This a phrase I have often heard and I suspect have used on number of occasions in sermons. It is easy to say and it’s a good soundbite but what does it actually mean?
I suppose the most obvious way in which we can understand this phrase is in relation to Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. Yet even that is a shorthand which I don’t think gets us any further. In order to understand this phrase we shall need to look at what the opposite of salvation is and what the cross is an antidote to.
At first glance salvation looks like being saved from something, and traditionally that something has been some kind of damnation, some sort of eternal punishment in the inferno, over the gate of which Dante inscribed the words, ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate“, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. And let’s be honest, that is worth being saved from.
I think that there is another way of looking at this that does not involve the vengeful justice meted out by a wrath filled God. I think that the cross is not the antidote for hell, it is a rather the antidote for sin. Sin is also word that needs to be unpacked and explained. The Greek word for sin is harmartia which means to miss or fall short of the target. It implies that our sinful behaviour falls short of the behaviour expected of by God. The problem with this is that it immediately creates feelings guilt, we’re not good enough. However we could look at this differently, missing the mark could imply that there is gap between arrow and target, the relationship between target and arrow is broken by the arrow’s falling short. This could speak to the brokenness of our relationships. If I look at the quality of my attitudes towards others I can see that I am not always as loving and selfless as I might be, and it’s not because I don’t want to be, but somehow I get in the way. As St. Paul put it in his letter to Christians in Rome;
For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.
However hard we might try we can’t avoid our selfishness, and this selfishness breaks our relationships, whether that is our relationship with our nearest and dearest, with our neighbours, friends and our colleagues, indeed our relationship with all other creatures and the whole of creation. One does not need to look far to see destruction caused by human greed and selfishness whether that is our personal relationships or our relationship with the planet. And all this affects our relationship with God. This brokenness is the real nature of sin and the antidote is not to pile on the guilt, that just makes things worse, the antidote is love, and it is love that is crossed shaped.
I think that it was almost to be expected that the domination system of any age will seek to destroy the good; why? A domination system whether it is political, corporate, or economic is always seeking to feed its own needs rather than seek the good of the other. That is the very opposite of love and contrary to good. God is love, God is the good. The Roman Empire’s punishment of crucifixion was one of the ways in which it maintained its dominance over subject peoples. Christians believe that Jesus is the God who is love living among us. The fact of his crucifixion at the hands of that empire was an inevitable consequence of love living as one of us. So in the crucifixion we see love on a cross.
Love is also cross shaped in a symbolic way. If sin is selfishness, then love is selflessness. St Thomas Aquinas taught that love is the willing the good of the other as other. If the word sin represents relationships that are broken, love represents relationship that being made whole. Love therefore is cross shaped. A cross is the horizontal line that joins us to our neighbour and it is also the vertical line joins us to God. What God desires most is our unity with one another and our unity with God, hence another word we associate with salvation, atonement, atonement meaning at-one-ment.
This Tuesday, the 14th of September, is Holy Cross day, and that cross is the shape of salvation because it is the shape of love.
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