The season of Lent is a time of repentance. “Returning” is the true meaning of repentance. We return to the covenant which God makes with humanity through baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection. Lent also gives us the opportunity to return to the cross. The readings in Lent increase the tension between Jesus and his opponents until in the service of The Three Days we are brought directly to the cross on Good Friday and the resurrection at Easter Vigil.
During Lent it is our task to grapple with the meaning of the cross. God comes to his people because God has a mission for us to accomplish. What God accomplishes in Jesus Christ—his life, death, and resurrection—is also the object of our reflection in Lent.
God is a covenanting God who makes promises that are meant to invest us and all creation with life. Often this life which is promised must be revealed under its opposite, that is, death. We see this in the early covenant making ceremonies recorded in the Bible. The story of God appearing to Abraham in Genesis is such a case. God appears to Abraham and promises to bless him. Abraham trusts in the promises and trust is accepted by God as a proper and good relationship.
Then animals are sacrificed, their carcasses are laid out as was ancient custom. Then we are told,
As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. . . When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” (Cf. Genesis 15:1-18)
Dread is the human reaction to the numinous presence of God whose mystery remains shrouded in the darkness and light. The covenant forms the revelation of the promise-making God and his will for creation. God makes the covenant, but the story does not end there. We must pass through a thousand pages of history in which God’s gracious will is not only ignored but willfully opposed by creation and the powers that have taken it captive. The opposition to God is most often portrayed in the fate of the prophets who die at the hands of the rebellious kings of Judah and Israel and, of course, at the hands of the successive empires that arise to resist any message that would call into question their right to rule the earth with a iron fist and a sword of blood. I once read that no prophets were killed but that this is a theological theme developed after exile.
This resistance is depicted in the story of Jesus, the Beloved Son, the Chosen One. He comes bringing a message of peace, mercy and reconciliation. He faced the same threat that the prophets encountered in their work. The powers installed in Jerusalem—those of Rome and their minions, Herod and the Jewish aristocracy—are immediately threatened by the message and person of Jesus. Jesus comes with the message that God’s rule has already drawn near. He offers an alternative that already challenges legitimacy of power structures that rule exploiting the human fear of death. It is this challenge of Jesus which inevitably raises the wrath of the powers.
The question for us is whether Jesus died because it was necessary or because it was inevitable? God’s decision to send Jesus is to be understood as God’s act to reveal the glory of God. It was not necessary for Jesus to die because God demanded a death as restitution for the sin of humanity. It was inevitable, however, that Jesus died. He was truly human, and he would face the same fate as the prophets.
We are coming to understand that the “necessity” of Christ’s death connotes the “inevitability” of his death. The decision of God as presented in scripture is to send his Son not in order to die but in order to make manifest the presence of God in the world. It is the presence of Christ which signals for us the faithfulness of God to all that God has created. It is the victory of God anticipated in the crucified-risen Christ that signals for disciples of Christ that God will ultimately prevail—not the God made in our blood-thirsty image, but the God whose image is Jesus. “We have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
That Jesus dies is not necessary to appease God, but it is the inevitable fate of those who remain faithful to their vocation and remain faithful to God in the face of opposition and conflict. God does not win by force. God wins by love defined as mercy and faithfulness in the Bible and embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, the Resurrected-Crucified One. His sacrifice is not on an altar at a temple. His sacrifice is on the altar of the world, pouring out of his life in faithfulness to God who lures the powers and principalities of this world into a “showdown” on Golgotha where their evil ways are revealed for what they are and God’s way is revealed as the path to life.
As we return to the cross during Lent, we must not lose sight of the love of God symbolized there. The cross speaks of a dark victory by the God who sends his Son who will inevitably die at the hands of sinners. Let us return to the righteous God manifest in the loving Son; to the vulnerable God manifest in the courageous Son; and to the faithful God revealed in the resurrected Son.