Pastoral Reflection: The Crux of the Matter
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Palm/Passion Sunday – March 16, 2008
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

When we say that we’ve come “to the crux of the matter,” we’re talking about the essential point or the heart of what is being discussed. The word ‘crux’ is from the Latin for cross. When we come to the core, the heart, the essential point we’ve come to the cross – and this is certainly the case when we talk about our Christian faith. Here we’re not using a metaphor or a simile, when we talk about the essence of Christian faith we’re left looking at the crux, at the cross. What the cross says to us powerfully, simply, profoundly is that God loves us, God has identified with us in Jesus Christ, and that God has taken our life, including our death, into God’s own life and brought about a profound transformation.

P. T. Forsyth, the English Congregational theologian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote a little book The Cruciality of the Cross; it has had a profound effect on me. Forsyth tells us that human beings are more than ‘consciousness,’ we’re also ‘conscience.’ That is, we don’t just know that we exist or that we think, but we’re also critical of ourselves. That’s how we can come to the concept of morality. Human beings are capable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. We’re able to judge ourselves and, as Forsyth says, we’re fearful of this critic, the conscience. We do all sorts of things to avoid or blind or sophisticate or even kill it. Still, we cannot escape the conscience. Forsyth wrote:

Conscience is the Word of God within us; and moral responsibility means responsibility before God, the living God, and Christ, His living Grace.

For there is no possibility of going to the bottom of the matter and leaving out Jesus Christ. This error of so many thinkers is a historic evasion. Christ was and is the conscience of mankind and of God. He called Himself man’s final judge. Was he deluded? He stands in the whole race as conscience does in each man. But He also means that the Eternal conscience is the Eternal love, that judgment is, in the heart of it, grace, that the judge is on our side and is our Redeemer. It is only love that can do justice, it is only grace that can right all wrong. The righteous Lord whom we cannot escape is our Saviour. Wrongs make far more sceptics than science; and the wrongs of history are being set right by a historic Redeemer. The moral malady of the race is mastered by the Saviour of the conscience. It is in history and in conscience that our hope lies. The conscience cries for forgiveness, and history brings it to the cross. There is the foundation of the soul and the security of the conscience, in the cross of history made ours in faith’s experience of mercy. We must all come at least not to rational conviction but to this insight and venture of faith. [p. 65]

Gild it as you will or encrust it with precious gems, the cross is still a starkly simple symbol. It carries none of the power or majesty of our national symbol, the eagle. Rather, it speaks to the triumph that can come over death itself when one places one’s self fully in God’s hands – as did the Christ. The cross then becomes the appropriate symbol for our Christian faith because it is a constant reminder that as consciousness and conscience we have hope, we have potential. As J. Barry Vaughn has put it, “The cross is the great ‘plus sign’ of creation. The cross brings together creation in one great sum. Heaven plus earth; divine plus human; Jew plus Gentile; slave plus free; women plus men – a divine equation whose result is so much more than the sum of its parts.” When we embrace this symbol and all it implies by living in faith, we experience the wonder of the sum greater than its parts.

We stand now at the entrance to the “great week,” “the Holy Week” in which we will recall and celebrate the events that led to the crux of the matter and through it to the Resurrection. I encourage you – no, I beg you, to take the time to experience a bit of what really matters, to come to the crux, the heart of the matter, which is nothing less than God’s heart opened in love for each one of us. In the midst of our rapidly changing and uncertain world there is one constant: God’s love and care for us. That is the crux of the matter and you are invited to experience it in a new, fresh, and personal way through the services of Holy Week.

Whatever we may go through, however we may fall short, the cross is the strong reminder of God’s constant love and care for us. Last week I could look out of the windows at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn Heights and see the space in the skyline where the World Trade Center had stood. Later there was occasion to drive past the construction going on at the site and afterwards I was reminded of a photograph of New York City firefighters and one of their chaplains standing in prayer by a cross that had been formed when the World Trade Center was destroyed. It spoke to me of hope, of the promise of peace, and the resilience of the human spirit when it acts in harmony with God.

Even at “ground zero” the cross carried the message of God’s will to love and reconciliation. The old hymn, “In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” makes the point. John Bowring wrote the words to that hymn while touring the orient. He was sailing past Macao viewing the remains of a city devastated by an earthquake. The steeple and cross of a mission church rose above both the ruined church and city. Bowring was moved to write, “in the cross of Christ I glory, towering o’er the wrecks of time.” So it is with each of us, with each of the ground zeros we have to face the cross towers over the wrecks of time if only we recognize and call out, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And that, that is the crux of the matter. Amen.