This Wednesday begins the season of Lent. Lent is traditionally a season for Christians to consider the deeper matters of what Christ has done for us in going to the cross and then of course in rising from the grave. If Advent is the season of celebration, one might consider Lent the season of sorrow. That's hard to say in today's world where all the messaging is supposed to be happy. But I for one, find a "happy Christianity" to be a shallow Christianity and one that has little to say to life's hard times and suffering seasons. The fact is that life has hard times, profoundly, abjectly, excruciatingly, hard times - some times. If our Christian teaching leaves out the sorrow of the cross, we lose one of the most powerful gifts of Christianity - a theology for suffering, a God who himself suffered the torturous death of his own son with all of sin's injustices and power grabs. It's an awful scene.
Shall we turn our eyes away from it then? Horrible as it is, it is a message of consistency with life as we know it. There is suffering in our lives. There is suffering in God's life. The consistency between the two leaves us with something that matches up, albeit so sadly. There is an answer, there is an experience that our God has manifest that is a suffering experience. No other religion has a God who has suffered under the weight of sin. And no other religion then overcome its power with His power - the power of life over the power of death.
This is part of the grand enigma of the cross. It is both the place of death - Jesus' death and also the death of the Christian - the person "who has been crucified with Christ." At the same time, it is the place of life: Jesus' death the final act for our forgiveness and preceding his resurrection which assures our eternal life. So if you consider the cross this Lent, consider it as the place where you, and He died. A place of suffering that is consistent with our world's tragedy. And then, it's the place of life - our forgiveness and first step in the two part drama of redemption - with step two being the resurrection.
To the apostle Paul, becoming a Christian meant the death of him - and yet it meant the life of Christ for him. A far better life than the "Saul of Tarsus" life he had before. For many of us, becoming a Christian seems to make Jesus an additive to our own peppy story. The cross makes all the difference.
