Made at the Foot of the Cross (Jan 11)

Reading, Romans 12
Image, Joan Mitchell, Sunflower V


Today we’re building off last week’s sermon on the confession that God’s good pleasure is the founding ‘why’ of the sending of Christ. Today the question is, what kind of community emerges in response to this delighting of God to adopt, elect, call and send a people in response to the loving good pleasure of our of God revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

At the risk of coming off like the supermarkets selling hot cross buns the moment it ticks over to Boxing Day, I am starting this January sermon at the Crucifixion. Specifically, the scene in John, where Jesus gives his mother and the beloved disciple to one another.

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

We might say that in this tender scene the church is born. As one disciple is given to another, forged into a new family by faith of the Son. As Jesus has been preparing the disciples for his going ahead of them, to the day when they will no longer have him with them, he has urged their need to be with and for each other (just as he has been with and for them), to love one another (as he has loved them), and to be one (just as he has made them one with him). Jesus makes of these two disciples a new family in his name, and in so doing, begins the path toward the church.

What I want to propose today, is that when we come to this passage in Romans 12, that we read it as an exegesis on this moment at the foot of the cross. That is to say, we read this as one in a series of reflections emerging after the resurrection that is investigating and describing what it means to be given to one another by Christ, what it means that in the wake of the ascension the followers of Christ did not also abscond into heaven, nor saw the immediate, glorious, and perhaps even militaristic return of their messiah, but instead were entrusted to each other, in the power of the Spirit, to carry on the work of Christ. 

Paul says as much in brief: In his reflection on giftings in the middle of the reading, he reminds the church, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. It is in this founding logic of been given to one another at the foot of the cross, of being made a household in the power and name of Christ crucified, that Paul considers the question what is the church to be. 
Let’s take, for instance, one of the repeating motifs that runs through Roman 12: the warnings against conceitedness or hierarchy. Paul insists members of the community must not to think of yourself more highly than you ought, must not be haughty, nor claim to be wiser than you are. Such a concern naturally unfolds from the self-understanding of a community founded at the foot of a cross. Founded by one who insisted on being baptised, on washing feet, on drinking the cup placed before him. Founded by the one who welcomed the little children and chided his friends’ desire for greatness. In trying to exegete or understand the community formed in the giving of one to another at the foot of the cross to carry on the work of Christ in the power of the Spirit it is natural that Paul should seek to break down divisions based on haughtiness or overly-inflated self-regard.  

So too we might say other themes from the passage: the command to forgo vengeance, to refuse to curse one’s persecutors, and to overcome evil with good again stems from the foundation of the one who on the cross, before handing mother to beloved, asked God to forgive his tormentors, who earlier that night healed the ear of one who came to arrest him, and who months before rebuked his disciples who wished to call down fire from heaven. In trying to exegete or understand the community formed in the giving of one to another at the foot of the cross to carry on the work of Christ in the power of the Spirit it is natural that Paul should centre enemy-love, non-violence, and mercy.  

Likewise, the picture of a community who rejoice and weep together, contribute to each other’s material needs, and endeavour to live peaceably together develops organically from the foot of the cross where Jesus’s mother – finally feeling the pierce of the prophesied sword hanging above her soul since her child’s dedication – is entrusted in her grief to another who loved and wept for her son. It develops organically from the one who had earlier looked on the crowds in mercy and fed them when others insisted they be sent away, and who soon will go and find the one who denied, and over fireside meal and beachside walk, lovingly and generously enfolded him in love. In trying to exegete or understand the community formed in the giving of one to another at the foot of the cross to carry on the work of Christ in the power of the Spirit it is natural that Paul should emphasise that we are bound by something deeper than convenience or practicality, but are a community of solidarity: emotionally, materially, spiritually.   

It is the strange foundation of this community at the foot of the cross in the tender act of giving grieving disciples to one another that gives us the potential to resist being conformed to this world. The most impossible kind of communal life becomes possible because we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. It is the strange grace of our beginnings that inspires the audacious seriousness by which Paul – and the many generations of churchfolk since – have dared to suggest that the church might actually be able to live up to its call (often against the weight of empirical data). The strange grace of this beginning inspires the audacious seriousness that a community of fallible people might yet do even greater things than the One sent in the name of the Lord. 
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Paul is not kidding when he instructs the church to love genuinely, cling to what is good, rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, and persevere in prayer, to extend hospitality to strangers and blessing to persecutors, to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, to live peaceably, forgo vengeance, and overcome evil with good. But this agenda, which might so easily fill us with a sense of futile impossibility – which might so easily be dismissed as the naive thinking of do-gooders – is in its very audacity a testament. It is a testament that in the act of being given to one another by Christ, we have become something dazzling. That the mutual adoption instituted at the foot of the cross is symbolic of the new family made through the spirit of adoption we have received, the power of Christ’s incarnation to make us children of God. It is in this remarkable act that a remarkable kind of communal life is made possible. It is in the wake of Christ’s sacrifice that our own living sacrifice is made possible. It is on the foundation of Christ’s transformative love that our own loving lives might transform a community into the church and as the church seek to love and serve the world Christ loved, like his friends, to the end.