Is the Cross Child Abuse?

You may be seated. Warm welcome to you in the name of Jesus Christ. So glad that you've chosen to be with us here this rainy Sunday morning. We're so glad to see you here and to be together in this place to worship the word together.

This is the last Sunday of my series called No Bad Questions, and I thank you for hanging in with me during this whole thing. Next week, I'm very excited to welcome back our former director of outreach, Dax Palmer, who is going to come and preach. Dax has, for the last nine months, been on loan serving as a pastoral resident with our daughter church, Reconciliation Church, Southeast Raleigh. And we're so glad to have Dax back in this capacity, coming back to share God's word with us. He's been a tremendous help to that congregation. We're supporting that church and also Dax and his work doing that. And I hope you'll welcome him next Sunday. And we'll start a new series the Sunday after that.

So if you will, we're going to turn our attention to God's word. We're going to read from Luke chapter twenty-two and twenty-three this morning. If you will, follow along on the screen behind me, or if you have a device you want to read along with. We're going to be in Luke 22, some verses, and then jump to chapter 23. Let's join our voices together as we read today about the crucifixion.

He went out and made his way as usual to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he told them, "Pray that you may not fall into temptation." Then he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, knelt down, and began to pray. "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done." — Luke 22

When they had arrived at the place called The Skull, they crucified him there along with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, "Father, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing." And they divided his clothes and cast lots. The people stood watching and even the leaders were scoffing. "He saved others. Let him save himself if this is God's Messiah, the chosen one." The soldiers also mocked him. They came offering him sour wine and said, "If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself." An inscription was above him: "This is the king of the Jews." It was now about noon and darkness came over the whole land until three because the sun's light failed. The curtain of the sanctuary was split down the middle, and Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands, I entrust my spirit." Saying this, he breathed his last. — Luke 23

This is God's word. Thanks be to God.

The Question About the Cross

This morning, as I said, we're at the end of our series called No Bad Questions, which comes from a conviction that you should be able to ask all your questions in church. And today, I've saved this question to the very end. And it's a question about the cross. I've saved it to the end because I think that this is a question that, honestly, Christians are too shy to ask, too maybe embarrassed to ask in church. And it's one that much of the rest of the world asks all the time.

The cross is the single most universally identifiable symbol of any religion in the entire world. People recognize the cross even if they couldn't tell you much about the gospel. It's on our tattoos. It's on our jewelry. It's everywhere. And that testifies to the fact that this is central to our faith. This is so central to our faith. But a lot of people are asking, does it mean what we think it means, especially today? What does the cross mean?

That may seem like an obvious answer to some of you who've spent a lot of time in church, but it isn't so obvious as you might think. A lot of people are reconsidering the cross today and are asking the question, have Christians gotten this wrong? Have we missed it somehow?

Here are some of the questions that people ask regarding the cross. How is it that Christians have come to believe that on the cross, God vents his wrath on his son? Would any loving father do that? How is it loving for God to torture his own son? Isn't that cosmic child abuse? Isn't it unjust to punish the innocent on behalf of the guilty? Is it necessary? I mean, isn't it unjust for Jesus to take punishment that we deserve? Why can't God just forgive like we're supposed to? I didn't ask Jesus to do this for me. Why should I receive that as some kind of gift? Or finally, how can I ever feel loved by a God who has to be convinced to love me?

Now those may be questions that you haven't considered, or you may have considered a lot of them, but they're ones that we need to take seriously this morning. One critic I read this past week regarding the cross says this about Christians, and he says it in very stark terms: "You Christians, you worship Molech and call it Christianity."

Now Molech in the Old Testament is a Babylonian god that was appeased only by child sacrifice. Do you hear the offense of that? This feels like child sacrifice. And you call this religion for the twenty first century?

The objections are part of a movement to divorce the cross from what's known as judicial substitutionary atonement. You may not know that term, but here's what it means. It means that on the cross, Jesus exchanged place with sinners, voluntarily bearing the punishment for sin that their sins deserved and satisfied the wrath of God. That's sort of the classic understanding of the cross. But is that right? We miss that somehow?

Here's the problem that's being raised, and it's a legit concern. There are many reasons why people find the cross offensive. The cross has always been offensive. It is a grotesque way of killing someone. But in our current cultural moment, the cross is sort of being cross examined again because of abuse in the Church. The American Church is living in a moment of moral accounting for much of the abuses and failures of our past and our present. Right now, it's very common to hear in our news media about pastors, churches, denominations that are being held accountable for ways that they have failed to protect, even hurt people. In particular, we are seeing sex abuse scandals getting a lot of attention, and rightfully so. This is a helpful housecleaning that needs to happen within the Church of Jesus Christ.

But this is what many people are asking: Christians, is your theology part of the problem? Is your theology, particularly the theology of the cross, actually part of what is, at best, perpetuating an environment of abuse, or at worst, even promoting it, creating it?

There are a lot of people who look at our theology of judicial substitutionary atonement and say, this is dangerous. And there are at least three reasons for this. Some say this doctrine promotes and encourages passivity among victims of injustice—imitate Jesus in being passive. And this is particularly a concern for women and minority communities. Others say the theology that we have on the cross is bloody and it's triggering, and we don't have to talk about it this way. Why so in your face with this? Another school of thought says, there's no positive ethic that's derived from Jesus' sin bearing work on the cross. Indeed, it seems to even mute that or work against it.

Do you see what I mean, why these are so serious? Why people are looking at our theology and saying, this is dangerous. Are you sure you get this right?

So very simply today, I want to walk through some of these objections and look at them together. And we're going to look at them not in light of what Paul says about the cross, but from the Gospel of Luke, from the victim himself, from Jesus.

Understanding God's Wrath

How is it that we've come to believe that the cross is the place where God vents his anger against sinners, vents his anger and wrath on his own son? Briefly, here's why. We just read the passage where Jesus goes to the garden the night before he's put on the cross, before he's crucified. He prays, anticipating the wrath of God that he would endure. He says this very strange thing:

Father, if possible, let this cup pass from me. — Luke 22

Now he's not drinking anything in the Garden of Gethsemane. He's praying. And the word there for cup actually is an Old Testament idea going back to the book of Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 51, which describes God pouring out, like in a cup, his wrath and people drinking it to its dregs. So when Jesus says, "Father, please let this cup pass from me, not what I'm at will, but what you will," what he's saying is, I know that the horror of the cross is not just death by nails. It's not just death by asphyxiation on a Roman torture device. It is, in a sense, drinking that cup of wrath to its dregs. The sense of the heaviness of that was on our savior in the garden. That's what he's anticipating.

Now, when we think of wrath, our experiences are all human. We think of wrath as irrational, hateful, excessive, people blowing up in anger. That's what we think of when somebody really is wrathful, full of rage. But God's wrath is not that way at all. God's wrath is his purposed, holy, loving displeasure, hate at what kills people, at what harms his image bearers, at what destroys us. It's not some irrational flare up. It's much more measured. It's settled. It's a just opposition toward anything that defiles his creation. It's his stance of judgment against sin.

I think what's been helpful to me to understand God's wrath—there's one writer who is a modern theologian from Serbia, and he writes about witnessing firsthand what happened in the former nation of Yugoslavia, the war that was there. His name is Miroslav Volf. This is what he writes:

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn't God love?

Shouldn't divine love be beyond wrath somehow? God is love, and God loves every person, every creature. But this is what I've discovered. That's exactly why God is wrathful. My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of war in the Former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, two hundred thousand people were killed. Over three million people were displaced from their homes. My villages and cities were destroyed. My people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination. And I could not imagine God not being angry with that.

How did God react to such carnage? By doting upon the perpetrators in some grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead confirming, you guys are basically good? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of God's wrath, I came to think I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.

Objection Two: Child Abuse?

Why would any loving father do this to his child? How is it loving for God to torture his own son? It's important to remember that Jesus was not a child when he went to the cross. He was a full grown thirty-year-old man who made a decision for himself about what he could do. He chose the path of crucifixion.

Over and over in the gospels, you read Jesus saying these odd words to his disciples: I must go to Jerusalem. I must suffer. And his disciples were scratching their heads going, "I don't know what we're talking about. You must go. You must suffer. And on the third day, rise. What are you talking about?" Over and over, Jesus' face is set toward Jerusalem, knowing what is to come. It's not something that was forced upon him.

He humbled himself to death on the cross. — Philippians

Or the book of Hebrews says it was his joy to go to the cross. He made no attempt, even in the garden that last night when they come to arrest him and his disciples are ready to pull out the swords and fight, he says, "Don't resist." Again, he is fully on board with what's going on.

The crucifixion was not some act of child abuse. Rather, Jesus said there is no greater act of love than for a person to lay down his life for his friends. This was Jesus' purpose. What we see in him is not passivity, but a daily active dependence on his father. Over and over saying, "I choose what you want, father, including the cross."

The best metaphor for this is not a child, but rather, I want you to think of soldiers who signed up in World War II to go serve the country, to go parachute behind enemy lines, to go lay down their lives for the country. This is the kind of act of voluntary self-sacrifice we see in Jesus, not child abuse.

Objection Three: Punishing the Innocent

Isn't it wrong to punish an innocent person in the place of the guilty? We have all kinds of examples in our culture of substitutes. Some of you are baseball fans. What do you call it when one batter bats and another person runs? A pinch runner, right? What about in a board meeting, one person voting in place of another person? A proxy voter. Even in China today, and this is hard to imagine, but the uber wealthy can hire a body double to go serve a prison sentence for them.

Now, we think of someone paying another person's debts, and we're okay with that. On a financial level, we're okay with that. But on a moral level, we're usually uncomfortable with one person who's innocent being punished instead of someone who's guilty. We call that injustice. We say that's wrong.

But remember, Jesus is not just any person. Jesus is called over and over in the Bible "the Christ." Now Christ is not Jesus' last name. It's a title, and it comes from the Old Testament. It's the word for messiah, and it's a special term. It's a special office that Jesus fulfills. It means anointed king. Every time you see "in Christ" or "Jesus the Christ," it's referring to a particular way that Jesus relates to his people.

Now you can get this because we do this for our sports teams. When the Wolfpack kept winning, a bunch of you in this room said, "We won. We're winning." Now, you didn't play. I don't remember any of you playing men's or women's basketball during that run of the Wolfpack, and yet all of you claimed it as your own. Why is that? There's a sense in which the Wolfpack represents us till they start losing.

But in the same way, this is how people in the Old Testament thought of their kings. This is even what messiah means—anointed one, one who may represent us. This is why when we compare the cross and the innocent suffering in place of the guilty, all of our courtroom analogies don't work. All of our courtroom analogies are like one person suffering, so the guilty get off free. That doesn't make any sense.

Jesus is a mediator in a way that no one else could be. He is a representative, a king, an anointed one in a way that nobody else could be. So him suffering and dying is different from just an innocent person suffering for a guilty person. Jesus does so on an infinite level because he's an infinite person. And he does so uniquely because he is the Messiah, the Anointed One. He's uniquely in a position to stand in the place of sinners—not just like in China, where the uber wealthy can get a body double, but where only he could stand and chose to do so.

Why Can't God Just Forgive?

Number four: Why can't God just forgive? Isn't that what he asks us to do with each other?

So let's say a friend of mine steals my lawn mower. Now it's not a great mower—it's an electric one, but it's corded. You might or might not really want it. But let's say somebody steals the lawn mower out of my garage. I get angry with him because he stole my mower. He's made himself my enemy. I might go and pursue him out of love. Like we were friends—how could you do this to me? And yet I still insist that I don't just want my mower back. I want an apology. I want some acknowledgment that what you did was wrong to me.

Forgiveness is a release of an acknowledged wrong. In commercial terms, it's saying, "You owe me this, but I'm not going to make you repay because you acknowledged it." Let's think about it in a moral realm: that was wrong, but I'm not going to make you pay and suffer for it because you've acknowledged this. To forgive is not to condemn them for an acknowledged wrongdoing. That's what forgiveness is.

Now, given this, forgiveness is simply never God letting something go. "Oh, I'll just pretend that didn't happen. Sweep it under the rug. Not a big deal." His character, his holiness, his righteousness, his justice means that he can't just treat our sins as if they didn't happen. And it bears repeating: we don't want him to.

We don't want a God who looks the other way, sweeps it under the rug, pretends it didn't happen. We don't want a God who looks at sin and genocide and murder, oppression and sexism and racism and rape and theft and infidelity and child abuse and a thousand little sins. We don't want a God who pretends like it doesn't matter. That kind of God would be scary. That would be a lawless God. That would be a God who's morally all over the place. A God who doesn't enforce his own law can't be trusted.

At the same time, the cross is the way that God makes it possible to forgive and satisfy justice at the same time. Both of those come together in such a unique, unimaginable way to the people of his time. How in the world did this happen?

Judicial substitutionary atonement is just an explanation. The God of the universe substituted himself—the innocent for the guilty. His guilt becomes my guilt; my guilt becomes his guilt. His righteousness becomes my righteousness.

This is why on the cross, in the very act of dying, what does Jesus say? You heard him. What does he say?

Father, forgive them.

Because in that very moment, he's making it possible for forgiveness to happen. That sacrifice is the way that the law is fulfilled, justice is done, and forgiveness happens.

Does God Say "Do as I Say, Not as I Do"?

Well, objection number five follows this: Is it then this God saying, "Well, do as I say, but not as I do," like your parents did? Remember how much that drove you crazy? Doesn't he tell us to forgo vengeance and then he does it himself?

Actually, no. This is because God is God and we're not. And there is a creature-creator distinction that's the foundation of all the ethics of this book. It's really helpful for us to remember this. In general, there are a whole bunch of things that are appropriate for God to do that are not appropriate for you.

Let's just think about one of them: receiving worship. It is right and righteous for God to receive worship. It's right and righteous to do so, and it's him telling the truth when he's like, "You should praise me because I'm the one thing in the universe that's praiseworthy." That's not arrogant. We talked about that months ago. And yet for me to say, "Hey, worship me," is a profoundly wicked thing for me to do because I am not worthy of that. It would be a lie to tell you to do so.

So when Paul says:

Repay no one evil for evil. Vengeance is the Lord's alone.

This is what he's saying: Don't inflict judgment on your enemies—not because God never does those sort of things, but because he's the only one who should do so. The explicit logic of the passage is: don't do that. It's not appropriate for you to do that. That's God's job only. Vengeance is his. Thank God.

Can God Love Without a Sacrifice?

Number six: A God who has to be convinced to love me by a suffering savior leads to this relationship where that's inherently damaging. God has to be convinced to love me. Do you feel that? How can I ever feel loved by a God who has to be kind of talked into it by the death of Jesus?

Now, we know from childhood development that it's not really great for kids to separate them from us, to send them away from us. "I don't want to see you anymore. I don't want to have anything to do with you." That's harmful to children. Isn't all this language of separation from God in sin just the same thing?

Simply put, no, it's not the same thing. Because when you put a child in time out, you're arbitrarily saying, "I'm putting you away for a moment so you feel the weight of this." But there's not a real barrier between you except for your own anger. When God does this, when God says there's a separation between us, he's naming a real separation, a gulf between us, something that cannot be ignored or just pushed out of the way. It has to be repaired. It has to be made right. There's a separation that's only remedied by a substitute.

God the Father doesn't have to be convinced to love you because of Jesus. God the Father loves you by sending Jesus. This is an expression of his love.

To sum up again, we need the cross. We need the cross and the fullness of what it means for us—the atonement. I want to underscore that I understand the abuses of the church are front and center and big, and it's worth getting upset over. But the atonement, the theology isn't the problem. We have to be really careful, and I know this is a temptation, to want to take apart theology because of the outcomes we see in our world.

Let me give you an analogy. Let's say you have a car with really quick pickup. I mean, that thing will go. And you start getting speeding ticket after speeding ticket after speeding ticket. And you go to your mechanic and you're like, "Hey, I need you to look at this car. I think this car has a speeding problem, and I need you to give me a new engine for my car." Your mechanic would rightfully scratch his head and go, "What are you talking about? You don't have an engine problem. You got a driver problem. Your right foot—you might want to look at how heavy that is."

Right? Because the problem is not the engine. The problem is the person operating the engine. In the same way, the problems of abuse in the church are incredibly serious, but they're not caused by our theology. That's too simplistic to draw that line. Abuse is not a theological problem. It's a human sin problem. The issue is not with our doctrine, but our leaders, our pastors, our churches, our denominations.

And ironically, when you go to clean up that mess and you get rid of the engine in the car, you get rid of the one thing that is necessary for us to be able to even address the abuses and sins and wrongs that are rampant in our churches—rampant by people of God. The one thing that we need is a doctrine where there is justice and forgiveness. Things are said, "This was wrong," and yet there's a way to make it right.

The Final Objection

Let me close by engaging the last objection: Objection number seven. "I didn't ask Jesus to substitute himself on the cross for me. Why should I receive that as a gift?"

I've heard this before, and to me, it's the most serious and it's the most heartbreaking. Because this is a person who says, "I know what Jesus did. I just don't want it. I don't need it." And really, my only response is: Why not? Why haven't you? What is stopping you from asking Jesus to substitute himself for you? Why won't you receive that as a gift?

This is what the gospel is. It's a great exchange. My sin, his righteousness. That's an expression of the love of God for you. What's keeping you? What's holding you back?

September 11th, 2001—one of the stories that came out of that tragedy in our country is the story of a man with a red bandana. New Yorkers, of course, exhibited extraordinary courage in the face of that destruction. There's a man, though, who's risen to kind of the surface, and you can actually see his red bandana on display at the 9/11 Museum in New York. His name is Welles Crowther.

When Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center's South Tower, a bunch of people huddled together in the sky lobby on the 78th floor, and they couldn't find a way out. And suddenly, this man appears with a red bandana over his mouth and nose and directs them to the right stairwell to get them all the way out. Three times that man kept going up and bringing down groups of people over and over until the tower collapsed with him in it.

A few months later, after 9/11, stories from survivors kept coming out about the man with the red bandana. Who was the man with the red bandana? And Alison Crowther knew immediately who this was—her 24-year-old son, who was both an equities trader and had been a volunteer fireman. And his entire life, he kept a red bandana with him. In fact, he had two: one to show, one to blow. That's what his dad used to tell him. And he had a red bandana with him all the time.

And on this day, he used it for the last time in a way that meant the delivery and safety of dozens of people. You know, that red bandana is on display in the museum, the nine eleven Museum in New York. And it's funny. I've never heard anybody say, "Why did he do that?" Nobody asked him to do that.

So, Jesus, so for us. What an incredible rescue. Why haven't you, if you haven't, asked him to do this for you?

In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.