The greatest error I needed to resolve in my thinking over the past few years was the mistake of seeing the cross of Christ as a transaction. This is common teaching in American Christianity, and removing it was like surgically removing cancer. I can’t overstate the damage this does to the soul.
If all Christ did was pay a legal debt, all kinds of evil ideas will start to oxidize downstream. It twists the image of the Father into a vengeful despot, cheapens the cross to be a sort of a bank you can swipe the sin credit card on, and misunderstands what problem God is dealing with on a cosmic scale. It’s easy to become embittered by this vision. I empathize with any atheists who have been pitched this vision and have walked away in anger.
It took me many years to recover the historical tradition of the fathers, the ancient teaching of the church. Once you see it, you will never return to a transactional cross again.
God came to unite himself to his creation, so that he could suffer with it, and thereby transfigure it. Transfiguration is what he does. When Jesus was transfigured atop the mountain, it wasn’t a random show off to his three best disciples. It was a hermeneutical key to explain his modus operandi.
The problem with evil is that God cannot touch it. By its definition, evil is not a thing, but the absence of a thing, the privation of God. If he cannot touch evil, he cannot get rid of it. How does he solve this dilemma? He becomes man, and joins himself to his creation. By suffering and dying on the cross, he transfigures, in his flesh, the very suffering introduced by evil itself. What the devil intended for evil God meant for good. The very symbol of death became the tree of life.
A suffering God is the God I long to worship. I can now suffer with joy, because in my suffering I can partake in union with God, who suffers alongside me and has blessed suffering as a means of his grace. There he joins us on the cross, and there we fill up what still remain in the suffering of Christ.
Kern Keep 