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Meet Father KempGood Friday – 2 April 2010
Voltaire once said, “Ask a toad what is beauty…; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.”[1] Voltaire’s sentiment, that beauty is relative to the beholder, is shared by many people today who believe that beauty is merely relative, an appearance that gives the viewer a pleasing pleasure. It is a sentiment, however, that is shattered by Good Friday. No individual nor culture would call Jesus’ execution beautiful. There is no visual beauty in an emaciated figure hanging like a slab of flesh at the meat market upon a roughly hewn wood cross. There is nothing beautiful in the sound of a man coughing and gurgling his own blood as he slowly suffocates. There is nothing beautiful about the scent of excrement and blood spilled upon the ground. There is nothing aesthetically beautiful about Calvary, yet the cross of Jesus Christ is the ground of beauty, it is the archetype of all things beautiful. The cross proves true the saying, “Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.”[2]
The ancient philosophers believed beauty to “consist in the proportions of the parts.”[3] On the cross, we see the most profound and humbling proportions of parts that ever occured and we see these proportions in the paradoxes held together by the blood of Jesus Christ. There are two consistencies of proportions, a human, and a divine proportion and these two proportions should drive us to our knees in awe, wonder, and repentance.
George Herbert expressed the human proportion in his poem Sacrifice in these words:
O all ye who passe by, behold and see;
Man stole the fruit, but I must climbe the tree;
The tree of life to all, but onely me:
Was ever grief like mine?
Adam, a human man, climbed a tree in the Garden of Eden in a flagrant and willful act of rebellion against God and brought upon himself and all his children death. Jesus, a human man, climbed a tree on Calvary in a purposeful and willful act of obedience to God and brought upon himself death, but to all his heirs this act brought life. Adam’s disobedience that brought death was proportionally countered by Jesus’ obedience that brought life, life through the death of Jesus. This is as St. Paul said in Romans 5, “For it, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Consequently, Just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.” The cross is beautiful because on this executioner stake, a human man, Jesus Christ, proportionally countered and defeated the sin of Adam, a human man, who brought death to mankind as George Herbert said:
Betwixt two theeves I spend my utmost breath,
As he that for some robberie suffereth.
Alas! What have I stolen from you? Death.
St. Paul speaks of the second consistency of proportion, the Divine proportion, in Romans 3:26, “God presented [Jesus] as a sacrifice of atonement…he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” One of God’s attributes is justice, He will seek out all those who have done wrong and give them their just punishment as St. Paul said, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” (Romans 1:18) or as the prophet Jeremiah recorded, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. When they drink it, they will stagger and go mad because of the sword I will send among them.’” (Jeremiah 25:15) Our sin, both our actual sins and our inherited sin from Adam, deserve God’s wrathful punishment. God is just, he cannot be anything but just, and he will punish our sins. But thanks be to God, that while we were powerless and still sinners, God Son, died for us and took upon himself God’s wrathful punishment. The sacrifice of Jesus, God’s Son, made God both Just and the Justifier, He is the punisher of sin and he is the sin bearer and this proportionality saves those who have put their faith in Jesus Christ, from God’s wrath, not because God’s forgets about his Justice but because God has already poured out his justice upon the cross. Indecently, this is what the word ‘propitiation,’ which we hear in the Comfortable Words means, that the wrath of God has been placated when it was poured out upon Jesus Christ at Calvary.
A very wise person once said, “[The cross] embodies simultaneously justice and mercy, death and resurrection, defeat and triumph, violence and hospitality, joy and sorrow.”[4] The cross is the foundation of beauty because nothing else is as consistently proportionate; nothing else holds together the paradoxes of life like the cross of Jesus Christ. Emerson said, “The beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary.”[5] This brings us to our last proportion, our last paradox. If we are to escape from the Just wrath of God, the cross is absolutely necessary and beautiful. However, what makes the cross beautiful, graciously beautiful, is that it was not necessary for God. God did not have to forgive us. Out of his gracious love for us not out of necessity, God the Son became incarnate as a man, was crucified, died and bore on our behalf the weight of our sins and the justice of God’s wrath. For us the cross is necessary, but for God it was an unnecessary gift of his love and that which God has done freely out of His love, He gives freely to all who believe.
[1] Voltaire, “Beauty” Philoshophical Dictionary 1764.
[2] Jean Anouilh, Becket, 1959, 1.
[3] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 162.
[4] Danielle Davey. Danielle also provided those wonder words from George Herbert!
[5] Emerson, “The Poet, Essays: Second Series, 1884.
