Christ's Cross - Splitting the Atom

Good Friday - a day good beyond all telling because of the goodness of Christ revealed on the Cross.

But how can one man's death 2000 years ago be an act that saves us today? I have found very helpful the way that C.H. Dodd reflects on Christ’s death.

The creative, loving purpose of God is everlastingly at work in his world. It meets continual resistance from hardened human hearts and wills. But if at any point human history should become entirely non-resistant to God, perfectly transparent to his loving design - then from that point God’s creative purpose would work with unprecedented power.

That is just what the perfect obedience of Jesus affected. Within human nature and human history Jesus established a point of complete non-resistance to the Father's will, a 'moment' of total transparency to his saving purpose. The love and obedience of Christ expressed to the utmost on the Cross is a point of entry that releases God’s creative power for the perfecting of human life, indeed for the transformation of creation.

As we believers connect in faith and trust with the 'Christ event' - existing eternally in God - it becomes contemporary and we are laid open to the creative energy and love perpetually working to recreate us.

All our moral choices have an impact. Christ’s ultimate moral act is the equivalent to splitting the atom.

Jesus' death split the moral atom, and its effect lasts forever. The power, grace, light, life and divine energy released by that action of absolute love and self-giving pour out unceasingly.

This is what we celebrate in Holy Week, what we encounter in the Eucharist, and what we live from each day of our Christian discipleship.

Broken Jar - Broken Body

We are saved by the death of Jesus! This is a central tenet within the Christian faith. Jesus' death on a cross changed history forever.  In the coming days of Holy Week we will journey in faith with Christ to the Cross and through it to his resurrection.

But how does this work? How can one man's death 2000 years ago be an act that saves us today?

There was more here than can be accounted for upon the historical or human level. God was in it. We must use mystical, poetic language to try to express the inexpressible – we speak of the sacrifice of the spotless lamb, we are washed clean in the blood of Christ, by his wounds we are healed. We have to use images - because the reality is too wonderful to grasp fully.

Some Fathers of the Church look at the anointing of Jesus by Mary of Bethany – a Gospel we hear on each Monday of Holy Week. By breaking the alabaster jar of very expensive perfume over the whole body of Jesus and filling the house with that gorgeous scent, Mary’s lavish gesture symbolised the deepest meaning of Jesus' passion and death. The body of Christ is the jar containing the most precious perfume of all time, namely, the Holy Spirit. It was about to be broken open so that the Holy Spirit could be poured out over the whole of humanity - past, present, and to come - with boundless generosity.

Until that body had been broken on the cross, the full extent of the gift of God in Christ and its transforming possibilities for the human race could not be known or remotely foreseen.

This mystery of God's love revealed on the Cross is something we can understand more in the gut than in the head. We can know and experience its truth, even when we can’t fully understand or explain it.

A blessed Holy Week.

GOOD Friday!

Have you ever thought like me: GOOD Friday! Why in God's name do we call this day of all days GOOD? Surely what happened on that Friday on a hill outside Jerusalem made it the blackest day in human history.

When I reflect on it I realise that this day is good because of the astonishing goodness of God that was revealed, and because God has turned our greatest evil  into our greatest blessing, an unending source of goodness for us.

Some mystics have used an image that I have found helpful in deepening my understanding of what happened when Jesus died. The image is that of a poultice - a home-made remedy placed on a festering wound to draw out the puss.

On the Cross it is as if Jesus willingly and with inexpressible love laid himself on the awful, foul, raw wound of this world's sin and anguish and bottomless sorrow. He took into himself all the dark evil this world could offer and he overcame it with love. To the horrific end he kept on loving, kept on forgiving, kept on praying, kept on trusting in his Father. There was no hate or desire for revenge, no self-pity in his great heart.

Like the healing poultice Jesus draws out the poison and gives goodness in return for hate,  mercy for vicious cruelty, light for darkness. The Lord's love unto death sets us free.

The Cross shows our sin at its worst and divine love at its best.