The Glory of the Cross

Click here to listen to this sermon.

The text for today is our Gospel lesson, Matthew 16:21-28.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!

The time has come for Jesus to speak frankly to His disciples about His imminent suffering and death. He surely has spoken of these things before, but the disciples have not understood. They do not grasp what Jesus tells them here either. In fact, Peter takes Jesus aside and rebukes Him: “Far be it from You, Lord!” Peter says. “This shall never happen to You!”

Peter’s intentions are good., but He speaks without considering the implications. The man who just acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, now contradicts Jesus. Jesus must go to Jerusalem. Jesus must suffer many things. Jesus must be killed. Jesus must be raised on the third day.

Jesus had commended Peter’s confession of faith, which came directly from the Father. Now He rebukes him sternly, even addressing him as Satan. Peter essentially says what Satan had told Jesus during those 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. He told Jesus not to carry out His mission, not to obey the Father’s will, not to fulfill God’s promises. If Jesus had stepped into that trap, His mission of redemption would have been aborted.

Though Jesus speaks to Peter, it is important for the other disciples to hear it too. They have not said what Peter said, but they have thought what Peter thought. They don’t want to hear about their Savior going through suffering and death. They don’t want to hear that their discipleship will include suffering.

Truth be told, we don’t like to hear about the trouble and heartache that will result from our connection to Christ either. And far too many Christians and their churches ignore or downplay Jesus’ suffering and death. But in doing so they end up like Peter, denying the very moment of Christ’s greatest glory.

When is Jesus’ moment of glory? When is He most the Christ? Most Son of the living God? When He’s hanging naked, bloody, and dead on the cross!

Only faith can say that. Because it sure doesn’t look that way to Peter as Jesus describes what is about to happen. It sure doesn’t look that way when Christ is beaten and nailed to the cross. Even as we recall that day some 2,000 years later it sure doesn’t look glorious. This is “the theology of the cross.”

The theology of the cross applies to the way God acts in Christ. You simply cannot judge the actions of God by what you see. God’s greatest work, the sacrifice of His only-begotten Son, seems harsh, appears evil, and stinks of injustice. A righteous man is condemned not only by wicked earthly rulers but is damned by God Himself. How can that be good?        

The cross solves the world’s greatest problem—sin. It explains the reason Christ had to suffer and die. Please follow as I move along step-by-step: God is holy; we are sinners. God is also just, and His divine justice must be satisfied. Therefore, sin must be punished, and the punishment for sin is death and hell. Still, God loves us. He doesn’t want us to suffer, to be cut off from His presence for all eternity. So, God makes a way out of this hellish predicament. He finds a substitute, a substitute able to endure God’s wrath at our sin. Hence Jesus, who comes as our Messiah, our Savior, must suffer our punishment in our place.

“A good theologian,” Martin Luther said, “comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.” You cannot have the true and loving God without the bloody death of Christ. God will not love you without the gruesome spectacle of His Son’s corpse. God cannot accept you except through the naked, bloody, dead Savior on Golgotha. That is the theology of the cross. God hides Himself in weakness and suffering.

The same basic theology applies to the Word of God and Christ’s sacraments. How can little words do anything? How can bread and wine really be a meal of eternal life? Because God works graciously in the lives of His people through lowly, every day, little things: words, water, bread, and wine.

The theology of the cross also deals with the difficulties and hardships that Christians must live through in a realistic and honest way. In the “spirituality” section of most bookstores, one will find titles offering a whole array of techniques and teachings that will solve all problems and bring us to the pinnacle of success. Unfortunately, these misguided notions can also be found in Christian bookstores whose shelves are stocked with ways of using God for one’s own health, happiness, and prosperity. Their covers make vast and excited claims, as if by following certain steps family problems will disappear, our bodies will do what we want, our financial problems will evaporate, we will solve our nation’s problems, grow the church, and live happily ever after.

Certainly, the Bible has much to say about how we should live, and its wisdom can shape our family lives and cultural issues in profound ways. But the problem with these self-help approaches is that they do not even do what they claim to do. The best Christian families still experience conflicts, thorny problems, and embarrassing failures. The most devout Christian may go bankrupt, or have a mental breakdown, or contract a terminal disease.

The books do not really help then, except to accentuate our sense of failure. Even if their step-by-step spiritual principles are valid, given our inability to keep God’s Law, we never consistently follow them. The ideal of the “victorious Christian life” proves impossible to attain, so we must suppress our failures, keep trying harder, and present a more positive front to the world.       

Luther called this kind of self-aggrandizing, success-centered, spirituality “the theology of glory.” Its attraction is understandable. Naturally, we want success, victories, and happiness. We want complete and understandable answers, evidence of tangible spiritual power, all conveyed by an impressive, well-run, and effective institution. We will gravitate to any religion that can promise us such things. Instead, God gives us the cross.

“If anyone would come after Me,” Jesus says, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” This by no means implies that we must suffer as Jesus did, much less that suffering is some sort of payment for our sins. Jesus did all of that for us. It does mean that life in Christ does include suffering, defeat, and weakness—not simply with the experience of “glory.”

It also, however, implies a peculiar way that Jesus relates to us. Coming to faith involves being broken by the Law, coming to grips with our moral failure. When we realize just how lost we are, then we cling to the cross, trusting Christ to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  

In his book, Pastoral Care Under the Cross, Pastor Richard Eyer tells of a patient, who required kidney dialysis and was in intensive care following open-heart surgery. Whenever Pastor Eyer would pray with him—the elderly man, following a common Lutheran custom, would make the sign of the cross.

When the man’s daughter visited him, however, she would be all smiles, bubbling over with reassurances, telling her father not to worry, that God would heal him. “But somehow her father doesn’t seem comforted by this,” Pastor Eyer recalls, “and turns to me to make the sign of the cross.”

The daughter believed that positive thinking, having enough faith will lead to healing. There was no place for weakness and suffering in her understanding of the will of God. But while she was busy trying to get God to surrender to her will, her father had surrendered his will to the will of God. He knew that it is the cross that lies at the heart of one’s confidence in the Lord.

Under the theology of glory, “we will begin to demand that God justify Himself to us in our sufferings by giving us healing and success. We will demand a God who does what we want Him to do, and we will reject the way of the cross by which He comes to us. We will become fearful of suffering and preoccupied with its avoidance at the expense of truth and faithfulness.” But in doing so, we may miss the blessing that God works in our lives through our crosses.

Our crosses teach us the joy and necessity of depending upon God rather than ourselves. In the hospital, patients are dependent—on the medical staff, on medication, on machines. Our culture shies away from such dependence. Many people prefer the thought of death rather than being “hooked up on some machine.” Those who believe in euthanasia maintain that a life of dependence and suffering is not worth living, that at some point it is a kindness for those who are sick to be killed. Those who believe in abortion believe that it is better to be dead than to come into this world, poor, unwanted, or with physical disabilities.

Being helpless and dependent, however, is precisely our spiritual condition. We are utterly helpless to save ourselves. We are utterly dependent on God. Saving faith involves giving up on our pretensions of being self-sufficient, strong, and in control. Instead, we rest in Christ and His cross. “My grace is sufficient for you,” the Lord told St. Paul, “for My power is made perfect in weakness.”  

The attitude of autonomy cannot only undermine faith; it can wreck God’s design for human relationships. Dr. David Adams makes the point that the high divorce rate—even among Christians—can be traced to a failure to understand the theology of the cross. If marriage is all about my comfort, my happiness, my feelings, rather than serving and submitting to my spouse, then it’s no wonder that people are going to decide that it’s time to leave when any of those factors change.

But God does His best work during suffering and trials; and couples with long-lasting marriages can tell you that their greatest growth as a couple came during the times they were most ready to give it all up. Just as self-sufficiency is shattered by the killing effects of the Law, in everyday life such self-sufficiency is shattered by bearing the cross—that is, by failure, frustration, struggles, and suffering. Both the Law and the cross drive us to ever-deeper and more-intimate dependence on Jesus Christ, who meets our sin and our sufferings in His cross.

Unfortunately, too many Christians lack a theology of suffering. We, understandably, want to avoid it at all costs—and yet it comes, and then we do not know what to do with it or what it means. The fact of suffering is often taken as a sign that there cannot be a God—at least not an all-loving, all-powerful God.

Even worse, the fact of suffering is sometimes taken to mean that God has rejected the sufferer. The assumption is that Christians will not suffer; that if one has enough faith, God will grant healing, prosperity, and success.

But God has never promised us a life free from suffering or trials; He just promises to be with us as we go through those trials and suffering. He promises to use those crosses for our good. “We know that God works all things for the good of those who love Him and have been called according to His purposes.”

The theology of the cross teaches the important role trials play in the life of faith. To believe in God’s Word of promise, despite one’s feelings, is faith. This is why all trials, both major and small, are occasions for the exercise of faith. In addition, trials teach us to pray. When we are in desperate need, we pray with an intensity, a heartfelt passion, that is particularly genuine and authentic.

Furthermore, we begin to find out that our own spiritual life is itself hidden. “For you died,” says St. Paul, “and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life appears, then you will also appear with Him in glory” (Colossians 3:3-4). Having been buried with Christ in Baptism and having joined with His cross in faith, the Christian’s life is “hidden.” At the resurrection of the dead and eternal life in heaven, there will of course be no crosses, God will be clearly seen in everything, and then will be the time for glory. But for now, the Christian’s life is hidden with Christ.

This also is true of our sanctification, the process by which we grow in holiness. Sanctification is not a smooth process. Often, we cannot even tell whether we are making progress. We fail, we start over, only to fail once again. As we grow in our faith, we even begin to notice other areas of sin in our lives that we had never seen before.

But God sees us through the cross: Our sins and failures are hidden by the blood of Christ; our ordinary lives are covered by Christ’s righteousness. When God looks at a Christian, He sees Jesus, the perfect unblemished Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the word. He sees Jesus, naked, bloody, and beaten, and hanging on a cross in payment for all our sins.

The theology of the cross teaches us that we cannot judge by appearances. We can’t judge by appearances when we experience suffering or when God seems distant or rejecting, or not real at all. Nor can we judge by appearances when considering what is happening when water, bread, and wine are used in a church service, or when the pastor reads from a book and proclaims words from a pulpit.

If we were to judge from appearances, we would scarcely think that the baby born in Bethlehem is God in the flesh. His being tortured to death at Golgotha, judged strictly by appearances, would be repulsive, a meaningless act of cruelty. We would never guess that it was the salvation of the whole world. But it is. For on that cross, Jesus redeemed you from sin, death, and the devil with His holy, precious blood and His innocent suffering and death.

By the glory of His cross, you have salvation and eternal life. By the glory of the cross, you are forgiven of all your sins.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.