Summarising chapter 7 – ‘The Cross as Divine Consent’

The relationship between God and his people is not that of a ‘forced marriage’:

‘God has given us free will and we can freely accept or reject his proposal.’

But what if we decline?  “Please accept my gracious offer…or else!”

We have seen that God is Christlike – and his nature is therefore cruciform (Cross-shaped) and kenotic (self-giving).

But how can such a God be said to reign?

We need to discover how God can be infinitely close and caring, without being coercive or controlling; how he:

‘rules, saves and serves by grounding and filling all that is with the power of love—a divine love with a particular content defined as consent and participation.’

Moreover, we receive God’s grace in exactly the same way: by consent and participation:

‘The fullness (in Greek, the pleroma) of God’s saving comes as God participates fully in the human condition—from birth to death—and consents to enduring temptations, trials and even the extreme humiliation of crucifixion. The fullness of our salvation comes as we participate in Christ’s death and as we fully consent—cooperate and surrender—to his grace.’

The cross as consent

(a) The cross symbolises the continuous, loving, mutual surrender of Father and Son.  See Jn 5:19-22.  This mutual surrender also characterises the Spirit, Jn 16:13.  It is illustrated at the wedding in Cana, where Jesus, having said, “My hour has not yet come,” then gets the Father’s nod (through Mary?) and does the miracle.  A similar pattern is seen in the account of the Syrophoenician woman (Mk 7; Mt 15), where Jesus first resists (Mt 15:24), but then gets his Father’s go-ahead (again, in response to the woman’s faith?).  Supremely, we see this pattern as Jesus faces the horror of the cross: first, he prays the he might avoid it, but in the same breath consents to it (Mt 26:39).

(b) Consent is also at the heart of the mediation between God and the world.  The Father consents to give his Son over to hostile men, and the Son freely consents (Jn 10:17f).  In inter-faith dialogue:

‘The authority to lay down his life, as opposed to having it taken, can prove to be a valuable point of contact in inter-faith dialogue with our Muslim friends, who abhor the idea that God’s Messiah could simply be killed by wicked men.’

In both John’s Gospel and the Acts:

‘The authors frame the story so that the Father foresees and the Son orchestrates the events in which our own ugly schemes are co-opted by God’s willing consent for our salvation!’

(c) Consent characterises our response to the grace of God in the cross of Christ.  As God ‘kisses’ the world in saving love, so the world responds with a kiss.  But,

‘if consent comes with an ultimatum tied to a deadline — if lack of surrender is threatened with eternal conscious torment — then the offer is devoid of real love. We’re left with no more than a pseudo-choice and not genuinely allowed to withhold consent.’

This is tantamount to God saying: “I love you for ever and ever…until the dealine.”

No: God will never force your will; and his love will last for ever (Jer 31:3), and for ever it will be consent.  It will outlive death (Song 8).  The door will never be shut to you (Rev 21-22).

Consent from the beginning

God is the First Cause, the Creator of all things, and all that he does it good.  But he is the also the creator of second causes – including natural law and free will – and these he permits to ‘do their thing’.  Gravity consents perfectly to God’s laws, and yet it can crush and destroy things.  So it is with tectonic plates, weather systems, and so on: they comply with God’s rules, and yet we should not assume that when they wreak carnage this is an ‘act of God’, still less that God is meting out punishment.

So too with human freedom.  In giving us free will, God takes the risk of us freely consenting to his will, or rejecting it.  And that rejection can have a thousand disastrous consequences.  And God consents: he does not interrupt or overrule every foolish or wicked decision we make.

Both secondary causes – natural law and human freedom – are addressed by Jesus in Lk 13:1-5.  Awful things happen to people, regardless of their sinfulness or relative innocence.  God doesn’t micro-manage our circumstances, so that we receive precisely the amount of punishment or reward that we deserve.  See also Mt 5:45.

A driver’s poor choices (human freedom) and the effect of ice on the surface of the road (natural law) combine in a fatal road accident.  We can say that God created the secondary causes, but not that he caused the collision.

Not merely a spectator – God’s participation

The Cross – standing for the totality of God’s participation in our sin, trauma and calamity – lies at the very centre of the cosmos.  Christ consents to suffer for and with us.  God does not idly sit back and observe our suffering.  Rather:

‘We look to the true image of the cruciform—Christ himself—the One who heard our groans and came down to suffer and die with us in order to overcome affliction, defeat death and raise us up to live and reign with him.’

Christ’s cruciform reign

Such love seems weak – as weak as a baby in a manger, or of a grown man hanging on a cross.  What sort of sovereignty is this?

God rules, not through force, but through the consent of his self-giving Son and through the Christlike attitudes and actions of Christ’s followers.  They shall reign (Rev 1:6) but only by servant love (Rev 12:11).

Compare two kinds of power:

Worldly power as force: authority, recognition, strength, territory, brutality, control, weapons, fear, success, influence, conquering, fame, bloodshed, wrath, violence, glory, domination, greatness, manipulation, bullying, aggression, striving, insecurity, hegemony.

Cruciform power as love: vulnerability, weakness, obedience, submission, outcast, cursed, ignored, betrayed, risk-taking, wounded, forgiveness, suffering, thirst, dishonor, shame, lonely, empty, bloody, promise, compassionate, dependence, hope, faith, sacrifice, liberation, empathy.

God’s kingship is without coercion; it is peaceful; and it wins through love (persuading by ‘witness, rhetoric, compassion, Spirit and, if need be, martyrdom, but never by force.’)

Divine yielding

God’s kenotic reign can be seen way back in the Genesis creation story:

‘To place creation into the hands of humanity at the genesis of the earth is an expression of a kenotic God, a yielding and incarnational God. It is a revelation of the cruciform God, willing to humbly consent and even bear complicity in the fall of humanity.’

It was God who put Adam and Eve in the garden; God who planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; God who created the wily serpent who lured them into sin; God who allowed the serpent to deceive them.  Was this all a trap?  Why didn’t God step in to stop it?  But only by allowing the possibility of our failure can God enter into a meaningful relationship with us.  And his command was never burdensome!

But where the first Adam failed (and we with him), a second Adam has stepped in.  There is another garden, and another man,

‘who kneels in surrender in that garden and yields his will completely to God the Father. Oh yes, he too had been tempted. That same serpent had come around, attempting to lure Jesus with power, with kingdoms, and with dominion. He tempted Jesus to accomplish his mission, not by yielding but by grasping, just as Adam and Eve had. Satan offered a shortcut to power, bypassing kenosis and consent and a cross. But Christ saw through it, passed the test and truly fulfilled what humanity was destined for—the perfection of the divine image—by laying down power, yielding to the Father and mediating God’s redeeming love to the whole world.’

And there is another tree:

‘The Cross becomes the fullest expression of an ongoing and coherent pattern of the Christlike God’s kenotic, incarnational and cruciform character. The tree of Christ’s kenotic death, planted forever in our world, is a perpetual offer of eternal life whereby we too can fulfill human destiny through a response of consent. As in Eden, Christ lays down his power and invites us to lay down ours. By simply yielding as he did, we participate in his kenotic death so that we might also become partakers in the divine life.’