The Nearness of the Cross

As Lent deepens, the Church draws closer to the place where the love of God and the sin of the world meet face to face.

As Lent moves toward its final weeks, the tone of the season begins to change. The liturgical themes of repentance, humility, and reflection that have quietly shaped the past weeks start to gather around a single focal point. The Church’s attention turns more directly toward the cross. This shift is not accidental; the entire rhythm of Lent is designed to prepare us for the events of Holy Week. Every reading, every prayer, every moment of reflection slowly yet purposefully directs our attention toward the place where the mission of Christ reaches its fulfillment.

The cross is never far from the center of the Christian faith, and yet during this season in particular, we are invited to approach it more deliberately and to look more closely at what happened there and consider what it means for us. This isn’t a comfortable thing to do. The cross confronts us with truths we would rather avoid. It reveals the depth of human sin with a clarity that can be unsettling. The suffering of Christ is not some abstract theological concept; it is the consequence of the brokenness of sin that runs through the entire human story.

The Gospel does not allow us to pretend that sin is a small problem. When Jesus speaks about His coming death, He does so with remarkable clarity. “The Son of Man must suffer many things,” He tells His disciples, “and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed” (Luke 9:22). These words do not describe some unfortunate accident in history. They tell us of the deliberate path that Christ chooses in order to redeem the world.

Yet even the disciples struggle to understand what He means! Peter, who has just confessed Jesus as the Christ, recoils at the thought of a suffering Messiah. He cannot imagine that the One sent by God would accomplish His mission through rejection, suffering, and death. In response Jesus speaks words that reveal how radically different God’s purposes are from human expectations: “You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Mark 8:33). Peter’s instinct to avoid the cross runs deep within our hearts as human beings. We much prefer a version of faith that emphasizes victory without sacrifice, and glory without suffering. We would rather imagine salvation arriving through strength or triumph than through suffering and death. The idea that God would redeem the world through weakness and humiliation seems almost impossible to accept.

But this is precisely what the Gospel proclaims to us, that the cross stands at the center of God’s plan, not in spite of its weakness but because of it. What appears to the world to be defeat instead becomes the moment when sin and death are overcome. What appears to be abandonment becomes the place where God’s mercy is revealed most clearly. This is why the apostle Paul can say something so startling to us: “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). The message of the cross contradicts our expectations about how God should act, and overturns our assumptions about power and success.

“What appears to be defeat is the very place where God accomplishes salvation.”

The truth is that God reveals Himself in the suffering of Christ, not in the ways that we would expect. What appears hidden becomes the place where God is most clearly known. God reveals Himself in the opposite of what we expect. For this reason, the Church never moves past the cross; it remains the interpretive center of the Christian faith. It tells us the truth about our sin. It shows us that human brokenness runs deeper than we often realize, than we want to admit. It shows us that no amount of moral effort or spiritual discipline on our part could repair the damage on our own. Through the cross, the Adam and Eve of our flesh are utterly condemned and we are shown that the only way to redemption is nothing less than the self-giving sacrifice of the Son of God.

But that is not all that the cross tells us. The cross tells us the truth about God, about who He is and how He views humanity. It reveals a love that refuses to abandon the world even when the world rejects and murders Him. Moved with great compassion, Christ does not back away from suffering, but rather He rushes directly into it. He steps into suffering, sharing in our burdens but bearing them perfectly. He fulfills the weight of the condemning Law perfectly, and He bears the weight of all the sin of humanity so that we sinners might be forgiven and be made holy before the Father.

This is why the approach of Holy Week is not simply a historical remembrance, looking back at a single event in time. It is an invitation to see again the depth of God’s mercy and recognize that the redemptive work of the cross spans across all time, is the center of human history even as it stretches forward and back with redemptive power to call us to the presence of God by virtue of the sacrifice of the Son. As the cross draws near, we are reminded that our hope rests entirely in what Christ has done there. The Christian life does not begin with our devotion or our commitment. We don’t have to make ourselves clean to take hold of the promises of God. The new life God offers us begins with the self-giving love of the Savior who chose the path of suffering for our sake, who makes us clean that we might enter into the presence of the Almighty made righteous by His blood.

The Lutheran Confessions speak about this work of Christ with remarkable clarity. The Augsburg Confession teaches that we are justified before God not by our own merits but freely for Christ’s sake (AC IV). Everything about the Christian life flows from this central reality: that Christ has accomplished what we could never accomplish for ourselves. It is a gift, nothing less. A gift that we receive by faith, offered by grace, paid for by the blood of Christ Jesus.

And so, the cross approaches not as a symbol of defeat but as the place where our salvation is secured. As Lent continues, the Church invites us to look at the cross honestly, to see both the cost of sin and the depth of God’s mercy. The closer we come to Good Friday, the more clearly we begin to understand what Christ has done for us. Soon the story will reach its darkest moment. But even now we know something the disciples did not yet understand: that the suffering that lies ahead will not be the end of the story. The cross is drawing near…and through that cross, the salvation of the world will be accomplished.