Sermon for 9/14/11 "The Power of the Cross"

Lord Jesus, let us see how you humbled yourself to death, even death on a cross, that you might show all the power and glory of God the Father. Amen.

Today is Holy Cross Day. This day has been recognized as a holiday in the Christian calendar for about 1700 years, since the year 326. Quite a long time. On this day in history, supposedly Helena, the mother of Constantine, found and identified the remains of the cross on which Jesus had been crucified nearly three hundred years earlier. Whether Helena really discovered the right piece of wood or not, this holiday points us to the importance of the cross of Christ.

So why is the cross so crucial? Why is it so very important? We see that in Scripture God has raised up something weak and powerless – a bronze serpent in the wilderness, a man dying in the Gospels – so that the people who look to it in faith will be saved and healed. But how can this work? Where’s the power involved in that? If we were to devise a means of salvation for sinners we’d probably have them do some heroic work of self-sacrifice. We might have them commit themselves to poverty, to works of sorrow, or something like that. We’d figure out some way that people would humble themselves to receive God’s forgiveness. That would seem like a worthy means to earn forgiveness.

But our God doesn’t work the way we do. He doesn’t think the way we think. His ways are not our ways. Our God was not satisfied with sinful man’s ability to save himself. He saw that we couldn’t and wouldn’t do it. And he also saw that we would be attracted to a means of salvation that looked noble or worthy. If there seemed to be great power and grace in it we’d be flocking to it so as to show ourselves worthy.

On the contrary our Lord chose to display his power through giving himself in the person of Jesus, God the Son, who would die in a shameful way. And a substitutionary death is not a means of forgiveness we would devise. He does what is impossible, even inconceivable to us. For Jesus, in his death on the cross, becomes sin for us, taking the sin of the world on his shoulders, suffering separation from God, though he himself is God. Jesus, God the Son, the very true God, dies, which seems impossible for God. And in this sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf, the seemingly weak one becomes the power of God. The sign of shame becomes the sign of God’s glory. The apparent defeat of God the Son shows that he has in fact triumphed over death.

How powerful is the cross? Let us never underestimate the power of the cross, for on it Christ died for you and for me, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God.

Let us pray.

Lord, let us cherish your cross, for on it you turned the tables on death itself. May we look to you, Christ, crucified for us, the power of God in all we do. Amen.