Why The Cross?
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WHY JESUS DIED ON THE CROSS
Because it’s the necessary conclusion of religion: the death of God at the hands of his creation. But, God overcame his death and our religion by absorbing it forever, by going straight through the middle of death, proving it both impotent and also the ground zero of our absolution and reconciliation.
(To be clear, I’m defining religion like Robert Capon in The Parables of Grace: “Religion consists of all the things (believing, behaving, worshiping, sacrificing) the human race has ever thought it had to do to get right with God.”)
Your religion kills God. Your religion has been judged and sentenced to death. It is no longer a factor. The only one not convinced of this is you.
If you’re right about religion - and you’re not - then you cannot be acquitted. Nothing in the law has any power to cleanse sin or bring about holiness. In a word, religion is a nonstarter.
Religion cannot raise the dead. You are condemned (by the law, not by God) the moment you take up your crusade. You are contending with Moses and all that he said would be fulfilled in the Anointed One, not in you.
Religion cannot raise the dead.
You and your religion will end up putting God on trial. You will condemn and brutally murder God. This is the end of religion. Always has been, always will be. This is the ultimate fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and why religion had to be brought to an end.
GOD KILLS RELIGION BY BEING KILLED BY RELIGION
The ultimate shocker plot twist is that God eternally established and revealed your forgiveness and reconciliation deep inside the very moment you and your religion happily killed him (Dr. C. Baxter Kruger, “The Mediation of Jesus Christ”).
So, your and my religion indeed killed God, but in it God killed religion and our connection to it. That’s why the life of religion is so dissatisfying. That is why taking up religion hoping for resurrection is so stupid.
The connection I think my religion wins me with God is purely imaginary, illusory, delusional, even synthetic and poisonous. For it flies in the face of the truest truth that makes all other truths true - that ‘God is With Us’ and always has been.
The connection I think my religion wins me with God is purely imaginary…
It’s like when my children come up to me after doing something spectacular expecting my applause. I am indeed proud of them for their achievements! But my commendation has nothing to do with my acceptance of and love for them. Commending their accomplishments is my enjoyment of their enjoyment of my acceptance. My acceptance and love for them cannot be changed by what they do or don’t do.
When they confuse my commendation with my acceptance their life deteriorates in the absence of the security of knowing I love them unchangeably.
Religion is born out of insecurity. Freedom is born out of assurance. Only one is God’s vision for his creation! And something drastic had to be done to set our eyes back on Life.
WHY LARK HARPS ON THE CROSS
So we (Lark) will go to our graves pressing the implications of the cross upon the barbarism of religion. We want to change how the world sees the cross, because, by and large, the world can’t help but turn the cross into the precise thing it means to obliterate - the idea that God has expectations of you.
We (Lark) will go to our graves pressing the implications of the cross upon the barbarism of religion.
The world sees the cross as yet another novel way of motivating people to get their shit together. But the cross is the parasite that inevitably consumes religion from within and without. In the cross, Jesus became one with us and our sin to exterminate all of it, delivering us into life everlasting in him, the only thing we’ve ever had and will ever have (John 1:3-4).
The cross of Jesus’ death isn’t God changing his plans. The cross is God undoing our plans by fully submitting to them. The cross is where God proves to us beyond every reasonable doubt that truly nothing can separate us from him and that there is no condemnation, no condemner, no condemned.
Indeed, where the world sees the cross as a call to spiritual arms, Jesus sees the cross as the death of every one of us (2 Corinthians 5:14) and the death of our unfaith and independence. Jesus calls us to see the cross as our invitation into him and the safety of our death in his death.
None of this is to mention, the One who died on the cross - who the scriptures emphatically say is face to face with the Father (John 1:1) as the very Creator and Sustainer of all things (Col. 1:16-17) - was seen by the religious authorities as irreligious, blasphemous, and cursed. Jesus was not killed for being bad at being God or good, but for being bad at religion. God the Son became “incarnate in a Person of remarkably cavalier attitudes toward religion” (Capon).
It behooves us to point out that crucifixion was an artform practiced by one of the greatest empires of all time as a strategy for subjecting everyone to state religion - “Casesar is Lord!” they would insist. The King of the Jews and the Creator of the cosmos was crucified by the highway so the many passers-by would never mistake who is boss in these parts (N.T. Wright). Religion at its finest.
SEEING THE CROSS LIKE JESUS SEES IT
Give up the superstition of your religion and your DIY approval and acceptance before God. The way you see the cross changes everything. Forget the way you’ve seen it before, as the great example and starting point. See it like Jesus sees it: as the proof and the provision of your once-for-all-oneness with God in Christ.
Give up the superstition of your religion and your DIY approval and acceptance before God.
You can live life under the banner of the finished work of Jesus. You can give up on living life under the banner of your own faithfulness. God’s not wondering if you’ll pull through, because he already pulled you through (Only this can quicken our devotion to doing true good anyway). You don’t have to wonder what God thinks of you or what he will do to you when you misstep.
And you certainly don’t need to insist on anyone else living life under the banner of their own faithfulness. Nothing ignores the life and work of God incarnate on the cross like trying to help.
Lay down your spiritual arms, your religious crusades, your moralistic stupor, and take up instead an apprenticeship of celebration, the revelry of death and dependence, the absurdity of your eternal life now. You are held by a love that will never let you go.
And all your discomfort and dissatisfactions result from pushing away and trying to resist this embrace. You may well get what you wish for, but it won’t feel like you want it to feel.
This way of seeing the cross like Jesus sees it finally frees the Church to be what it is. “It is here for no religious purpose at all, only to announce the Gospel of free grace” (Capon).
DEATH AS A WAY OF LIVING
Take up this cross. Take up the life that is death in Christ. “Death as a way of living” (Capon) is our only freedom. It is the only Life. It is trusting Jesus to have accomplished both your creation and your commendation. It is a life of trusting that although you have nothing to offer, Jesus is in you (John 14:20). The space and life freed up by not trying to do or redo what Jesus did is enormous.
Death as a way of living is a way of seeing the cross that assumes acceptance instead of expectations. It is the death of you and all your spiritual endeavors because there’s nothing left undone. All is well and now you live. All has been made right and now you are free. Nothing can undo what Christ has done. You - and every person for all time and in every place - are hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). Trust this. Do not toil for this.
Death as a way of living is a way of seeing the cross that assumes acceptance instead of expectations.
Remarkably, many people are more prone to view gifts as debts to repay than they are to ever enjoy the gift they received. Even as givers we often imagine we are paying on a debt.
But the gift of Christ, the eternal Giver, is only enjoyable. It is never repayable. It is un-repayable not only in the sense that it is too great to be paid back. More specifically, it is never repayable because of the sort of gift it is. I did nothing to come to life at birth and creation. I do nothing to stay alive. I can do nothing to be raised to life in Christ. I can only live and enjoy that living.
You can do nothing apart from the One (John 15:5) who can do only what he sees the Father doing (John 5:19). If this One - who can only do what he sees the Father doing - has revealed his life in you regardless of your darkness, then the One you think you’ve been separated from - the Father - is actually in you. He is the One in whom you live and move and have your being (Acts 17:28-29).
The death of your imaginary life apart from God is the dismissal of your spiritual anxiety. It is the beginning of your enjoyment of the reality of the Father’s, the Son’s, and the Spirit’s delighted eternal residence in you. Live free or live a lie.
After all, if there’s no religion among Father, Spirit, and Son, why would there be religion between us and them?
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