The Meaning of the Cross: To Overcome the Misgiving about God’s Love for us
Which is the Effect of the Sin of Our First Parents
Holy Friday
I want you to meditate on how deep that instinctual reaction of dread of God in our awareness of sin is, that God would have to go to the extremes that He did in order to overcome it. It seems to me that's the only rational response to the Cross. When you think of what He did it would be natural to ask, "Well, why did He do that? Why did He have to go to such extremes? There must be some reason for it." And the reason is precisely that our experience of guilt is so profound and so intense, causing us to withdraw from God, that He had to balance it, so to speak, by dying on the Cross to show us that there's nothing to keep us from going to Him. That’s what He meant when He said, "Weep not for Me but for yourselves and for your children." (Lk 23:28) They were weeping because they saw how much He was suffering and how good He was and He said: Don’t weep for Me but weep for yourselves seeing how much you need to be reassured.
Q: Once you said that in looking for our justification in ourselves we crucify our real justification. Would that be because we haven't meditated enough, we haven’t believed in that?
Yes, you're not sufficiently convinced of your own sterility, your own hopelessness in yourself, and you don't understand God's motive in permitting the sin, which is more significant than the malice of your sin. So God did those two things: He permitted sin but then he died on the Cross to use the sin to draw you to Him.
So if you don't see your sins in relation to His dying on the Cross to overcome your misgiving, you’ve missed the whole point of your salvation.
Q: And it makes the guilt more intense.
Because when you see how good He was, then it makes you feel even more guilty. You see, there's a way of contemplating God's goodness like a kid outside in the cold looking through a window at a lot of people having a party. But the right way to see God's goodness is the goodness for you, precisely in relation to the guilt which withdraws you from God. If you don't contemplate his goodness that way it's sterile, as though God died on the Cross in order for you to see how good He was. He died on the Cross to make you good! That last point is profoundly important.
So that's where you really get your teeth into things, when you see how deep is your tendency to withdraw from God, and how your whole life is dominated by that. All the distraction, all the dissipation, all the waste of time, is because you allow that guilt to withdraw you from God, because by nature you want God infinitely more than anything else.
Q: It's funny because we were always taught that God could have used any means to save us but we never knew the reason why He used the Cross.
Yes, God could have done anything He wanted, but in His wisdom, the means He used was the very thing that we needed. But if you don't see how much you need it, to that extent you don't understand the Cross.
I'd like you to think for a moment about what your conscience was. Did you ever think of why He went to those limits? After all, God is rational. But I think your conscience focused on how good God is and how bad you were; the discrepancy between our perversity and God's goodness is all the greater for what He did, so the effect was the very opposite of what God intended.
That's how upside down your conscience was, that the very device God used to overcome your misgiving about His love for us, actually increased it! Here's another way of seeing it: You can say that we sin because we're bad, and Jesus from the Cross says, "You sin because you don't know how good I am!" With that false conscience it seems that we are, by our very nature, attracted to impurity and stuff like that, and that we've got to do something to fight it; whereas the simple theological truth is that we're attracted to God by our very nature infinitely more than anything else. But because of the effects of fallen nature, sin is like a secondhand choice. We want God and we sin because we don't believe we can have Him.
Q: And then the sin is like a barrier, as if we were to say, now I've done it and I'm a sinner, so how is He going to save me?
And the signs of being a sinner are there all the time. It's not so much the sin as what you are, as though you are a person who can't be loved and the sin is a sign of that. And if you really understand it correctly, Jesus from the Cross is saying, you don't have to withdraw from Me, I'm a sinner just like you - not that He actually sinned, but He carried that whole experience of being separated from the Father as though He had sinned. Now what's behind all that except the need to overcome that profound withdrawal from God which is the effect of sin? Otherwise you have to say that He just went through all that to show how good He was, to be all the more justified in condemning us for how bad we are in comparison. That was your conscience.
Q: I never thought of Jesus on the Cross as saying: "I'm a sinner" in that sense.
Yes: "There's no reason for you to withdraw or hide, because I'm a sinner just like you!"
Q: That's really what Adam and Eve did when they sinned.
The thing about Adam and Eve is that they covered their genitals and hid. The significance of our impurity is that it causes us to hide from God, and Jesus on the Cross is God's answer to that.
Q: That’s what we don't realize in a way. The awareness of our withdrawal from God is repressed by a kind of false purity where we make believe that we're going to God and keep the appearance of going to God.
And try to avoid overt sins. The point that I'm driving at is for you to see how much of your life is a life of repression and hidden withdrawal from God because you don't believe that you are acceptable to God. The whole point of the Crucifixion was to prove that your sins really meant nothing, in a way, because of God's love. You should be examining your conscience to see how much of your life is consecrated to hiding from God. The reason you do this is that you don't believe that you are acceptable to God, so your spiritual life consists in making yourself acceptable.
Q: And when you said that Jesus carried all the burden of sins, that changed the whole thing.
You see, the essential effect of sin is to separate you from God, and what He experienced when He said, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Mt 27:46) was, as far as possible, that separation from His Father. That's how real His carrying of our sins was, that without sinning He experienced the essential effect of sin.
Q: And when we sin, we realize our hopelessness in our sins, but realize also that He, though sinless, suffered all the effects of our sin so that our hope is in Him.
Well the sin was paid for; all your sins are paid for in advance. But if you don't understand this, it's like starving while you have a million dollars in the bank; you don't know it so you starve.
Q: Yes, it's like a whole new story. In the Genesis account God didn't promise to send a Redeemer after the sin with the forbidden fruit, but after their misgiving about God's love for them, and withdrawal from Him after they covered their genitals. And you can see how when Judas realized his sin he withdrew. We always thought the effect of Adam's sin that we're left with was the tendency to do bad things, but the real effect that we're left with is that misgiving about God, and this tendency to withdraw from Him.
In principle, that's it.
Q: In other words, that withdrawal from God that we have by our fallen nature is a natural effect of sin. That's what we've got to work with; it's there, it's given.
Yes, as soon as you think of sin you withdraw from God. What you should have misgivings about is your disbelief in God's love when you see your sins. If you know that He loves you, you don't want to offend Him, and then you do want to overcome your sins, because of that.
Q: It orders everything else.
That's right. "Charity sets the house in order." You love God and then you hate everything that is contrary to Him. But above everything else you should hate your misgiving about God’s love for you.
Q: That's the same thing as hating your own soul, hating that misgiving.
You see, anybody who's serious about his spiritual life wants to make himself acceptable. The question is: Do you make yourself acceptable by overcoming these weaknesses by yourself, or do you make yourself acceptable primarily by believing that God is making your acceptable?
You don’t make yourself acceptable, He makes you acceptable. And because you are acceptable, then you hate everything which is contrary to God Who loves you.
Q: And that's when you can put your will behind overcoming sin.
And you have the confidence to do it. You believe that even if you sin, you know it's a sin of weakness that can't separate you from God. And that's another thing: without this understanding, you don't see that you sin, because you're always covering it up. But with the right conscience you can say: yes, I sin. For example, you have a bad thought and you rest in it because you enjoy it. With the right conscience you don’t try to convince yourself, well, I really don't want to do that. But you most certainly would want to do it! Under the influence of your weakness you want it. Then you can see yourself as a sinner and how that you're loved at the same time, which is integrally a healthy conscience - as against that neurotic twilight which is the state of continual doubt.
Q: The Crucifixion is like a summary of everything you’ve taught us. All the evil is there, God's goodness is there, and our union is there.
And. the evil gets dissolved in his goodness. So you can see what you're supposed to do now. You've got to meditate on that and convince yourself of that truth, to see your sins in the right perspective. Now you should be saying to yourself, no wonder I've been so miserable all my life!
Which is the Effect of the Sin of Our First Parents
Holy Friday
I want you to meditate on how deep that instinctual reaction of dread of God in our awareness of sin is, that God would have to go to the extremes that He did in order to overcome it. It seems to me that's the only rational response to the Cross. When you think of what He did it would be natural to ask, "Well, why did He do that? Why did He have to go to such extremes? There must be some reason for it." And the reason is precisely that our experience of guilt is so profound and so intense, causing us to withdraw from God, that He had to balance it, so to speak, by dying on the Cross to show us that there's nothing to keep us from going to Him. That’s what He meant when He said, "Weep not for Me but for yourselves and for your children." (Lk 23:28) They were weeping because they saw how much He was suffering and how good He was and He said: Don’t weep for Me but weep for yourselves seeing how much you need to be reassured.
Q: Once you said that in looking for our justification in ourselves we crucify our real justification. Would that be because we haven't meditated enough, we haven’t believed in that?
Yes, you're not sufficiently convinced of your own sterility, your own hopelessness in yourself, and you don't understand God's motive in permitting the sin, which is more significant than the malice of your sin. So God did those two things: He permitted sin but then he died on the Cross to use the sin to draw you to Him.
So if you don't see your sins in relation to His dying on the Cross to overcome your misgiving, you’ve missed the whole point of your salvation.
Q: And it makes the guilt more intense.
Because when you see how good He was, then it makes you feel even more guilty. You see, there's a way of contemplating God's goodness like a kid outside in the cold looking through a window at a lot of people having a party. But the right way to see God's goodness is the goodness for you, precisely in relation to the guilt which withdraws you from God. If you don't contemplate his goodness that way it's sterile, as though God died on the Cross in order for you to see how good He was. He died on the Cross to make you good! That last point is profoundly important.
So that's where you really get your teeth into things, when you see how deep is your tendency to withdraw from God, and how your whole life is dominated by that. All the distraction, all the dissipation, all the waste of time, is because you allow that guilt to withdraw you from God, because by nature you want God infinitely more than anything else.
Q: It's funny because we were always taught that God could have used any means to save us but we never knew the reason why He used the Cross.
Yes, God could have done anything He wanted, but in His wisdom, the means He used was the very thing that we needed. But if you don't see how much you need it, to that extent you don't understand the Cross.
I'd like you to think for a moment about what your conscience was. Did you ever think of why He went to those limits? After all, God is rational. But I think your conscience focused on how good God is and how bad you were; the discrepancy between our perversity and God's goodness is all the greater for what He did, so the effect was the very opposite of what God intended.
That's how upside down your conscience was, that the very device God used to overcome your misgiving about His love for us, actually increased it! Here's another way of seeing it: You can say that we sin because we're bad, and Jesus from the Cross says, "You sin because you don't know how good I am!" With that false conscience it seems that we are, by our very nature, attracted to impurity and stuff like that, and that we've got to do something to fight it; whereas the simple theological truth is that we're attracted to God by our very nature infinitely more than anything else. But because of the effects of fallen nature, sin is like a secondhand choice. We want God and we sin because we don't believe we can have Him.
Q: And then the sin is like a barrier, as if we were to say, now I've done it and I'm a sinner, so how is He going to save me?
And the signs of being a sinner are there all the time. It's not so much the sin as what you are, as though you are a person who can't be loved and the sin is a sign of that. And if you really understand it correctly, Jesus from the Cross is saying, you don't have to withdraw from Me, I'm a sinner just like you - not that He actually sinned, but He carried that whole experience of being separated from the Father as though He had sinned. Now what's behind all that except the need to overcome that profound withdrawal from God which is the effect of sin? Otherwise you have to say that He just went through all that to show how good He was, to be all the more justified in condemning us for how bad we are in comparison. That was your conscience.
Q: I never thought of Jesus on the Cross as saying: "I'm a sinner" in that sense.
Yes: "There's no reason for you to withdraw or hide, because I'm a sinner just like you!"
Q: That's really what Adam and Eve did when they sinned.
The thing about Adam and Eve is that they covered their genitals and hid. The significance of our impurity is that it causes us to hide from God, and Jesus on the Cross is God's answer to that.
Q: That’s what we don't realize in a way. The awareness of our withdrawal from God is repressed by a kind of false purity where we make believe that we're going to God and keep the appearance of going to God.
And try to avoid overt sins. The point that I'm driving at is for you to see how much of your life is a life of repression and hidden withdrawal from God because you don't believe that you are acceptable to God. The whole point of the Crucifixion was to prove that your sins really meant nothing, in a way, because of God's love. You should be examining your conscience to see how much of your life is consecrated to hiding from God. The reason you do this is that you don't believe that you are acceptable to God, so your spiritual life consists in making yourself acceptable.
Q: And when you said that Jesus carried all the burden of sins, that changed the whole thing.
You see, the essential effect of sin is to separate you from God, and what He experienced when He said, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Mt 27:46) was, as far as possible, that separation from His Father. That's how real His carrying of our sins was, that without sinning He experienced the essential effect of sin.
Q: And when we sin, we realize our hopelessness in our sins, but realize also that He, though sinless, suffered all the effects of our sin so that our hope is in Him.
Well the sin was paid for; all your sins are paid for in advance. But if you don't understand this, it's like starving while you have a million dollars in the bank; you don't know it so you starve.
Q: Yes, it's like a whole new story. In the Genesis account God didn't promise to send a Redeemer after the sin with the forbidden fruit, but after their misgiving about God's love for them, and withdrawal from Him after they covered their genitals. And you can see how when Judas realized his sin he withdrew. We always thought the effect of Adam's sin that we're left with was the tendency to do bad things, but the real effect that we're left with is that misgiving about God, and this tendency to withdraw from Him.
In principle, that's it.
Q: In other words, that withdrawal from God that we have by our fallen nature is a natural effect of sin. That's what we've got to work with; it's there, it's given.
Yes, as soon as you think of sin you withdraw from God. What you should have misgivings about is your disbelief in God's love when you see your sins. If you know that He loves you, you don't want to offend Him, and then you do want to overcome your sins, because of that.
Q: It orders everything else.
That's right. "Charity sets the house in order." You love God and then you hate everything that is contrary to Him. But above everything else you should hate your misgiving about God’s love for you.
Q: That's the same thing as hating your own soul, hating that misgiving.
You see, anybody who's serious about his spiritual life wants to make himself acceptable. The question is: Do you make yourself acceptable by overcoming these weaknesses by yourself, or do you make yourself acceptable primarily by believing that God is making your acceptable?
You don’t make yourself acceptable, He makes you acceptable. And because you are acceptable, then you hate everything which is contrary to God Who loves you.
Q: And that's when you can put your will behind overcoming sin.
And you have the confidence to do it. You believe that even if you sin, you know it's a sin of weakness that can't separate you from God. And that's another thing: without this understanding, you don't see that you sin, because you're always covering it up. But with the right conscience you can say: yes, I sin. For example, you have a bad thought and you rest in it because you enjoy it. With the right conscience you don’t try to convince yourself, well, I really don't want to do that. But you most certainly would want to do it! Under the influence of your weakness you want it. Then you can see yourself as a sinner and how that you're loved at the same time, which is integrally a healthy conscience - as against that neurotic twilight which is the state of continual doubt.
Q: The Crucifixion is like a summary of everything you’ve taught us. All the evil is there, God's goodness is there, and our union is there.
And. the evil gets dissolved in his goodness. So you can see what you're supposed to do now. You've got to meditate on that and convince yourself of that truth, to see your sins in the right perspective. Now you should be saying to yourself, no wonder I've been so miserable all my life!