Good Friday and God's Covenant-Fulfilling Righteousness

 

Good Friday and God's Covenant-Fulfilling Righteousness

Good Friday and Easter are certainly the high water mark of the Christian ecclesiastical calendar, in that they celebrate the events that determine Christian identity and guarantee Christian hope. These do so because they constitute, as N. T. Wright so aptly put it more than thirty years ago, "the climax of the covenant" God made with Abraham and his “seed” to bless the entire world through him/them (Genesis 12, 15, 17).

Perhaps the greatest statement of the significance of the cross for manifesting God's saving covenant faithfulness (“righteousness”) was articulated, not surprisingly, by Paul the Apostle, in one of the most profound passages in his greatest letter:

But now, quite independently of the Law, though with the Law and prophets bearing witness to it, the righteousness of God has been manifested; it is effective through faith in Christ for all who have such faith—all, Jew and Gentile, without distinction. For all alike have sinned and fall short of God's glory, and are justified freely by his grace through his act of liberation in the person of Christ Jesus. For God publicly displayed him as the place of propitiation at his death, effective through faith. God meant by this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had passed over the sins of the past—to demonstrate his righteousness now in the present, so that he would be both just and the justifier of anyone who places faith in Jesus (Romans 3:21-26, Revised English Bible [revised JRM]).

For once, I am not interested in theological controversy. For that, consult the vast scholarly literature and the commentaries of, inter alia, Doug Moo, Tom Wright, Jimmy Dunn, and Beverly Gaventa. I simply want to focus all too briefly on what this text says about the salvation-historical and personal significance of the cross. First, with reference to salvation history, the cross was the means by which God “now” definitively enacted his “righteousness” by fulfilling his ancient covenant promise to bless the world despite the sinfulness and “faithlessness” (Romans 3:3) of the covenantally-designated rescuers, i.e., Abraham and his progeny. They, no less than the English, Irish, Chinese, or Indians, sinned and thus were in a state of declension from the divine "glory" humans were created to reflect (Genesis 1; Psalm 8). God's solution to this conundrum was to solve it himself through the vicarious, expiatory, propitiatory death of his Son, Jesus Messiah, the “seed of David” (Romans 1:3) and thus the ultimate Abrahamic "seed" and true Israelite (Galatians 3), who on the cross took sin's consequences upon himself, exhausting them and thereby enabling the blessings of the "age to come" to flow to all, Jew and Gentile alike, who place their faith in him.

Second—and here is where I personally have a stake in what Paul writes—at the cross Jesus bore the penal consequences of sin and suffered the effects of his Father's “wrath” ("propitiation" [much more needs to be said here in clarification, but that time is not now]) so that I could be liberated from sin ("redemption") and stand acquitted—justly!—before his judgment seat with the status as one of his covenant people ("justified").* This is a status to which I, a Scots-Irish American, have no ethnic, inherited right (cf. Ephesians 2:11-13) and, it goes without saying, could never earn through my own moral effort, but which is granted to me "freely" through faith in Christ alone. And that, as Martin Luther emphasized more than 500 years ago, means it is only through the unmerited, indeed incongruous (John Barclay) grace of God alone. Soli Deo Gloria!

May those of us who know Christ reflect worshipfully on these truths this Good Friday. And if anyone reads this who does not know him, consider the lengths God went to rescue humanity from its self-imposed plight, and bend your knee at the foot of the cross in thankful faith in him.

*In Romans 8:3-4, Paul asserts that by thus vicariously serving as a "sin offering" (peri hamartias; cf. Lev 5:6-7, 11; 16:3, 5, 9) "[God] condemned sin in [Jesus'] flesh"—not "God condemned Jesus," a rather significant difference—with the result that those who are justified ("There is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus" [Rom 8:1]) now are enabled to fulfill "the righteous requirement" (dikaiōma) of the Law. Hence "justification," in Paul's thought, is no mere legal fiction, as is so often caricatured, but an effectual verdict, because the sin that previously condemned the justified has itself been condemned and the Spirit given to internalize (cf. the promise of the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31!) the Law's demand.