But all is not darkness. The early Christians saw something more. If the cross drove home to them with terrible acuteness what men do to God, it also drove home to them with burning clarity what God does to men. He reconciles them to himself. The cross is reconciliation. And this time, let us reverse our procedure. Let us first try to see what is involved in this difficult notion of "reconciliation" as it applies to our situation, and after that look at the way it was understood by the early Christians.
"Reconciliation" is not a word we ordinarily use in the high school corridor, the business office, or the living room. And yet the idea of reconciliation is important to the high school corridor, the business office, the living room. We have all seen the "lone wolf," the boss-nobody-likes, the wallflower. These are people who are isolated, separated from other people, and this is wrong. What is needed in such situations is to have the broken relationship restored. And this restoring of a broken relationship is reconciliation.
Now let's be more specific:
You and Joe have had a fight. Furthermore, it was clearly your fault. And your problem is, how can you get back on good terms with Joe? How, in other words, can reconciliation be brought about? Clearly it cannot be "bought" by you. It will not be enough to give Joe an expensive gift (though such a gesture may not be out of place). It will not even be enough to go "all out" and be nicer to Joe than you normally are, since "being nicer than you need to be" is a contradiction in terms when friends are involved.
The fact of the matter is that the broken relationship will never be healed just from your end. Even to throw yourself on Joe's mercy and ask his forgiveness is not quite the whole story. For the decisive action must come from the one who has been wronged -- from Joe. He must be willing to forgive, and so bridge the gap which your wrongdoing has created.
This may be a hard thing for him to do. He will have to humble himself, swallow his pride, and perhaps even suffer in order to demonstrate actively that he bears you no ill will and desires only your friendship.
This does no more than give us a faint hint and clue about the broken relationship between God and ourselves and how it is restored. You should be able to make the necessary connection. We are likewise separated from God, and it is the result of our wrongdoing, not his. We cannot amass credits before God by doing "more than we ought to," since there is no limit to the extent to which we ought to love God. The decisive action must be by him. And the Bible tells us that the decisive action has been taken by him, that he comes to meet us in Jesus Christ in an act of outgoing, reconciling love. And the cross, quite specifically and quite concretely, shows us that love "costs," that God loves enough to pay the price of the cross that we may be restored to one another. Our job is to accept this gift which we do not deserve.
Suppose, now, that you are a first century Christian. You need, as you see it, to be reconciled with God. The broken relationship needs restoring. And you discover that Paul has compressed the whole thing into one burning statement: "In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself" (II Cor. 5: 19). And this speaks to your situation! For you know that you can't do the reconciling. Nothing you can do is enough to "make up" to God for the wrong you have done. And now you know that God does the reconciling, and that he does it "in Christ." And as you are aware of Christ, and see him now as God's mighty act of reconciliation, something else becomes apparent to you.
You come to see that reconciling love of this sort will be suffering love, suffering love endured on behalf of someone else -- what is called "vicarious suffering." And then you recall those "Suffering Servant" poems in the latter part of Isaiah. You remember that in them a servant, who was not clearly identified, took upon himself voluntarily the suffering that should have been meted out to his tormentors. They came to realize what he had done, and they said:
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned every one to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. ( Isa. 53: 4-6)
That's it! As you ponder this message, you find in it a wonderful description of what is true for you as you gaze at the cross of Christ. This same thing is true of him: he has suffered on your behalf. He has been willing to pay the cost of your wrongdoing, and he has done this voluntarily -- out of love. He has broken down the barriers between himself and you, barriers that you erected. He has done the reconciling, and it is up to you simply to accept it.
We can never penetrate fully into the mystery of the reconciliation between God and man. But we can at least see that at the very heart of all things is a God of suffering love. We can have the overpowering realization that God has paid us the almost intolerable compliment of loving us that much. He has offered us himself.
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