The great contradiction

One of the remarkable aspects of the Apostles’ Creed is how it moves directly from the Incarnation of Christ to His death and resurrection. Given that we have four Gospels replete with stories of His actions and teachings, the Creed’s omission of these is striking. And yet in focusing on the bookends of Christ’s ministry, it also points the church to those matters that should most fill our minds with wonder. That the infinite, eternal, immutable, and impassible God should in the person of the Son take frail, finite, vulnerable human flesh sets the stage for those actions and teachings and sets them in a context that calls forth wonder and praise from anyone who meditates for a moment upon them. Jesus is not merely a great teacher or miracle worker. His teachings and His miracles take us to the very heart of the Trinity, as He is nothing less than God manifest in the flesh.

If the Incarnation sets the stage, then the cross and the empty tomb are the veritable explosion of God’s revelation into this world of darkness. They are the climactic moments of the human life of Christ that began in Bethlehem. On the cross, the power of the Son taking flesh reaches its apex as Christ reaches the nadir of His incarnate existence—Death, that enemy that awaits us all, claims Him and overwhelms Him, yet He mysteriously breaks its power in that very moment. And if His divinity is always hidden in flesh to the eyes of the world, at Calvary it is completely buried under the outward contradiction of His horrifying death on a cross. Yet in that moment of horror, the beauty of God’s grace is revealed: There is nowhere so deep and so dark to which we can fall that God Himself will not reach down to us and draw us back to Himself.

This is of singular importance for the way we think about both God and life. Paul, reflecting on this moment, will argue that the cross is the great contradiction of human expectations about God. It is a moral offense, and that in two senses: that God should die for the sins of others, and that we are so filthy that we need another to die for us. And it is an intellectual offense: that the immortal God should die, that power is made perfect in weakness, that the way to life is through death—you name any human expectation of God, and the cross will contradict it.

The cross exposes human righteousness and human wisdom for what they are: plausible counterfeits that lead only to our destruction. But in this—in shattering human intellectual and moral pretensions—it also reveals to us Christ as Savior, one whose person and work is fully sufficient to address all the evils that affect us, those that come at us from the fallen world and those that dwell in our fallen hearts. And in so doing, it drives us to praise this God whose ways are past knowing and yet who has mysteriously acted to save in the most unexpected way possible.

And, of course, Calvary is not the final word. Holy Saturday, when Jesus is held for a time in the icy grip of death, underscoring the seriousness of His fight against the final enemy, and then Easter Sunday, when He rises triumphant over all His foes, point us to the reality behind His real suffering and apparent defeat on the cross. Death was the path He had to tread in order to gain full entrance into His kingdom. And that is why Paul is able to declare that all of the sufferings and contradictions that marked his own ministry were but a light momentary affliction in comparison to the eternal weight of glory that is to come. Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection do not mean that our sufferings and death are not terrifying realities. Far from it. Who of us is not terrified at the prospect of our own mortality? But they do mean that we will ultimately see them in eternity as comparatively trivial.

This is one reason why reciting the Apostles’ Creed this Easter weekend should be so powerful. It is not an exhaustive statement of Christ’s person and work. But it does focus our minds on the most important elements of the gospel: God became flesh to die for us; but His death, the last enemy, was not the last word. And neither shall ours be.