Framing the Cross

What is Assumed Matters

"The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 6:23

It's amazing how a pre-conceived "framework" constrains how you understand a piece of text. For example, 2x4 is either 8 or a piece of lumber depending on whether you are a mathematician or a carpenter. We always come to texts with a framework which is sometimes not found in the text itself.

So, the "juridical/accounting/transactional" framework that I was taught always told me that St. Paul meant "If we sinned we owed God big-time, so much that we could never re-pay so Jesus paid it for us, suffering the wrathful penalty of God's justice, paid the debt we owed to God for our sins, and the zero balance of the ledger was our free gift from Christ".

Over the years the "substitutionary" framework (as it is usually preached) made less and less sense as "the gospel" in light of what I read about God in the Gospels. One day I read the text exactly as it is written: It says "SIN pays the wage of death." Not God. God doesn't kill us because we sin. WE embrace death when we serve sin, and sin gives us the paycheck it promises and we cash it: Alienation and separation from God who is Life. Apart from Life, we die.

And yet God still offers a free gift: Himself, Life, not "wages". He doesn't offer Life as a paycheck for "not sinning", He offers forgiveness carte blanche. He always has from the beginning. There is no death in God. There cannot be, because He is Life eternal. Death is only in us.

St. Gregory said, "What is not assumed is not healed." That is The Gospel in seven words. When Jesus died in His human flesh He assumed ALL that is within us, our nature, our limitations, our will, our mortal flesh and ultimately even our death and united it ALL to God.

He accepted sin's "wage" even though He didn't earn it by sinning. He took the paycheck and ripped it up instead of cashing it in.

So, God didn't kill Jesus instead of us (John MacArthur's take on Good Friday). Christ accepted the wages from sin (not from God the Father) on our behalf and nailed the W-2 to the cross (Colossians 2:14). Death is zero'd out. The IRS is abolished. In Christ we have no fear of an audit, no taxes due, no penalties for non-payment of our back taxes. It has ALL been assumed into Christ.

In all the Parables, the Master, Lord, King, Landowner forgave the debts of his crappy householders, borrowers, scammers, and negligent subjects with "a Word". He NEVER extracted the due debt from an innocent third party and then offer the zero-sum, paid off balance sheet to the debtors as a "gift" the innocent paid for. On the Cross God in Christ absorbs death, the wages of sin, into Himself because God is Life and not even our "last enemy" (I Cor. 15:26), invincible death can prevail before and within God. As Solomon said, "Love is stronger than death..."

St. Paul says, "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" at the Cross. (2 Cor. 5:19) He was not vicariously punishing Christ, exacting a penalty, or substituting Him for us in some cosmic juridical execution of a guilty evil-doer. THIS is why we celebrate "The Feast of The Precious and Life-giving Cross" because death is slain through the power of love. Therefore it is not called "The Celebration of the Horror of the Penalty God Demanded in His Righteousness".

The Gospel is not about wages, ledger books to be balanced, cosmic justice and penalties to be paid to a God who must pay Himself off via His Son to satisfy His need for a balanced ledger or the guilty punished. The Gospel is about a benevolent King who just forgives because that is who He is: an unconstrained, free God who is Love. And because of that He takes all the crap and debt and even death that we can deal out into Himself for our sake's just because He loves us, because that is His nature.

I once held the former thing as "Gospel", and it made sense to me until it didn't. Then I found the latter thing in the Parables. The longer I live the latter thing makes more and more sense to me. God says to us, "Forgive your enemies..." and either He expects us to be better gods than Him as a "juridical God" or He does what He expects of us (though we fall short, He does not.)

All that said, we look upon the Cross today as our salvation, regardless of what theological framework we bring to it.

As if we can make sense of the horror of the Cross.

As if we can make sense of human, much less, divine Love.

(For the Feast of the Cross, Celebrated in the Orthodox Church on September 14).

“Corpus Hypercubus” by Salvador Dali