The one place in scripture at which we are brought fully face to face with the majesty of God is when we stand - or fall - at the foot of the cross. There are places where glory is presented in more conventional terms, as on the mountains of Sinai and the Transfiguration; but it is in the helpless and shattered body of the crucified Christ that we see, as nowhere else, what that glory truly is. Here we are drawn, challenged, convicted, changed by a love that calls us and claims us, even in the depths of our willfulness and sin.
Jesus says, "Except you come as little children, you shall not enter God's kingdom." Children have a capacity to delight in life, and a playful spirit, and a capacity to give and to receive love, that must rejoice the heart of God; but, more than that, children are dependent, and know they are.
It is the helplessness of the man who hangs on that cross, life draining from him, that - as we see what is really happening there - leads us to recognise and acknowledge our own childlike dependence on what only he can give us. Without him, our best endeavours are wasted; in him, a love divine meets with our own feeble efforts at love and transforms them, even as we are forced to face up to the impact of our own weakness and foolishness and sin.
As we gaze on the cross, what looks to us like a place of degradation, defeat and death is made by this great love into the only true royal throne, against which the finest and grandest of the royal thrones of earth are found wanting. And this man is hanging there both because of me and yet for me, instead of me. Praise the King of Glory.
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