I hate mazes. Always have. I simply can’t understand how people derive entertainment from wandering around aimlessly looking for the middle, invariably irritated by teenagers who have found the redoubt in the centre and are shouting misleading instructions to the people they see below them.
The mazes I hate most are maise mazes, which now pepper the most boring parts of the British countryside such as Shropshire where I come from. My dullest most irrelevant weekends with the family have been spent in the maise maze. ‘Shall we all go to the maise maze? They sell jam in the middle!’ ‘Yes Auntie do you mind if I bring a can of petrol and a lighter.’
What erks me most is the basic premise; that before you find the right way you must try every conceivable wrong way. Some people will find the centre quickly but its pure, blind fateful luck.The analogy to life is of course clear. We all accept that we must try some wrong routes before we find the right one, we all look back on our younger lives and forgive ourselves our wrong turns but wince that we took so many.
The tantalising possibility presented by Christianity is that there may be a shortcut to the centre of it all. Some way to stop in your tracks, stop the natural process where you find truth by a process of painful elimination and find a way to the centre of it all straightaway. Its an audacious claim and those who make it will look to many like the annoying boys at the centre of the maise claiming the answer.
I know in part that there is such a shortcut and it is found in the mysteries of the cross of Jesus. I know that the deeper I look at the cross of Christ, the more I accept the truth of its revelation, then the nearer I will be to finding a shortcut to the centre of it all.
To fully understand the cross is to fully understand the most significant event in human history, the most significant moment in all of time and space. It is to understand the revelation that the whole universe exists for the sake of Christ, that we live for the sake of Christ. It is in truth the meaning of time, the purpose of it all.
Yet even as I write this I know that I have not fully found the shortcut. I know that there is much about the cross of Jesus that I have not grasped.
I ask myself whether I have fully understood the substitution of him for me? For that matter whether I have fully put to bed my intellectual objections. I am still trying. I am trying because every time I do I know life is flowing into me.
I know that I can measure my understanding and acceptance of the cross as it brings about a mysterious transformation in me.
This is because the depth of my understanding of the cross defines the size of the space that God’s Holy Spirit can fill in my life. The spirit of Jesus reveals the cross, he builds an understanding of it into our every action, every thought. As we come to understand the cross we come to judge other people in the light of it, not in the light of our personal standards. We start to measure ourselves by the cross. Our self esteem flows from His action, our pride is crushed by the sheer enormity of what he had to do just to reconcile us to God.
Jesus’ instruction to ‘seek first the kingdom of God and all other things will be given to you’ is of course about seeking, searching, craving for the moment that his kingdom came at calvery.
I could write about this for hours but I won’t. The reason I am starting to talk about it is that I’m going to be preaching a series on the cross this year at the Bear.
I hope you will join me on the journey I am going through as I write these. I start with the firm conviction that the study of the cross of Jesus is the most difficult intellectual challenge I have ever attempted, that in the study there is the potential to cause emotional upheaval, spiritual transformation and even physical change.
My talks will have three titles – making three statements that I believe to be true.
I killed Jesus
God killed Jesus
Jesus chose to die.
Do you believe all three of those things?