Sunday, September 14, 2025
Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Raising the cross
Do we want instead to raze the cross? Was the cross necessary for our salvation? Not everyone agrees, but on this day the cross is exalted. Moses lifted up the snake on a pole and people were healed. Paul spoke of Jesus “becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” Christ Jesus emptied himself and “God greatly exalted him.” And Jesus predicted his own death to Nicodemus late at night while his disciples and the Pharisees slept.
Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
Could the cross end up, as Richard Rohr describes his Franciscan ancestors’ understanding, as an inoculation against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely “thank” Jesus instead of honestly imitating him? And was this act of violence necessary before God can love creation?”
Until Anselm in the 11th century wrote Cur deus Homo? (“Why Did God Become Human?”) most people believed that “the sacrificial death of Jesus” was to satisfy, not God, but the devil.
But Anselm said, in effect, “Yes, a price did need to be paid to restore God’s honor, and it needed to be paid to God the Father – by one who was equally divine.” Unfortunately, for a simple but devastating reason, this understanding also nullifies any in-depth spiritual journey: Why would you love or trust or desire to be with such a God?
Most of us have not been told of the varied history of this theory. It has been mostly accepted by Catholics, even more so by Protestants and later Evangelicals. But, Rohr contends, “God is much more than a problem solver.”
Franciscans claimed that the cross was a freely chosen revelation of Love on God’s part. In so doing, they reversed the engines of almost all world religion up to that point, which assumed humans had to spill blood to get to a distant and demanding God. On the cross, Franciscans believed, God was “spilling blood” to reach out to us! Rather than being a theological transaction, as Anselm proposed, the crucifixion was a dramatic demonstration of God’s outpouring love meant to utterly shock the heart and mind and turn it back toward trust and love of the Creator.
Anselm’s theory is called “penal, substitionary atonement.” In her book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, Episcopalian rector Fleming Rutledge explores this and several other ways to see the crucifixion (and in turn, the resurrection) of Jesus. She too understands that God is “much more than a problem solver.”
If the incarnate life and sacrificial death of the Son was God’s emergency reaction to an unexpected departure from his original plan, then we do not have the Creator God of the Bible, but a creature like the rest of us, vulnerable to surprise and, therefore, to some extent dependent upon events in the created order. This is difficult to discuss, because we are using ideas from the created order to express that which is uncreated, but this is the only language we have. (p. 297)
God did not change his mind about us on account of the cross or on any other account. He did not need to have his mind changed. He was never opposed to us. It is not his opposition to us but our opposition to him that had to be overcome, and the only way it could be overcome was from God’s side, by God’s initiative, from inside human flesh — the human flesh of the Son. The divine hostility, or wrath of God, has always been an aspect of his love. – p. 323
Theology of the cross insists that we continue to exalt the cross as “the touchstone of Christian authenticity.” Human humility from our historical, finite, position requires that we settle for partial understanding of a trans-historical, divine event. The Israelites lifted the saraph and were healed. Whatever we do today must also be with our hands held high to receive whatever God gives.
At the name of Jesus
every knee should bow,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
(Numbers 21, Psalm 78, Philippians 2, John 3)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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