Of Martin Luther’s many important contributions to the church, and there are many, one of the more significant is his theology of the cross. In this, we are led to understand that the only way we can understand who God is and how God saves is through Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross. In contrast, the theology of glory pretends that our reason, human power, can lead us to know God.
In my quarter-century of ordained ministry, my newsletter columns for the month of Easter have always focused on the Resurrection, the culmination of God’s saving power. It is God’s final triumph over death and evil without which the cross loses its meaning. In raising Christ from the dead, God claims the final “Amen.”
This year, different in so many respects from any other we’ve known, is different in this way as well. As I write this, it feels like a Holy Saturday season, a time in-between. When we don’t quite know what is happening, when the world feels turned on its head, when everything we taken for granted feels less certain. Which is exactly what the theology of the cross is all about.
Our reason isn’t enough to understand all that is going on. Thanks be to God that reason, in science and medicine, are gifts of God we’ve been given to protect and save so many. But reason doesn’t fully explain why we panic buy toilet paper or guns. Or why we sing from balconies and give money to strangers.
The disciples, in that time between death and resurrection, locked themselves away because they couldn’t understand what was happening and they were afraid of what was going to happen. By God’s grace, while it we are living Holy Saturday now, in all of its turbulence, we know Sunday is coming, we know the stone will be rolled away. How the future will unfold, we do not know. But we do not grieve as those who have no hope.
Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things
Whoever has God lacks nothing;
God alone is enough.
~Teresa of Avila
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