The greatest error I needed to resolve in my thinking over the past few years was reducing the cross of Christ to a transaction. In the American Protestant world that formed me, the legal image could become the whole gospel. That reduction was the cancer. Scripture’s real language of debt, ransom, and sacrifice was not. The reduction distorted both the Father and the cross.
If all Christ did was pay a legal debt, the Father can begin to look like a vengeful despot and the cross like an account balance. It becomes easy to misunderstand the cosmic problem God is addressing. I empathize with atheists who were given this vision and walked away in anger.
It took me years to recover the wider tradition of the Fathers, in which the cross is not only a settled account but God’s victory and our healing. Once I saw that, I could not reduce the cross to a transaction again.
God came to unite himself to his creation, to suffer in our human nature and thereby transfigure it. When Jesus was transfigured on the mountain, it was not a display for his three closest disciples. It was a key to the way he works: divine glory does not avoid the road through suffering and death.
Evil is not a substance but a privation of the good. God is not blocked by it. In the Incarnation, the Son enters our wounded condition without becoming evil. By suffering and dying in the flesh, he transfigures the suffering that evil introduced. What the devil intended for evil, God meant for good. The very symbol of death became the tree of life.
I long to worship the God who did not remain distant from our pain. The Son truly suffered as man while the divine nature remained unchanged. I can now suffer with hope because my suffering can be joined to Christ’s and offered for his body, the Church. There he meets us on the cross and makes even suffering a means of grace.
Kern Keep 