I just finished reading The Cross of Christ by John Stott. (The March assignment in the Book of the Month Challenge). OK, OK, I’m a little behind, but not to worry… I’m on vacation and hoping to use the leisure time to make up the difference.
It turns out that this book was a much slower read than expected – not because it was academically nuanced or boring, but rather because it was so rich and thoughtful. There is a reason it takes hours to dine at a fine Steak House and only minutes to scarf down a burger at McDonalds. John Stott is a master chef for those interested in real food for the soul and The Cross of Christ is a five-star Restaurant. But if I were to read it again, I would prefer to do it in a small group taking a chapter a week.
To give you a taste, here are portions of a section entitled “The Pain of God” from Chapter 13: Suffering and Glory. In this chapter, Stott explains how the Cross helps us in our suffering:
The cross of Christ is the proof of God’s solidary love, that is, of his personal, loving solidarity with us in our pain. For the real sting of suffering is not misfortune itself, nor even the pain of it or the injustice of it, but the apparent Godforsakenness of it. Pain is endurable, but the seeming indifference of God is not. Sometimes we picture him lounging, perhaps dozing, in some celestial deck chair, while the hungry millions starve to death. We think of him as an armchair spectator, almost gloating over the world’s suffering, and enjoying his own insulation from it…
…It is this terrible caricature of God that the cross smashes to smithereens. We are not to envisage him on a deck chair, but on a cross. The God who allows us to suffer, once suffered himself in Christ, and continues to suffer with us and for us today. Since the cross was a once-for-all historical event, in which God in Christ bore our sins and died our death because of his love and justice, we must not think of it as expressing an eternal sin-bearing in the heart of God. What Scripture does give us warrant to say, however, is that God’s eternal holy love, which was uniquely exhibited in the sacrifice of the cross, continues to suffer with us in every situation in which it is called forth.
Stott then argues against the “impassability of God.” This is a doctrine that teaches that God is incapable of suffering and therefore experiences no emotion. In this section, Stott references Japanese Lutheran scholar Kazoh Kitamori.
[Kitamori] wrote his remarkable book Theology of the Pain of God in 1945, not long after the first atomic bombs had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was inspired, he tells us, by Jeremiah 31:20, where God describes his heart as “yearning” or “pained” for Ephraim, even as “broken.” “The heart of the gospel was revealed to me as the ‘pain of God,’” he writes. To begin with, God’s anger against sin gives him pain. “This wrath of God is absolute and firm. We may say that the recognition of God’s wrath is the beginning of wisdom.” But God loves the very people with whom he is angry. So “the ‘pain’ of God reflects his will to love the object of his wrath.” It is his love and his wrath that together produce his pain. For here, in Luther’s arresting phrase, is “God striving with God.” “The fact that this fighting God is not two different gods but the same God causes his pain.” The pain of God is a “synthesis of his wrath and love” and is “his essence.” It was supremely revealed in the cross. For “the ‘pain of God’ results from the love of the One who intercepts and blocks his wrath towards us, the One who himself is smitten by his wrath.” This is strikingly bold phraseology. It helps us to understand how God’s pain continues whenever his wrath and love, his justice and mercy, are in tension today.
This ‘pain of God’ is like the pain of a Judge who must declare his own child guilty and then determine his sentence. If he cared nothing for the criminal, there would be no pain. But it is an excruciating necessity to administer justice to a sinner whom you love. This is what we are as Christians – sinners loved by God. The Cross wondrously displays the depths of God’s pain and its resolution in Christ. Praise God, what an amazing message is Christ and him crucified!