Brief Reflection on the Triumph of the Cross
Deacon Douglas McManaman
Consider this part of today’s gospel reading:
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
The more I go on in my life as a Deacon and have to listen to various preachers as well as many faithful Catholics, the more I am convinced that so many of us have missed the radical nature of the good news (gospel), likely because we have read such passages against the background of centuries old prejudice against Protestantism, in particular Martin Luther’s emphasis on the principle that we are saved by faith, not works. A very important document came out in 1999 that many Catholics are unaware of entitled the “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification“. It was created and agreed to by the Church’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation as a result of Catholic–Lutheran dialogue. It states that the churches now share “a common understanding of our justification by God’s grace through faith in Christ.”
It’s a very important document, because to anyone who reads St. Paul or the gospels carefully, it is obvious that we are not saved by our works, but by grace through faith in Christ. This does not mean faith as in a simple assent to a set of theological propositions; rather, it means believing that by his death on the cross, Christ has defeated death definitively, and that forgiveness of sins and eternal life is ours for the accepting. So many of the parables point to this fact, but many instinctively believe that such an arrangement is too good to be true, and so they drift back into a transactional covenant, an Old Testament legalism, so to speak. The only work necessary is faith that Christ has saved us from death by his death–everything else will follow from that. Jesus says: “And this is the will of Him that sent Me: that every one who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the Last Day.”
And notice the last half of today’s gospel: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him”. The gospel, the good news, is a message of salvation. It’s not a morality–even though it has moral implications–, it’s not a set of rules and regulations, nor is it an ideology; rather, it is about a Person, namely Christ himself, who came to save the lost and give his life as a ransom for many. In short, it is about the Triumph of the Cross.
Over the years I’ve noticed that many people would like the person preaching to be a conduit of their anger. In that anger, they inevitably project a Christ who condemns. They don’t really want the good news, it seems. But I was reading from a great Scripture scholar and theologian the other day who was commenting on the verse: “Many are called, but few are chosen”. Allow me to quote a portion of what he wrote, because I can’t hope to say it any better. He writes:
What then do I make of, “Many are called but few are chosen”? Just this. The sad truth of our fallen condition is that we don’t want anything to do with a system of salvation that works by grace through faith. We want our merits, sleazy though they may be, to be rewarded–and we want everybody else’s obviously raunchy behavior punished. We are like pitiful little bargain-hunters going to a used-car lot with $265 worth of hard-earned cash in our pockets and looking for the ultimate transport of delight. But just as we are about to give up and go away, the salesman comes up to us with a smile on his face and whispers in our ear: “You really want a car?” “Come around to the back of the lot. Have I got a deal for you!” And back there, gleaming in the sun, is a brand-new Porsche. “It’s yours for free,” he says. “The boss just likes you; here are the keys.”
Many are called: there is no one in the whole world, good, bad, or indifferent, who isn’t walked around to the back of the lot by the divine Salesman and offered heaven for nothing. But few are chosen: because you know what most of us do? First thing–before we so much as let ourselves sink into the leather upholstery or listen to the engine purr–we get suspicious. We walk around the car and kick the tires. We slam the doors. We jump up and down on the bumpers to test the shocks. And then, even if we do decide to take it, we start right in worrying about the warranty, fussing about the cost of insuring a sports car, and even fuming about whether, if our no-good neighbor came in here, he might be offered a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud. But God doesn’t help us–at least not with all that tough-customer routine. He just sits up there in the front office and remains Mr. Giveaway, the Mad Dog Tyson of Parousia Motors, the Crazy Eddy of Eternity whose prices are insane. He gives heaven to absolutely everybody: nothing down, no interest, no payments. And he makes hell absolutely unnecessary for anybody.
The only catch is, you have to be as crazy as God to take the deal, because your every instinct will be to distrust such a cockamamy arrangement. You have to be willing to believe in an operation that would put any respectable God out of the deity business. Which, nicely enough, lands us right back at the parable: a king who throws parties that any other king would be ashamed of, representing a God who refuses to act like one; and a hell only for idiots who insist on being serious. (Robert Farrar Capon: The Parables of Judgment. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1993)