The cross … the symbol of one of the central tenets of the Christian faith. A particularly visible image during the Easter season. The reminder that Jesus died – and then rose again.
The reminder that Jesus did that for us. For me. For the forgiveness of my sin. To make it possible for me to be in an intimate relationship with God.
That’s Basic Christianity 101.
This is not going to be a theological dissertation. I wouldn’t even know where this fits in various theological constructs. It’s merely the musings of something that pops into my mind from time to time.
Does the cross just take care of my sin? Or does it also take care of the sin done to me?
I’m not talking about the salvation of the person who violates another person and sins against them. I’m not talking about somehow excusing or minimizing the evil that is present when one person sins in horribly destructive ways against another.
What I’m talking about is this: Can we run to the cross – can we rely on the power of what was done on the cross – with those sins, the ones done to us, just as we can run to the cross with our own sin?
My experience – and my heart – tells me we can.
One of my “cling to” verses, discovered in the midst of pain, is 1 John 4:16a – “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.” Rely – that’s the word that originally leapt off the page at me.
I understand there are circumstances where the evidence seems stacked against a loving and reliable God. There are situations where I really don’t know what to say because anything I think to say feels less than what the person needs, it feels insensitive to the depth of pain and abuse. I don’t pretend that my experience should somehow make it easy for anyone to get past their own pain, their own distrust of God. But for me, I always come back to the fact that I can know and rely on God’s love for me. And somehow, the cross becomes the place I know that, the tangible sign of the depth of God’s love.
Maybe this isn’t a new idea to you. But when I first thought of it this way, that the cross could take care of sin done against us, against me, it was somehow more tangible than a vague pat answer about letting God into the pain or turning the pain over to Him.
I am a huge beneficiary of great counseling and inner healing. I absolutely want to always be part of a community that has a theology of healing and that encourages the use of gifted counselors and healers. I have counselors that I credit with giving me back the ability to function after the pain of what happened in my life felt as if it would crush me.
Ultimately though, my ability to move through pain and into healing seems to rest not just on great insights and technique, or gifted counselors who help me see things I wouldn’t face otherwise. When I look for the “solid ground” on which to stand, from which to heal, it goes back to being able to know and rely on God’s love – to the cross.
If the cross is about ripping open the veil between us and God, bringing us into deep and nourishing and life-giving relationship with Him – then it has to take care of anything that stands in the way of that. So it must take care of our sin. And it does.
But for some people, in some circumstances, sin done against them can distort a view of God’s goodness, or God’s desire to be close, or our ability to rely on Him, or even the perception of whether He is real and present and caring. There are stories where you wonder how anyone can survive such sustained or repeated abuse at such a horrendous level. The “easy” Christian answers don’t work. They feel trivial and inappropriate.
And the story doesn’t have to be big or dramatic for that to be true. There are lesser known stories as well, the ones that happen day in and day out to people we know and love. And the damage is the same. It is not their sin, but it gets in the way of the relationship God offers and desires.
If the cross removes barriers between us and God, in some way it has to take care of these sins done against us as well. It has to be big enough and powerful enough for this.
I don’t know how everyone gets there. I don’t know a magic formula that makes it easy to remove that kind of barrier. I’m not a gifted counselor. I know there was to be a willingness to let God into the healing – but I probably won’t know how to get you there.
In spite of that, whether I can explain how it works or not, whether I know how to help you get there or not, I still believe the cross is the answer. I believe the cross takes care of it.
I am reminded of John Piper talking about Romans 8:32 being precious to him because the cross shows what length God has gone for us and therefore gives us the assurance that there is good in all the things the grievous things done to us.
“He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?”
From the cross, I know that all things work out for my good, for our good, for the glory of God, in spite of all the lesser evidence against this assurance.
This is a really important concept – we can be forgiven, but we can also forgive, because of the cross.
Miroslav Volf talks about this in Exclusion and Embrace: “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion without transposing the enemy from the sphere of the monstrous into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness.” His experience of this was in ethnic conflict (and the death of a brother) in Yugoslavia. But his understanding echoes yours – God’s grace is greater than my own sin, and the sin of my enemy. Thank you for the gracious reminder.