The Shadows of the Cross

Isaiah 53:3-5 (NIV)
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.

1 Corinthians 2:1-2 (NIV)
And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Today we focus on the section of the Apostles’ Creed which I believe “brings home” the heart of the Gospel.

“[Jesus Christ] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell.”

While Paul preceded the Creed, he set the stage for the centrality of this pain and death-filled section.

1 Corinthians 2:1-2 (NIV)
And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

With the exception of Luke’s recording of a twelve-year-old Jesus, we possess no scriptural information about Jesus’ life from an infant to age thirty. The Creed jumps from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate.”  Why? Because the suffering and death of Jesus the Christ is the message of the devastating price of your sin and my sin and the dynamic love of God.

Philippians 2:6-8 (NIV)
Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something
to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death--
        even death on a cross!

(Notice the suffering and sacrifice prior to His obedience to death.)

In The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the authors pose the question, “What understandest thou by the little word ‘suffered’?”  (qtd in Barth 101)

They answer their own question with these words, “That He all the time of His life on earth . . . hath borne in body and soul the wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race.”  (qtd in Barth 101)

Jesus suffered for the sin of the whole human race.

“There is no doubt that for the Evangelists Luke and Matthew the childhood of Jesus, His Birth in the stable of Bethlehem, were already under the sign of suffering. This man is persecuted all His life, a stranger in His own family—what shocking statements He can make!—and in His nation; a stranger in the spheres of State and Church and civilization. And what a road of manifest ill-success He treads! In what utter loneliness and temptation He stands among men, the leaders of His nation, even over against the masses of the people and in the very circle of His disciples! In this narrowest circle He is to find His betrayer; and in the man to whom He says, ‘Thou art the Rock . . .,’ the man who denies Him thrice. And, finally, it is the disciples of whom it is said that ‘they all forsook Him.’  And the people cry in chorus, ‘Away with him! Crucify him!’  The entire life of Jesus is lived in this loneliness and thus already in the shadow of the Cross.”  (Barth 102-103)

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Barth wrote elsewhere that Christ was the “total help over against total guilt.” (107)

#ordinarylives

Reference:
Barth, Karl. Dogmatics in Outline. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.