Surprised By ParadoxSample

The Grace of the Cross

In an interview with Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times, Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary and author of the memoir Call It Grace, denied an orthodox understanding of the cross of Jesus Christ. “[The] crucifixion is not something God is orchestrating from upstairs. The pervasive idea of an abusive God-father who sends his own kid to the cross so God could forgive people is nuts.”

Contrary to Jones’s assertion, as the church has historically understood it, the cross of Jesus Christ is the very place where God exercised both mercy and wrath. We preach God’s foolish, heroic grace by preaching the cross. The cross speaks a thundering word about the cosmic big deal that is sin. 

The surprise of the cross isn’t just its leniency but also its violence. We are not strung up for failure, but God himself. For all the mistakes and moral failings of humanity, he is the one betrayed and beaten. He is the one crucified and pierced. It is his breath, not ours, that expires—his body that is entombed. We deserve his ignominy and get his innocence instead.

How can such grace be?

Grace is the very thing that baptizes us as the people of God. Hapless sinners, we are plunged by God’s own strong hand into death by grace. By grace, we die to self-deception and moral self-assuredness; we die to self-reliance and bootstrap religion; we die to self-trust and to the pocked, unreliable hope that we can save ourselves. 

All the old ways of earning our keep with God have gone. The waters of grace are the waters of God’s abiding benediction, and the mystery is that they are for each of us, and not just on Sunday when we arrive in seersucker to church. The grace of God opens wide its arms on the very worst of Monday mornings, when the toast burns and there’s nothing to pack for lunch, and the car won’t start and we aren’t given to placidity and prayer but boiling rage. Grace is the best kind of news.

Christ and him crucified: this is the gospel of grace, the good news that despite our inability to ever make things right with God, he stretches out his hands, east to west, and pays for the forgiveness that can cast our debt of sin into his bottomless ocean of love. 

Adapted from Surprised by Paradox by Jen Pollock Michel.