Yesterday I wrote a length post about the necessity of Jesus dying on the cross...why he did it and what it showed about God's relationship with us. You'll need to read that post in order to understand this one, in which we talk about the significance of Jesus dying to our daily life.
Jesus' death on the cross settles the argument about faith revolving around righteousness or love. This debate has been going on for centuries. Some folks say we get to heaven based on our righteousness...how good we are. The cross disallows this way of thinking, making it nonsensical. If we were capable of being righteous (making heaven's population more than zero) Jesus would not have needed to die for us. He could have just joined the righteous people in heaven and let the rest pass away into death/nothingness/whatever. Jesus died on the cross, and that death had meaning, because nobody was righteous but him. It was an act of pure and profound love, God's love for us. That shows us the nature of our salvation.
Again, clearly and simply: Salvation and faith revolve around God's love for us, not our righteousness for him. The first is infinite and all-powerful. The second doesn't even exist, at least not in a pure enough form to get us into heaven.
Every time we start to talk about our own righteousness as the basis for our relationship with God we head down the wrong path. Every time we look at scripture and judge that we have fulfilled it, every time we judge that our neighbors have not, we deny Jesus Christ and the need for his act of salvation on the cross. We can call ourselves Christians as we do so. We can quote chapter and verse to justify it. That does not make it true. You cannot use God's words to deny God and still claim to be serving him.
Many people who call themselves Christians are actually anti-Christian in this way. As we discussed yesterday, the whole point of Jesus' life and death on the cross is love. Yet it's the one thing that eludes them.
The judgment seems more powerful to us. It seems powerful in the instinctive sense that young boys have when they think knocking something down is more powerful than building it up. (Some parts of us never grow up.) It also seems powerful to us culturally. We respect those who can enforce their own will, get their voice heard loudest. Judgment is far easier to shout, and is a far quicker message to deliver, than love. Judgment also appeals to our traditional American "church-y" culture. We've been so beaten down that it doesn't feel like "real" church unless somebody's getting yelled at or preached against. We've grown up in a church culture of fear and now fear feels like the only really Godly thing to us.
Someone once said to me, "You've taught me a lot about God's love..." The "..." at the end of that sentence represents how it trailed off into an implication that there was something more, something greater that I wasn't teaching. Like judgment was the secret, powerful reality of God that nobody has the guts to take a stand on anymore.
Garbage.
Judgment is the convenient, weak, and self-serving subversion of God's message. Judgment is your repetition of the very first sin, putting yourself in God's place and denying your need for him too.
Any sense of righteousness and temptation to judgment that you've ever had should have disappeared the moment you saw it getting nailed up there on the cross with Jesus. The only way you can continue judging is to ignore the cross (and thus Christ) completely or to look at it and say, "It's not for me."
Righteousness does exist, but it's not our righteousness before God...as if we were choosing the right way when everybody else isn't. The only true righteousness is God's, shown through his sacrificial love on the cross for all of us. That righteousness cannot be bought or earned. The only way to understand it is to follow in God's footsteps, loving our neighbors just as much as Jesus loved them in that moment when he gave his life for them on the cross.
Judgment also exists, but it's God's judgment. We have all been found guilty. That's why Jesus had to accept the nails and spear on our behalf. There's no doubt about it, no wiggle room. We failed. Jesus took those sins to the cross with him so that failed people like us could be restored to God.
The only question now is whether we'll be thankful for this restoration and live our lives by it or whether we'll act as if it never happened by continuing to judge each other. In other words, you know that Judgment Day that all the quick-judging Christians say is coming to doom the world? That day isn't going to fall on the heads of those who don't know Christ and his sacrifice. Tax collectors, prostitutes, people from far-off lands...Jesus welcomed and loved them all. Judgment is going to fall on the heads of those who deny Christ by co-opting his loving gift into a weapon of power to make themselves seem more privileged and godly than their neighbor. This is the lesson the Pharisees never learned. This is what made them so angry that they ended up killing Jesus. Those who most look forward to the Judgment Day are those who most need to fear it.
On the most solemn, in some ways the darkest day of our entire church year--Good Friday--we also hear the message of purest hope and light: Love, or it's not true. Love, or it's not real. Love, or it's not Me.
As followers of this same Christ through life, death, and resurrection let us carry that message to the world.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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