I feel like any of my stumbling expressions are entirely inadequate for all the ramifications of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is Holy ground. For the follower of Jesus, this is the zenith. Easter addresses all our cosmos, all our past, all our discouragements, fears, traumas, grief and manifold emotions of a broken world.
On Good Friday and throughout the Easter weekend, it was so good to be with our home fellowship and so many trusted church family in loving and relational celebration. I was profoundly struck in a fresh way by the relational events surrounding the cross and the public interactional dimensions of it. I wondered if sometimes we miss something of this, as careful as we are as thought-out, doctrinally protective Evangelicals, we are quick to jump to our theological framework, we have our own well-trod liturgy, songs, path and routine. Our minds have open gates to a neurological palace of many details, well-sequenced paths harmonised by gospel accounts. The older our walk with God, the more to recall and process, but there is something greater than handled detail or recalled knowledge, an instinct of greater weight and shock significance... HE LOVES US.
Here, at the foot of the cross, and staring into an empty tomb, there is nothing of the ordinary or usual and everything of the extraordinary. The greatest of it all we glean is His love for you and me. Such is the extravagance, compassion, magnitude and depth of it, we will never have a "handle" on it. Nothing should hit us harder or rock us back on our heels more to assess our lives, identity and very existence with urgency than the fact that He comes and dies, perseveres, communicates, obeys, persistently pours himself out and completes the work... in love for us.
THE GREATEST OF THESE IS LOVE (1 Cor 13)
The gift of Christ to us, and in turn any blessing we can be in his resurrection power to this broken world, stems from love. God is love. This is the root. All we enjoy in Christ's finished work is the gift of love. We are quick to jump to application, to the repair, to do mission, yet the central application of it all is to love our God more, because we see how greatly he must love us, that he loved us first.
Survey the scene again from a relational angle. This is the view of John, his personal interaction (John 19:26 "the disciple whom he loved") with Christ and all others he loves (His mother, Mary, Mary his executioner, his subjects and enemies acting in counterfeit authority (Pilate, the crowd), the two criminals, with whom he collectively identifies, one repentant, another rebellious to the last). Our creator hangs, centrally, the pinnacle of shame and public disdain, given relationally, elevated not just physically but relationally, to survey and deal with all our brokenness, our disconnect before God.
Around the elevated gaze of the Son of man are those relationally closest in his normal daily relational interactions, but this is no ordinary day. Then there are the relationships with those who reject, the enemies with casual abandon, not understanding the gravity of what they do, rejecting God, the pivot of history (Luke 23:34). There is love and relationship with sinners who come in repentance on one end of the spectrum, and grief over those who don't on the other. As he goes to the place of the skull (Golgotha), the portrait recorded by John under the direction of the Spirit captures the manifold relational living dimensions of many levels within a broken world of death, trying to process who He is in ignorance of stretched incapacity, throughout it all, the persistence of love and the patience of grace. Here is his love for me, for us, all his family, all his people from every nation, every broken dimension under rebellion against a Holy God. Here is love vast as the ocean, loving kindness as the flood. (1 Cor 13:3-8)
We are to love him more. We are to love like him more. Lord by your strength, help us in daily normal loving relationships, relationships with those who reject, relationships with the arrogant, the angry, the ignorant, the messed up, the repentant, the grieving, the lonely, the hurting in a broken world. Help us to see our own identity not merely as part of a broken world, but in your love as reborn creatures of redemption and sanctification in your love.
IT IS FINISHED, OUR NEW LIFE OF CERTAINTY BEGINS
We live in a world of so many broken dimensions. I am grieving with several families this Easter, whose loved ones in Christ have gone to be with him over the last few days. The brutality of death does not change in a broken world. We are not made for it; it is overwhelming and swamps our hearts with heartbreak. (John 11:37). We are not made for goodbyes in the relational dimension. Yet, the finished work of Christ means that our certainty is clear Sun breaking through the clouds of immediate tears. Death has nothing left. Christ, in his mastery, subjects death to accomplishing our redemption.
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ."
Only in Christ do we have resources and love for this life.
Death brings relational Victory.
So what is John in the way he writes, drawing our attention to through the living interactions of Jesus as he dies? The Bible shows us the deeper reality of Christ's intercession for the living. It is not simply that we celebrate that our redeemer lives, the final outcome; He does, and what certainty that is, but there is also the certainty of His death and complete victory over all the enemies of God and all the consequences of sin on the relational journey of love for you and me. There is victory over the power of sin, its hold on our lives; He removes the presence of sin in our lives now, the foretaste of the day soon coming when we will be without any battles with sin or evidence of what it can do to our lives. On his journey to accomplish this, we see the creatures we are designed to be under God. This profound transformation is most evident in relationships, our interactions with others. With our corrected identity in him founded at the foot of the cross, our relationships with others are transformed in the liberty of his love. We are released from trying to prove ourselves, serve ourselves, rebel with the crowd, and our prideful obsession with ourselves.
Through his death, forgiveness, purity, obedience, Holy worship, and perfect completion comes our life in all its fullness, not only the foundation to a new life... but the essence, growth and fruitfulness for eternity of life lived in Him, with Him, as intended.
"And you, who were dead ... God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him." (Col 2:13-14)
As Paul meditates on the relational and pastoral dimension of Christ's love for us at the cross, he is challenged to love more those around him to fulfil his calling as an agent of the love of Christ. The greatest application of Christ's love to us is our love to him and, in turn, others, to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and others as ourselves. Whilst the cross always demands our personal response, an appropriate understanding of his love will never produce an individualistic response. We are made to know him, grow in love for him, and in doing so know his community and grow in love for it, love the lost more and grow in love for them.
"that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." (Col 2:2-3)
The Love of Christ has manifold dimensions and implications, both to the family of Christ and those who need to connect with grace and understand his love for the first time. For all of us, we need to grow in understanding of his love. No one you know who has walked this earth other than Christ himself ...perfectly understands or fully sees the magnitude and implications of the Father's love.
For those who grieve, see the magnitude of his compassion from the cross (John 19:26-27), the certainty of his precious view of His loved ones in and through death (Psalm 116:15). The eyes of our Saviour and heart are steadfast even as He is tortured with all the limitations of being fully man. How much more so the one who stands over death as LORD and eternal master, for whom death is a memory long gone.
For those who have lost their way, see his love for the criminal and the repentant (1 John 1:9, Luke 23:43). For those who walk in a public ministry, called to serve, called to declare the cross, see the pronouncement of His Lordship over all things, all peoples, all relational events (John 19:30).
He is with us, in death and in life. We know that our redeemer lives and loves. We are in His grip of grace, living in the light of His love, past, present, his completed work, his help today. In His love and risen presence is our life, and all we desire it to be. In Him is all we need, and all we need more of.
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