Boasting in the Cross: Sermon delivered at a liturgical welcome by the Diocese of Newcastle

Archbishop Peter Jensen | 10 July 2002

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Introduction

“May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14)

Christianity boasts in the cross of Christ. Christian buildings display the cross: that is how they are known even in street directories. Christian graves often display the cross. War memorials use the cross. Christians often wear a cross. The class rooms of many Catholic schools display the cross. We are sealed with the sign of the cross in baptism. The greatest hymns of Christendom are based on the cross. The cross adorns our banners and distinguishes our processions. The most solemn day of the church’s year is an extended meditation on the cross. The Holy Communion is centred especially on the cross. Of the many symbols connected with Christianity there is none so pervasive, so powerful, so instantly recognisable as the cross. Christianity boasts in the cross.

This is an amazing fact, an astonishing fact.

It is not that we simply remember the death of Jesus Christ. That would be surprising and noteworthy after all these years, but not amazing. It would tell us that a great human being had passed this way.

It is that we remember the cross, that is the peculiar manner of the death of Jesus, that is amazing. To gather in something of the shock of this, we could compare it with a modern execution. What if you saw a lady wearing a miniature electric chair around her neck? Or a tiny syringe? What if Christian buildings were designated in the street directory with icons of a gallows? What if in the most prominent places of our buildings we placed a guillotine? You would be shocked. It is macabre, to say the least. Maybe you are even shocked to hear me suggest it. And yet a cross is worse than any of those.

Executions are brutal and horrible events, but crucifixion was the worst of the horrors that human beings have inflicted on each other. The very name ‘cross’ was an obscenity, not to be uttered in society. Frankly, our attempts to portray the cross visually are all lies, because nothing could convey the awful horror of the actual event.

So, to remember the cross of Jesus is amazing: it tells us that someone greater than any human being has passed this way; so great is he that he has transformed the worst into the best. But Christians do not simply remember the cross; we boast in the cross, and that it amazing and astonishing. Thus the Bible says: ‘May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.’; Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong, visited Macao in 1852 and saw the ruins of a massive cathedral built by the Portugese. Above the ruins, defying all, stood a great bronze cross. Inspired by what he saw, the Governor wrote the words of a famous hymn:

In the cross of Christ I glory,
Towering o’er the wrecks of time,
All the light of endless story,
Gathers round its head sublime.

And yet all this focus on the cross in art or liturgy or speech or hymns only reflects how things ought to be; does it reflect personal and church reality? Can you say, can I say, can we say, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”?

The Apostle Paul wrote these words to a church which was no longer centred on the cross of Jesus. They had been diverted by the world and by the force of events that had snatched away their original faith and left them in grave spiritual danger. His words of warning to them are amongst the most urgent in the New Testament. Paul saw them as in a perilous situation, with their salvation itself at stake. He did not spare their feelings, nor did he spare the reputations of those who had led them into this danger, including the apostle Peter.

What we must understand is how powerful were the forces that had led them astray and how easy it is for us to be in exactly the same peril. And — be warned — one of the chief dangers is religion itself.

To understand what was — and is — at stake, think of the word that he uses: boasting.

Boasting

Boasting is more than bragging, more than being conceited. You may be a very quiet and even modest person, yet you may have a boast. Indeed, almost certainly you do. Your boast is what you glory in, what you exalt in, what you trust in, what you have confidence in. Often it is linked to your identity as a human being, what makes you as you are; who you think you are. It is frequently your face to the world; the uniform you put on to show the world who you are. Some of us literally wear uniforms so that the world may identify us; the danger is when we boast or glory in the uniforms.

You may boast in your family; you may boast in your pedigree; you may boast in your education; you may boast in your position; you may boast in your reputation; you may boast in your wealth; you may boast in your material circumstances; you may boast in your prowess in some activity; you may boast in your physical strength; you may boast in your intellect; you may boast in your moral achievements; you may boast in your religious observances.

Of course such things as family, education, strength and even wealth are not bad in themselves. It is when they become our faith, our definition of ourselves, that they become spiritually dangerous. It is then that we find that we have put our trust in such things before man and before God; we think that others should honour us for our achievements or status; we believe that they set us apart from others. It is what the Bible calls, ‘boasting in the flesh’ or boasting in the world.

Let me mention two such dangerous boasts in particular. First, there is the boast or trust in human strength, physical or intellectual. This is very common in our community. Men and women feel such confidence in their own capacities that they have no time for God. They simply believe that they do not need him. Life is satisfying, rich, enjoyable without him. In fact, it is better without God, because then you do not have God telling you what to do in your life. Sometimes this is dressed up in a physical robustness which says that ‘with my health and wealth and strength, God is not someone I need think about’. Sometimes this is dressed up in and intellectual way, as if to say that ‘we do not need God to explain the world and we have disproved his existence satisfactorily’. Only the weak of brain and spirit need God. And so we boast in ourselves, in our own humanity, in our own resources.

The second boast is even more perilous. It is the boast of the religious or moral person, the one who does believe in God. This person says that they are acceptable to God in the strength of their spiritual and moral achievements. Perhaps it is a religious family that they are trusting in; perhaps it is a lifetime of church-going; perhaps even a clerical collar. In fact it was this second type of boast that Paul was combating in his letter to this church. They were being led astray by religion.

Boasting in the world

To understand this, it is time to turn our attention to the second part of this extraordinary verse: ‘May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.’ He does not merely boast in the death of Jesus: he boasts in the power of the death of Jesus. The cross has accomplished great things in his life; through the death of Jesus, he is a new man. The cross has killed him, and now he is (verse 15) a new creation.

Who was Paul before the cross of Jesus made him a new man? He was a very religious Rabbi. Indeed he excelled in religion, and not just any old religion; it was the religion he found in the Bible. But like many people before and since, he took the religion he found in the Bible and turned it on its head. For him, as for many others, religion was about God and God’s grace; but it was also about human achievement in the moral realm, about obedience to the ten commandments, about reward for work done. His hope was in God, but it was not only in God, it was in human good works as well.

But God taught Paul a huge lesson and one that we have to learn also. He taught him that no human achievement was enough; that even the best are far below the standards of God. He taught him that family pedigree, religious ritual, educational attainment, practical zeal — all the things which we foolishly believe will save us — are of no use. Indeed God taught him to regard them as garbage. He taught him that all they did was cut him off from others who are just as needy but lacked his apparent attainments.

They made him foolishly proud before God and others.

The new man who was Paul then began to reach out to those who did not have his credentials. That is why he said these famous words: ‘There is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female: for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ (3:28). God’s method of saving us is not by our effort in reaching him, but by his effort in reaching us. It is through the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. As far as the cross is concerned, there are no super-heroes, no spiritual giants, no moral high-flyers, no saints, no religious aristocracy. We are all on level ground here. The Archbishop and the whore have exactly the same credentials for acceptance, and the whore may have the better chance because she does not have much pride left. You have a stark choice; when it comes to acceptance by God, you either boast of your attainments and hope that they may be enough, or you boast in the cross. There is no third route.

Paul was exasperated with the church of his day because they could not see this. But we can be sympathetic. What had happened was that persecution of Christians had broken out. There was a safe place for the original Jewish Christians to hide in. If they went back to being a variation of the Jewish religion, they could still believe in Jesus, but they would be spared the persecution.

Furthermore, if they could get the new non-Jewish believers to accept the Jewish law with its emphasis on human attainment, they too could be spared the persecution. But Paul could see a great cost in this. If it were so easy to be saved, why did Jesus come? Specifically, why did Jesus die on the cross? Paul saw that the death of Jesus had the effect of doing away with all human religious systems for human boasting, including the use of the old covenant law. He called these things ‘the elemental spirits of the world’ and he said that they enslaved human beings instead of freeing them. Thus the call to compromise, to go back to the religion of grace and works he saw as attacking the cross. That is why he put the choice for us in such clear terms.

The cross of Christ has a powerful and transforming effect. It is the means by which we die to the world. The world has its standards, its rewards, its beliefs. We can be successful players in the values of this world. We can even learn all about it from our parents and our churches. But until we accept God’s valuation of us — that our achievements are worth nothing, but that we are worth dying for — we will remain our old lost selves, impressive perhaps, happy perhaps, confident perhaps, but lost nonetheless. Only by dying to the world, so that the world is dead to you and you are dead to the word, can the cross transform you into the man or woman God wants you to be.

Samuel Zwemer, a great missionary among the Muslims, wrote this: “If the Cross of Christ is anything to the mind, it is surely everything — the most profound reality and the sublimest mystery. One comes to realise that literally all the wealth and glory of the gospel centres here. The Cross is the pivot as well as the centre of New Testament thought. It is the exclusive mark of the Christian faith, the symbol of Christianity and its guiding point .” (Zwemer wrote ‘cynosure’.)The Scottish theologian James Denney echoed this thought: “For the modern mind, therefore, as for the ancient, the attraction and the repulsion of Christianity are concentrated in the same point. The cross of Christ is man’s only glory or it is his final stumbling block.”

Conclusion

Christianity boasts in the cross. All our art, liturgies, symbols point to this fact; more importantly, so does the New Testament and so do the lives of God’s people. But the church now, as in its earliest days, is always caught debating the matter; querying whether the good news can be quite so good as it seems; asking whether it is not by human effort as well as by God’s grace that we are saved. When we debate this, the cross fades in importance, our attention is diverted elsewhere. Then we may sing, ‘In the cross of Christ I glory.’ but the words are only words.

But the effect of the cross is decisive for us. As we trust in Christ’s work on the cross, the world is crucified to us and we are crucified to it. All human boasting and pomp is put to death. All we can do is put our trust there. Humanly speaking, surely no one has put it better than Isaac Watts:

When I survey the wondrous cross,
Where the young prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ, my God,
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to his blood.

See from his head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down,
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

His dying crimson, like a robe,
Spreads o’er his body on the tree:
Then I am dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small,
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.