Dear Friends in Christ,

Lent and Holy Week bring us to the foot of the cross. There, beneath the dying form of the murdered Jesus, we gather to be confronted with our complicity in this most heinous of crimes and to hear through Jesus' dying lips,

‘Father, forgive them...’.

Martin Luther called this proclamation of God’s judgement and forgiveness , hidden within that bloody event, the theology of the cross.

Luther set his theology opposite the theology of glory which the Roman Catholic Church at that time accepted and which continues to be the default  religion of humankind.

The theology of glory leads humans up the ladder of self-transcendence. It presumes to stand before God and strike a bargain on the basis of moral achievement in fulfilling the Law, whereas the theology of the cross views humans as being called by the Gospel message to live as we were meant to live within the obligations and confines of creaturely existence.

The message of the cross destroys prideful, willful human self-confidence so that now, instead of wanting to transcend ourselves, we live out our actual human life with all the accompanying ambiguities, joys and sorrows, trusting that God alone will bring the promised future. Such a person has been called by the Gospel from the self-willed bondage of moral and religious activism to the freedom of a down-to-earth, living  faith in God’s promises.

Three days after His execution God raised Jesus from the dead thereby confirming God's own decision to be merciful to sinners and carrying Jesus prayer for forgiveness into the living present.

To kneel at the foot of the cross is to live in both the shadow of God's hiddeness while at the same time being gripped by the power of the Holy Spirit as we are called, day by day, through God's forgiveness, from death into life.

To confess the Easter faith, therefore, is to paradoxically cling to the hiddeness of God at the foot of the cross. Believers know this. For in the "very dying form of  One who suffered there for me" we meet the God who loves us as we are and who is determined to include us in His promised future.

grace to you,

Pastor Mark Anderson