expects you to do something about it. “Me?” Yes, you. The world is full of injustice, and God expects you to do something about it. The world is full of hatred … well, you get the idea. The mission God have us is to spread his kingdom. We do that by telling people the Good News and continuing the ministry of Jesus. Jesus, you recall, went around healing and feeding and showing compassion and challenging those who needed to be challenged and comforting those who needed to be comforted. It is a big job. Sometimes it is a hard job because it requires us to swim against the current. It demands courage. But we have plenty of courage, or at least we ought to. The victory has been won. Evil is under the judgment of God. You know that you can press forward, and you are not wasting your effort—no matter what happens in the short term—because in the end God’s victory, already achieved on the cross, will be total.

This is my favorite way to look at the cross. It says to me that when life hits you hard right in the face, you are supposed to laugh and hit it right back. I’m not a violent man. I’ve only been in one fight in my whole life. I was five years old, and the neighborhood bully pulled my hair, so I belted her with my lunchbox. I have never raised my hand against another human being since, although I would if I had just cause. I am not a pacifist, but I am a person of peace. I like this answer because I know evil is real, and I believe Jesus has defeated it. I believe his victory can be real in my life. Grace is stronger than sin. Love is stronger than death. So I choose not to be afraid. I choose to not give up. I will never let go of him. He gives us the victory. “‘Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord of hosts” [Zech 4.6]. Amen.

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March 29, 2009