The Cross Changes Everything

Taylor Mertins on the treasures of a life centered on the cross of Christ.

Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash

A recent albeit beloved discovery has been Taylor Mertins’s Substack, which houses his weekly homilies and devotions as he pastors Raleigh Court United Methodist Church in Roanoke, Virginia. His writings are consistently biblical and Christological, providing a regular dose of the good news that is found in and through Christ alone. Case in point, I can’t help but recall his entry from a few months back, “The Clothing That Is Christ,” especially for the ways in which he brings out the truths of the gospel from the apostle Paul’s own life. While that might seem like proverbial “low-hanging fruit,” Taylor’s dexterity with God’s word of promise as seen and known in Jesus is on clear display. With Paul’s words in Galatians 2:19–20 as his starting point, Taylor alludes to some of the ways Paul’s life was utterly changed and how the cross serves as the lynchpin of that, as it does in the lives of all the redeemed of God. He writes:

T. S. Eliot called the cross of Christ the still point of the turning world. It is the gravitational force around which the cosmos spins. The cross is a reminder that there is no perfect, eloquent, or savvy way by which we can get to God. All of our attempts to climb up to God are our pitiful efforts at self-salvation. It’s the foolish assumption that things will be perfect if we live perfectly. But that doesn’t work. It never has and it never will. In fact, it usually just makes things worse. We turn commandments into bludgeons that belittle others in order to soothe our egos, because they are bruised from our inability to do the good we know we ought to do.

And so, instead of giving us a manual for making it all come out right, God jumps down into the muck and mire with us. God takes hold of all of our sins, nails them to the cross, and leaves them there forever.

Preaching is foolishness, Paul says in almost all of his letters, because lofty words of wisdom and grandeur do not bring us closer to God. God, instead, comes close to us. So close, in fact, that we have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. Which means [we] only really know who we are in relation to, and because of, who Jesus is. We can develop and put on all sorts of identities and qualities. But our primary identity, the shoulder upon which all of our shirts hang, is Jesus. We live in Christ and Christ lives in us.

This language is very trenchant for me, especially since I am currently engrossed in a sermon series on Paul’s letter to the Colossians, in which he explicitly refers to the work of Christ by which all of our sins have been canceled by being nailed to the cross (Col. 2:14). Even though it is not fiery as Galatians or doctrinally robust as Romans, the Colossian epistle is no slouch when it comes to conveying the adamantine grace and truth offered to all through Christ’s passion and resurrection. It is precisely and only in and by the cross that one can ever come to a full knowledge not only of who God is but also of who one is oneself. This is partly why the best theologians are, as Luther put it, “theologians of the cross.”

The folly of the word of the cross, as Paul writes elsewhere (1 Cor. 1:18), lets us understand that it is precisely through death, splinters, and blood that the world is made witness to the apex of God’s self-disclosure. It is there on that appalling device of human torture and atrocity that the entire cosmos pivots. All of human history, including your own personal story, hinges on the Christ of God who was crucified for you. That is where he who formed the vast expanse of the universe made peace for you and bought your forgiveness “by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). With this good news on our lips, we are filled to the brim with “the riches of [the] full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ” (Col. 2:2), who himself epitomizes the fact that humanity is not summoned to climb to God. Rather, God in Christ condescends to humanity to reconcile them to himself.

The cross changes everything, which is why the church ought never to move on from it to something else. When Paul said to the Corinthians that he “decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2), he meant it. Not in some “church marketing” sort of way or as merely some platitude by which he had come to define his ministry; rather, it was the cross and the Son of God who was pegged there that encapsulated his message because emanating from that site are all “the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3) by which every sinner is reconciled, justified, and made whole. As that old yet beloved hymn says, referring to the blood of the cross, “Sin-stains are lost in its life-giving flow.”

Grace and peace to you, my friends.