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.
