Today’s Reflection
The Cross as Revealing the Non-Violence of God
The cross of Christ is like a carefully cut diamond. Every time you turn it in the light you get a different sparkle. It means so many things and its depths can never be fully fathomed, always more meaning spills over. We can never get our minds around it, but, and we sense this, ultimately the cross is the deepest word that can ever be spoken about love.
How can one begin to unravel the multifarious levels of meaning carried by a cross? The best place to start is with God. What the cross tells us, more clearly than any other revelation, is that God is absolutely and utterly non-violent and that God’s vulnerability, which the cross invites us into, is a power for community with God and with each other.
We are forever connecting God to coercion, threat, guilt, reckoning, and to the idea that a power should somehow rise up and crush by force all that’s evil. That concept is the main reason why so many of us either fear God, hate God, try to avoid God, or are disappointed in God (“Why doesn’t God do something about the world?”.) But what scripture reveals about God, and this is seen full bloom on the cross, is that God is neither coercion, threat, guilt, nor the great avenger of evil and sin.
Rather God is love, light, truth, and beauty; a gentle, though persistent, invitation, that’s never a threat. God exists as an infinite patience that endures all things, not as a great avenger.
The cross reveals the power of God in this world, a power that is never the power of a muscle, a speed, a brilliance, a physical attractiveness, or a grace which simply leaves you no other choice but to acknowledge its superiority and bend your knee in obeisance. It’s the only power upon which love, and community can be created because it, and it alone, ultimately softens rather than breaks the heart.
The cross of Christ tells us that, at those moments of painful helplessness, when we can’t impress or overpower anyone, we are acting in a divine way, non-violently, and in that vulnerability lies the secret to our coming to love and community.
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