Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ left us with a final command before He took His leave of our planet earth and returned to His heavenly home. He told His disciples, “Go out into the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” (St. Mark 16, v.15). It is therefore a command we must clearly obey and gladly perform, never mind how hard it is for us to gain a hearing in today’s obstinate, ignorant and rebellious society.
The problem for us lies in what we actually proclaim. The historic facts are recorded in all four Gospels and summarised in the two Catholic Creeds we use each Sunday. These must be the essential starting points for our proclamation of the Gospel, but do we tell people what these facts actually mean in terms of the salvation He has brought us?
There has been a recent tendency in certain quarters to making a badge of honour out of proclaiming only one side of the true meaning of the cross. Jesus did indeed satisfy the wrath of God on Calvary’s Hill when He took on His innocent shoulders the Divine punishment for our sins – and the sins of the whole world – but this is not the whole story by any means.
There is another significance to what the Lord achieved on the cross. It is His precious blood that flowed from the cruel wounds to His body which physically and literally washes away our sins. God incarnate actually allowed this to happen to Himself during those dark hours He suffered during His dying agony on that so aptly-named Good Friday. It was so that He could present us clean, spotless and without sin to the Father on Judgement Day.
This presentation of the cross will be inevitably horrifying, graphic and totally arresting. It should therefore be the main thrust of our Gospel preaching. The immense love of God is here exposed for all to see, because it is the very life blood of God Himself that flows out from His innocent body and washes away all our sins, however grievous they may be. “When I am lifted up I will draw all people to Myself,” says Jesus. This side of the proclamation is the side that will indeed draw sinners. “Such love!” says the modern worship song to a world that no longer knows real love, but is literally desperate to discover what it really is.
In Victorian times Edward Caswall translated from an unknown Italian source these words which put it all so brilliantly:
Glory be to Jesus,
Who in bitter pains
Shed for me His life blood
From His sacred veins.
Blest through endless ages
Be the precious stream,
Which from endless torment
Did the world redeem.
In response to this supreme sacrifice, another Victorian, Bishop Walsham How of Stepney and Wakefield wrote these amazingly evangelistic words:
But even could I see Him die
I could but see a little part
Of that great love, which like a fire,
Is always burning in His heart.
It is most wonderful to know
His love for me, so free and sure,
But it’s more wonderful to see
My love for Him so faint and poor.
It is worth noting, in passing, that Mrs. C.F. Alexander wrote her hymn on the cross as she was looking out of her husband’s Londonderry Deanery windows at her green hill.
She wrote:
He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven
Saved by His precious blood.
There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin:
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven, and let us in.
Mrs. Alexander’s “green hill” is now covered by the Bogside council estate, scene of so much shooting, bloodshed and violence during the recent “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. How vivid a Gospel illustration is that!
We live in an age which operates through the visual and it is primarily through the visual that people will be drawn to the cross and to the Saviour who died there. His gracious arms are permanently outstretched on the horizontals in welcome to all those who so desperately seek God’s forgiveness, peace and understanding. This looks to be the main thrust for evangelism today.
However, those who make so much of what is called “substitutionary atonement” are by no means wrong. It is, after all, what St. Paul teaches us about the significance of the crucifixion in Romans and his many other epistles. It is a forensic and legalistic aspect of the Lord’s achievement, naturally suited to a pharisee like Paul, with the intellectual and law-based nature of his upbringing, living in an age where death was the penalty for nearly all wrongdoing. It is only totalitarian regimes like China and North Korea that still practise it widely today.
Perhaps it is not unfair to say that this interpretation of the crucifixion makes most sense to the professional and educated classes, whereas it is not as universally grasped as is the visual one. Substitutionary atonement is the second aspect of the cross that will come to us with time and increasing Christian experience, as we continue to ponder our own sinful natures, the magnitude of the gulf between the Father and sinful humanity and the only bridge that can span this abyss, which is our Lord Jesus Christ on His cross.
