I have been thinking lately about my Christian beliefs. Well, actually I think about them all the time, but sometimes a specific idea grabs you and it doesn’t let go for a while.
In this instance I was thinking about the parallels of parenthood and God’s sacrifice of his Son for us. I was thinking about the amazing, life-changing, all encompassing love that a parent has for a newborn child: how that mother or father would do anything to protect the child even if it meant sacrificing their lives. Sacrifice in the name of love is a theme that comes up in literature from time to time - just look at the ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Narnia’ series, for example - and it’s a very true reflection of one of the fundamental cores of Christian belief.
As a Christian I believe that God is ‘triune’ - i.e. that God exists as God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. God became incarnate - that is to say took human form - and sacrificed himself in order that we humans (his creation) should be saved from ourselves.
Now to a lot of people this has to be a very dry concept... a man lets himself be killed and suddenly that puts everything right for the whole of the human race? That’s balderdash!
But consider it this way. As a good parent you would do everything within your power for the good of your child. You would go to the ends of the earth and back again if it meant saving them from harm. You would, if it were possible, willingly take their place if they were suffering an awful illness. Your love for your child would drive you to do things that to others might seem heroic or even stupid but to you would be completely necessary. Your decisions would be motivated by your own overpowering and irresistible love for your child.
Imagine now the position of a Creator God who had taken human form in a much loved world that had been corrupted and filled with evil. Would you lose hope and destroy or abandon everything you had created and start again, or, because you built it all out of love, would you try to fix it?
Us broken, bad, beastly human beings met with Christ and we didn’t (on the whole) recognise the man Jesus for what and who he was. And because his message of redemption didn’t fit with our selfish mean ways we decided to reject him and put him out of our minds in the most (we thought) absolute way we could imagine. We decided to silence him once and for all and get back to our lusts for power and prestige and other selfishness.
And Jesus let us.
He let us kill him. He didn’t have to. He had the power to stop it - all the biblical accounts of Jesus speak of a man who had awesome and astonishing power. He could have run away or miraculously dissolved the nails or struck down the Roman guards or fomented a revolution or any number of different things. But he chose to let himself be crucified.
What does that say to us?
It says, to me at least, that the saving power of this self-sacrifice was greater than any momentary miraculous act. It says that God loved his Creation so much that he was prepared to do anything to set in place a cure for its ills, including the most painful thing: of being rejected by all that he loved and, as Jesus, being put to death. But he also knew that the power of this act would reverberate down the millennia in a way a simple popular revolt would not. He knew that those with eyes to see and hearts to feel would understand the significance and empathise with how they, as the creators and parents of their own children, would feel if the only option to save someone so totally and unconditionally loved was to sacrifice themselves.
To welcome into our world new life and to mark each new child with baptism brings us into the company of God who loved his creation so much that he sacrificed himself in the form of his son for our eternal benefit. In experiencing the wonder and joy of new life we begin to get a taste of the love our blessed Lord had for us. And isn’t that just wonderful?
Of course it didn’t just end with Our Lord dying on the cross, but I’ll write about the absolute necessity of the Resurrection in the grand scheme of things another time.
