Cross of Christ

Our Greatest Need

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ, D.A. Carson

D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Baker, 1992), page 109:

If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.

ht: OFI

Romans 15:13

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ, Faith, Holy Spirit, Joy, spurgeon

Paul’s prayer wish for the believers in Rome:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

A collection of thoughts from my morning reflections:

  • God is the source and object of all hope.
  • Personal joy, peace, and hope are gifts from our gracious heavenly father–and he desires to give us more!
  • God fills us with joy, peace, and hope via our abiding trust in him. Personal faith and trust in God is the conduit God has chosen to communicate his joy, peace, and hope to us [causal: ἐν τῷ πιστεύειν].
  • Hope does not operate apart from our trust, the forward-looking aspect of our faith.
  • If I do not trust God for the future, I cannot experience his joy today.
  • In faith, the Holy Spirit fills us with hope.
  • Joy, peace, and hope are all external to us, they are gifts.
  • Piper: “Confidence in the promises of God overcomes anxiety.”
  • Faith’s object is the gospel (Rom. 1:16–17). To have faith in the gospel is to receive peace, joy, and hope.
  • Schreiner: “Faith and hope are functioning here as virtual synonyms, for the God who gives hope does so by increasing faith, which results in joy and peace.”
  • As we grow in our faith and in the content of the gospel promises we experience greater peace, joy, and hope. These are gifts from God.
  • Paul’s pastoral concern in this prayer for the Roman believers is simple: he wants to see them grow in faith in order to experience more of God’s abounding and abundant joy, peace, and hope.
  • Mounce: “Our role is to maintain a relationship of continuing trust in God.”

Where’s the Cross in James?

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ, Cross-centered life, James

It’s not there. Not explicitly. There’s no overt mention of the cross of Christ in the Epistle of James, nor of the resurrection for that matter (although the resurrection is clearly implied in 5:15).

The absence of the cross is striking and it led Martin Luther to degrade James to “strawy epistle” status. In Luther’s words, Paul, John, and Peter “show you Christ and teach you all that is necessary and salvatory for you to know.” On the contrary, James “is really an epistle of straw compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.”

If the cross is so important why is it absent from the book of James? Is James deficient? Is my personal emphasis on the cross proven to be faulty by James? These are big questions, and they are big questions that get tackled in Richard Bauckham’s thoughtful commentary on James (pages 135–140), a book I read last week (occasionally I read commentaries cover-to-cover).

First off, Bauckham provides evidence that a substantial Christology undergirds the entire Epistle of James, an important point but one I will not detail here. It’s worth noting that he makes this conclusion:

James’ Christology is closer to Paul’s than first impressions might suggest.

His arguments are solid.

Yet,

It remains the case that anything like the Pauline soteriological interpretation of and focus on the cross and the resurrection of Jesus is completely absent.

But a second consideration should be borne in mind at this point. James writes paraenesis. …

Pause for a moment. So what is paraenesis?

Paraenesis is defined as “a technical term for moral exhortation and advice. While catechesis is the form of teaching that tends to emphasize basic instruction in the content of the faith [like the theology of the cross and resurrection], paraenesis is the instructional model in which ethical counsel and moral education were provided in a pattern of exhortation applied to practical problems or issues of living” (DLNT). The book of James is largely paraenesis, it has even been called the Proverbs of the New Testament.

Okay, now back to Bauckham:

… An appropriate comparison is not with Pauline letters as such, but with the paraenetic sections of such letters. These may well be among the most traditional parts of Paul’s letters, drawing on common traditions and patterns of Christian ethical instruction.

Romans 12–13 are an extensive example, and are no less lacking in Christology than James is. In the 35 verses of these chapters, Paul refers to Jesus Christ only three times (12:5, 11; 13:14). The frequency is only a little greater than in James (7 references in 107 verses). Two of the references (Rom. 12:5; 13:14) have characteristically Pauline Christological features. Like James, Paul in these chapters probably reflects the teaching of Jesus, but only implicitly (12:14, 17; 13:9), and, again like James, he refers to the law and all of its commandments (13:8-10).

Here’s his point:

Surprising as it may be, it seems that early Christian paraenesis, even in Paul, generally lacked much Christological reference. So James is as Christological as we should expect the kind of Christian literature he writes to be.

Explicit references to the cross are absent in the Epistle of James, but that should not surprise us. This is not uncharacteristic for its genre, even in Paul. Catechesis and paraenesis serve unique functions, functions that complement one another (a point made obvious in the broader context of Romans).

“That there are very considerable differences between James and Paul is not in doubt,” he writes. Yet by looking at the distinct functions of genre, Bauckham helps us see the continuity between James and Paul and, to me at least, suggests one way to reconcile James with Scripture’s overall priority on the gospel.

Crucifixion

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ, Cross-centered life

The cross of Jesus Christ is at the center of the gospel message and defines what it means to be a Christian. For that reason alone it is a huge privilege traveling around the country with one of the most effective preachers of the cross. My boss does it about as well as anyone, especially when it comes to the frankness of the Savior’s cruel death (the cross is too easily sterilized in our modern context) and the saving results of the cross work of Christ that are now offered to ill-deserving sinners like me.

This week we flew to Palm Springs for the Resolved conference and during the flight I read Martin Hengel’s survey of crucifixion in the Greco-Roman world published in 1977 under the title Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross. It is a technical book, but also brief, readable, and valuable. And while I don’t agree with all of his theological or political conclusions (clearly the author disagrees with any and all forms of capital punishment), I do agree with the author’s overarching purpose for writing it, which is stated in the final sentences of the book: “Reflection on the harsh reality of crucifixion in antiquity may help us to overcome the acute loss of reality which is to be found so often in present theology and preaching” (90). Doubtless it will have that effect.

What follows are a few excerpts I marked to share with you:

“The heart of the Christian message, which Paul described as the ‘word of the cross’ (λόγος τοῦ σταυροῦ), ran counter not only to Roman political thinking, but to the whole ethos of religion in ancient times and in particular to the ideas of God held by educated people.” (5)

“Even Paul’s Greek audience could hardly have approved of the λόγος τοῦ σταυροῦ, much less the Jews who could see the Roman crosses erected in Palestine, especially when they could hardly forget the saying about the curse laid upon anyone hanged on a tree (Deut. 21.23). A crucified messiah, son of God or God must have seemed a contradiction in terms to anyone, Jew, Greek, Roman or barbarian, asked to believe such a claim, and it will certainly have been thought offensive and foolish.” (10)

“For Paul and his contemporaries the cross of Jesus was not a didactic, symbolic or speculative element but a very specific and highly offensive matter which imposed a burden on the earliest Christian missionary preaching. No wonder that the young community in Corinth sought to escape from the crucified Christ into the enthusiastic life of the spirit, the enjoyment of heavenly revelations and an assurance of salvation connected with mysteries and sacraments. When in the face of this Paul points out to the community which he founded that his preaching of the crucified messiah is a religious ‘stumbling block’ for the Jews and ‘madness’ for his Greek hearers, we are hearing in his confession not least the twenty-year experience of the greatest Christian missionary, who had often reaped no more than mockery and bitter rejection with his message of the Lord Jesus, who had died a criminal’s death on the tree of shame.” (19)

“The passion narratives in the gospels are in fact the most detailed [crucifixion accounts] of all. No ancient writer wanted to dwell too long on this cruel procedure.” (25)

“Even in the Roman empire, where there might be said to be some kind of ‘norm’ for the course of the execution (it included a flogging beforehand, and the victim often carried the beam to the place of execution, where he was nailed to it with outstretched arms, raised up and seated on a small wooden peg), the form of the execution could vary considerably: crucifixion was a punishment in which the caprice and sadism of the executioners were given full rein. All attempts to give a perfect description of the crucifixion in archeological terms are therefore in vain; there were too many different possibilities for the executioner.” (25)

“In terms of severity, crucifixion can only be compared with the ‘popular entertainment’ of throwing victims to the wild beasts (bestiis obici); however, this was not listed among the regular forms of execution because whether or not it was carried out depended on the chance circumstances that such a popular festival had been arranged. By comparison crucifixion was a much more common punishment; it could be carried out almost anywhere, whereas bestiis obici required a city arena and the necessary facilities. Of course, crucifixion too could serve as a ‘popular entertainment.'” (35)

“The relative scarcity of references to crucifixions in antiquity, and their fortuitousness, are less a historical problem than an aesthetic one, connected with the sociology of literature. Crucifixion was widespread and frequent, above all in Roman times, but the cultured literary world wanted to have nothing to do with it, and as a rule kept quiet about it.” (38)

“In most Roman writers crucifixion appears as the typical punishment for slaves. … This basic theme of the supplicium servile illuminates the hymn in Philippians 2.6–11. Anyone who was present at the worship of the churches founded by Paul in the course of his mission, in which this hymn was sung, and indeed any reader of Philippians in ancient times, would inevitably have seen a direct connection between the ’emptied himself, taking the form of a slave’ (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών) and the end of the first strophe: ‘he humbled himself and was obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.’ Death on the cross was the penalty for slaves, as everyone knew; as such it symbolized extreme humiliation, shame and torture.” (51, 62)

“In the Greek world the cross is never, so far as I can see, used in a metaphorical sense. Presumably the word was too offensive for it to be used as a metaphor by the Greeks.” (68)

“The ‘word of the cross’ is the spearhead of [Paul’s] message. And because Paul still understands the cross as the real, cruel instrument of execution, as the instrument of the bloody execution of Jesus, it is impossible to dissociate talk of the atoning death of Jesus or the blood of Jesus from this ‘word of the cross.’ The spearhead cannot be broken off the spear. Rather, the complex of the death of Jesus as a single entity for the apostle, in which he never forgets the fact that Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock, much less passing on ‘old and full of years’ like the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Rather, he died like a slave or a common criminal, in torment, on the tree of shame. Paul’s Jesus did not just die any death; he was ‘given up for us all’ on the cross, in a cruel and a contemptible way.” (89–90)

Washing Feet

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ

Washing feet in the ancient culture was as common and necessary as brushing teeth is today. But washing someone else’s feet was a task reserved only for the lowest slave. Feet-washing slaves had hit bottom in the socio-economic scale. In fact “in a household without servants,” Richard Bauckham writes, “everyone washed their own feet” (The Testimony, 192).

Jesus assumes the position of a low slave when he washes the disciples’ feet in John 13:1–20. The disciples were embarrassed by his act. It didn’t make sense. But what’s not to understand? The disciples had dirty feet and needed them cleaned. Yet there was meaning to the event that the disciples couldn’t perceive. In the middle of the narrative Jesus says, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand” (v. 7).

Hold that thought.

If foot washing was the task of a slave, the cross was a unique threat to the slave class. Crucifixion was a Roman convention commonly reserved for rebellious slaves, a useful tool to prevent rebellion among the slave class, and a useful tool to make an example of lawbreaking slaves and any slaves connected to the guilty slave (see the story recorded by Tacitus in The Annals, 14.42-45).

Jesus’ foot washing act begins to make sense. Jesus takes the position of a slave, serves like a slave, washes the disciples feet like a slave, because ultimately he is preparing to die the degrading death of a slave (Phil. 2:7–8).

The disciples could not fully understand this point when Jesus lowered himself to his knees with a basin of water. This single act was significant for many reasons: here we find that no act is beneath the Christian; we find a model of Christian service to others; etc. But most significantly, in the foot washing we find a metaphor for the cross. The disciples could not see this, not here, not now. The full explanation for why Jesus washed their feet would only become clear after the substitutionary atonement of the Savior. Then they would understand that in the cross we find complete cleansing–head to toe–from all our sin.

The End of Blood Sacrifices

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ

B. B. Warfield, Works 2:434–35:

Wherever the Christian religion went, there blood-sacrifice ceased to be offered—just as the tapers [thin candles] go out when the sun rises. Christ’s death was recognized everywhere where it became known as the reality of which they were the shadows. Having offered His own body once for all and by this one offering perfected forever them that are sanctified, it was well understood that there remained no more offering for sin. “The death of Christ,” says Harnack—“of this there can be no doubt—made an end to blood-sacrifices in the history of religion.”