Christ’s Mighty Victory
By Bishop Earl G. Hunt Jr.
Good News Convocation 1971
Business often carried a friend of mine through the plant of a great foundry. He never missed the opportunity to study the workmen who labored there. One man, a furnace-tender, always fascinated him. The bones and muscles of this laborer were those of a giant. His face was as strong as granite, and his hands as big as hams. It was a striking sight to see him work with his shovel and coal, huge muscles rippling in unbroken rhythm, face florid with heated blood, and pools of perspiration glistening on his bare skin as the glow from the furnace played across his body. He was rough, uncouth, a man of brawn more than of mind.
Once my friend saw him stagger, almost overcome with the intense heat of the fires. He looked weary, ill, nearly beaten. But he regained his footing, stepped aside into the cooler shadows, lifted his goggles, and passed a great blackened hand in gentle reverence over something hanging around his neck. It seemed to strengthen him. His strained features relaxed, and in a moment he was back on the job. Curious to know what had happened in that brief respite, my friend peered more closely and discovered that the something around the big workman’s neck was a tiny golden crucifix suspended on a short chain. It looked strange against its background of hot, damp flesh. But it did something for this giant of a man with his furnace and fires to have that tiny likeness of the Christ on the job with him. He could touch it and brush weariness aside. It was a fountain of refreshment and strength for him.
This incident helps to point up the nearly incredible power of that Strange Man who, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it years ago, has “ploughed” his way into the “history of the world.” He and his mighty victory are the themes of New Testament Christianity, the roots of our religion. The tragic impoverishment of the Church’s witness in recent years is traceable to persistent ignoring, often in high places, of the naked spiritual power implicit in a full awareness of God’s work through Jesus Christ’s incarnation, death on the cross, and resurrection.
Dr. James S. Stewart (1896-1990) of the University of Edinburgh has reminded us that “the Christian religion is often today identified with pious ethical behavior and vague theistic belief, suffused with aesthetic emotionalism and a mild glow of humanitarian benevolence” (Thine is the Kingdom, 1956). It is simply impossible to account for the impact of the Christian faith in human experience and history apart from the Church’s ancient message of Jesus Christ and his mighty victory.
For example, we fail to understand St. Francis, whose saintliness casts a light even into the 20th century, if we do not see him as he kneels in the dilapidated Church of St. Damian outside the walls of Assisi and grasps for the first time the meaning of the Cross.
We glimpse the incentive that drove Horace Bushnell to bind the church and the home indissolubly together only when we visit the religious revival on Yale’s campus in 1831 and later, in 1848, spend the night with him as he responds to a radiant vision of Christ as the personal Revealer of God.
We look in vain for the secret of Walter Rauschenbusch, who stabbed the social conscience of Christendom awake in the days before World War I, until we find “the little pastern gate in the castle of his soul” and learn of the richness of his personal faith in the God revealed by Jesus Christ, which made prayer the dominant mood of his life.
Behind the deed forever stands the creed! As Christians, we act because God has already acted! To quote Stewart again, “The dynamic for our unaccomplished task is the accomplished deed of God” – or, put in the words of my theme tonight, Christ’s mighty victory. There are three imperishable acts of God that constitute the core of our Lord’s triumph.
- The Incarnation
“God was in Christ …” (II Corinthians 5:19a). How incongruous this assertion has seemed in recent years. One of the surprisingly prominent illusions of our era is that God is absent from his creation. As Professor William Hamilton has said: “We are not talking about the absence of the experience of God, but about the experience of the absence of God.” Put another way, radical theology says simply, but not freshly, “God is dead.” Zarathustra, Nietzsche, William Blake, Hegel – even Martin Luther – said it in earlier days. Bonhoeffer speaks in our modern day, and out of a deep devotion, about God “allowing Himself to be edged out of the world.”
The beginnings of this view are complex. Certainly it is an effort to interpret, in terms of faith, a weird age of the world’s history. It undertakes to account for secularism’s triumph. Fearing that the older theistic and theological views of life and history cannot survive contemporary international and cultural revolutions, it seeks to make a new and radically different road. It is secular theology, religionless Christianity, contrived to satisfy the empty realism of Julian Huxley’s “God-shaped blank in the modern mind.” But most of all, this illusion of illusions is based upon man’s arrogant metaphysical and actual independence of God. It rests upon the assumption that modern man can get along very well indeed without God.
What an illusion! A man prays and knows an answer. A Marine, dying in Vietnam, is told of the love that will not let him go, and peace and hope shine in his eyes. A great congregation sings with enthusiasm “A mighty fortress is my God” and the atmosphere of worship is charged with living power. A man who has just learned that he has an inoperable cancer receives Holy Communion and rises with quiet courage to take up his tasks for the time that remains. A member of Congress talks frankly with his pastor and then goes to the House floor to vote his Christian conviction, aware that the deed may cost him an election. A student kneels to pray at night, taunted by some of those with whom he lives.
God absent from his creation? What an illusion! Only those who have allowed philosophical hogwash to befuddle their brains and blind their eyes could possibly overlook the voluminous evidences to the contrary.
Or take yourself – you who don’t always believe in him, who think you operate your life with reasonable efficiency and effectiveness without him. Can you be honest enough to recall a moment when some alluring temptation to dishonor brought your soul to the edge of a precipice – and something held you back? Can you remember an hour dark with human need when suddenly light and help appeared? Or what about a memory that rose at nighttime to rebuke you or to bless you? Or a great and ennobling thought that broke unexpectedly across the barren terrain of your mind? Or some strange and exhilarating exultation after you had seen a great play or read a memorable book? Or the warm glow somewhere within you as you shared intimate fellowship with a dear and trusted friend? Or the sorrow of some bereavement? Or the ecstatic gladness of a beautiful surprise?
God absent from his creation? What an illusion! Do you remember how Isaiah pictures God saying to Cyrus the Persian, King of Babylon: “I girdeth thee, though thou hast not known me.”
The Death-of-God philosophy, never a serious threat to Christianity but rather an extreme manifestation of our age’s strange affinity for the novel and the bizarre, has moved now into an oblivion fashioned from its own internal irresponsibility and spiritual stupidity. The Incarnation, foundational doctrine of the Christian religion, reminds us again and afresh that God has betrothed himself forever to humanity!
God is not only not absent from his creation, he is forever identified with it. When the Everlasting God planned a nearer visit to earth, he chose the utterly human trails of a mother’s deep anguish and a baby’s low, helpless cry for the divine pilgrimage. He might have come as a heavenly visitant in trappings of cosmic splendor with spirit-legions and a chariot made of the winds, but this was not his way. He chose the cattle-shelter, ‘‘swaddling clothes,” and the loneliness of a man and a woman. And into this situation he came in the person of his son, Jesus. This is the first glory of the Incarnation.
Christianity begins with the most stupendous idea man’s mind has ever been asked to enfold: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him” (John 1:18).
Here is what Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1889-1966) said about that text: “This statement, which would make every good Platonist’s hair stand on end, is the central article in the Christian theory of knowledge.”
That the God of creation, infinite, holy, omnipotent, should care enough to identify himself with his creatures, putting on for a while the garments of flesh in order that he might understand us and we might know Him – this is history’s supreme fact. And its message of nearly incredible hope and joy is a light for life’s dark valleys and a song in its long nights. The God who made us has come to save us.
Do you remember G.K. Chesterton’s beautiful words?
“To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome;
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.”
John Wesley preached no recorded sermon on the Person of Christ. A distinguished student of his life declares that the founder of Methodism simply assumed the centrality of Christ’s position in the plan of salvation. If someone had asked him to prove the divinity of Christ, “he would probably have pointed to some humble convert, to some little band of men and women whose sins were forgiven and in whose faces shone that light which was reflected from the face of Christ.”
Years ago I heard the great Episcopal clergyman Joseph Fort Newton say of Jesus Christ, “He entered into the soul of humanity like a dye, the tinge of which no acid can remove.” And Robert Oppenheimer, in a reference to religion rare for his agnostic mind, commented upon the place of Jesus in the Christian philosophy with these words: “The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person.”
These are authentic echoes of the chorus of the centuries in dealing with the great fact of the incarnation. If some of the early Christians came dangerously dose to forgetting his humanity, then some of us, in nearer days, have come dangerously close to ignoring his deity. Too often have we of a more liberal tradition surrendered the doctrine of the incarnation to those extremists of the faith who subscribe only to fundamentalism and bibliolatry.
The vital nerve of the Church’s mission at the crossroads of life will be severed if our generation is permitted to believe that the voice of Jesus Christ is no longer the voice of God. Kenneth Scott Latourette (1884-1968), the great historian of Christianity, said that the centuries reveal a direct relationship between the magnifying of the name of Jesus Christ and a revival of religious faith. But much more than this is true. The incarnation is the authentic authority for Christian involvement in seeking a solution to the tormenting social problems of this moment.
If we believe that God walked the dusty paths of this planet in the garb of flesh, we have no right to preach a disembodied gospel which scorns human needs, earthly problems and all mundane concerns. If Jesus Christ, indeed, was both man and God, then his gospel is the silken cord that binds earth and heaven forever together, and that urges the application of the heavenly insights in the Sermon on the Mount to such problems as racism, poverty, war, population control, ecology, moral confusion.
Here is the initial aspect of Christ’s mighty victory!
- The Crucifixion
Years ago I first read these words of Bishop William Fraser McDowell (1858-1937): “I would not cross the street to give India a new theology; India has more theology than it can understand. I would not cross the street to give China a new code of ethics; China has a vastly better code than ethical life. I would not cross the street to give Japan a new religious literature, for Japan has a better religious literature than religious life. But I would go around the world again and yet again, if it pleased God, to tell India, China and Japan and the rest of the world:
“There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
lose all their guilty stains.”
The Cross, for me at least, is not ultimately subject to minute theological analysis. Men have seen many ideas in it – sacrifice, atonement, expiation, ransom, substitution, and propitiation – each with at least a modicum of truth to contribute to the whole.
The Cross is vastly bigger than the ideas men have had about it. It towers in magnificent mystery above Hugo Grotius and Anselm and Peter Abelard and all the others who have sought to reduce it to theories. Its message is beyond theological formulae. Emil Brunner comes as close as words may approach when he declares that we see three realities on Calvary: “The inviolable holiness of God; the absolute impossibility of overlooking man’s sin; and the illimitable mercy of God.”
In 1848, three Englishmen, all destined to become famous, were on a Paris holiday during the Revolution which overthrew King Louis Philippe. The men were Jowett, a future master of Balliol; Stanley, later Dean of Westminster; and Palgrave, a poet. Palgrave kept a diary and in it is an entry describing the sack of the Palace of the Tuileries by the mob. Everything was being smashed, when suddenly the mob reached the Chapel, broke in the doors, and found themselves staring at the huge painting of Christ crucified behind the altar. Someone called out, “Hats off!” Heads were bared, most of the crowd knelt down, and the picture was carried out to a neighboring church in utter silence.
This is the power of the Cross.
Years ago a Boston preacher set this couplet in my heart: “Christ, the Son of God, hath sent me o’er the widespread lands; Mine the mighty ordination of the pierced hands.”
The rugged, rigid disciplines of Christianity, by which the saints have been made, issue from an understanding of the Cross. Willingness to bear scorn courageously, to make sacrifice daily, to endure hardship and to face danger – these are the attributes of those who have taken a long look at Calvary.
Essential dedication will not-cannot-come to our generation of Christians without a fresh glimpse of the Cross. This is our message – not the dialectic of human philosophy – but Jesus Christ and him crucified, forgiveness of sin, redemption for lost and lonely mankind.
“Nothing in my hand I bring/ Simply to thy Cross I cling.” Here, again, is Christ’s mighty victory!
- The Resurrection
In the little book Interrupted By His Death, Albert Payson Terhune (1872-1942) wrote, “God always finishes his sentences.” The resurrection is the final, necessary clause of the sentence whose earlier parts have dealt with the incarnation and the crucifixion – the crescendo of Christ’s mighty victory. If the identity of Jesus Christ is our authority for the Christian enterprise and the redemption of the Cross is our message, then the resurrection is our hope and our triumph.
I know the resurrection has meaning at the point of abolishing the icy dread of death in the Christian’s heart. One great historian insists that the almost incredible accomplishments of the early Christians were due in large measure to their complete scorn of danger and death.
But I would have us think particularly of the resurrection as God’s ringing pledge of victory for his gospel’s cause and for those who labor in it. A great contemporary Christian thinker has said, ‘‘There had now appeared, in the midst of time, life in a new dimension … The early Christians were not merely preaching the resurrection as a fact; they were living in it as in a new country.”
In one of my pastorates there was a lovely and radiant young woman upon whose life heavy sufferings converged. Her husband was an alcoholic whose tragic condition defied the corrective efforts of successive ministers and a regiment of friends, and made him insensitive to the claims of responsibility, honor and love.
Debts rocketed, community derision for the man she loved cut her to the quick, financial duress kept her working though physically ill and decreed that she must not use her earnings for herself. But there was something memorably buoyant about her. She never lost hope. Others did for her, but not she. The commonest kindness, the tiniest scrap of good news became a harbinger of better things ahead in her perennially confident heart.
Each new morning was a magic scroll, a parchment of reverent optimism. Life was new and something marvelous might happen before nightfall! One day I had preached on “The Christian Hope” and her eyes danced in excitement as she thanked me for letting her hear a fresh utterance of the message God had given to her long before!
She died – all too soon, we thought – but with the banners of ecstatic expectancy flying yet over a debris of terrible heartaches. She was our lady of the resurrection hope. She used to make me think of Wordsworth’s lines: “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky …. “ She was living Christ’s mighty victory!
Today’s headlines and telecasts have little of a hopeful nature to suggest about the coming of the Kingdom! The debilitating intrigues of continuing ideological struggles; the diabolically mad nuclear armament race still raging; the devastating revolution in morals – crime, sex perversion, drugs, alcohol; the generation gap; the lingering, senseless terror of the war in Vietnam; mind and behavior manipulation; genetic engineering; the ethical implications of organ transplants; racism of all colors; violence; lawlessness – and so it goes. But in the midst of all of this, the perceptive Christian senses a strange and wonderful wistfulness about our tragic moment in history. We begin to wonder with tremulous hope if the long tide is turning.
Dr. George Arthur Buttrick reminds us in one of his later works that the sea of faith has been ebbing for four centuries – we are the victims and not the authors of modern skepticism.
Another writes of our present day as an “age of longing.” Perhaps we are almost ready to doubt our doubts and to believe our beliefs again; perhaps we have discovered that our easy answers do not answer at all. Existentialism, in proper perspective, may help us to place our sense measurements of truth in a correctly subordinate position; for a true existentialist knows that a sailor’s knowledge of the weather is a deeper kind of knowing than that of the meteorologist, and that truth is to be found in the events of history rather than in the dialectics of the mind. We may be moving into a new age of faith.
There is a famous story of Faust gambling with his soul, about which an artist has painted a picture of a game of chess with Faust at one side and Satan at the other. In the picture the game is almost over Faust has left only a king, a knight and one or two pawns. He wears on his face a look of utter despair, while at the other side of the board the Devil leers in contemplation of his coming triumph. Many a chess player, looking at the picture, has agreed that the position is hopeless – a checkmate. But one day a master of the game stood in the picture gallery gazing at the scene. He was fascinated at Faust’s expression of utter despair. Then his gaze went to the pieces on the board and he stared at them absorbed as other people came and went. Then, suddenly, the gallery was startled by a ringing shout: “It is a lie! The king and the knight have another move!”
To us who are sons and daughters of the Resurrection faith, it is a parable of our situation. No matter how hopeless the times may seem to be, the King and the knight do have another move! This is the meaning of the Resurrection for the 20th century. And so hope surges again within us, moral muscles tighten, spiritual vision clears, and fear’s palpitations know a great calm. As someone has said, “We cannot be children of the resurrection and not see all the world bathed in resurrection light.”
The resurrection was the divine fiat that validated the facts and the philosophies of the incarnation and the cross. Someone said, “It is no epilogue to the Gospel, no codicil to the divine last will and testament, no appendix to the faith.” It is the triumphant concluding clause in God’s great sentence to man, and without it all that has gone before about the Incarnation and the crucifixion is but a weird jumble of words without meaning. Here is Christ’s mighty victory brought to tremendous and triumphant climax.
In my mind’s eye I see once more the big, brawny furnace-tender pausing in the heat of his task to pass his blackened hand in reverence over the golden crucifix which hung about his neck and receiving from this simple motion the strength and renewal needed to continue his work.
Religion is not just philosophy. When the human mind begins to develop its clever dialectics of God and man, sin and redemption, death and life, it is not necessarily dealing with the gospel. Sermons, even sermons, can prove to be exciting intellectual encounters with intriguing ideas, even ideas about the Bible, lofty philosophical monologues in which the holy, transforming presence of the living, loving, compassionate Lord is totally missing. There is no burning bush, no cry from Calvary, and there are rarely changed lives in the wake of such preaching.
No, the gospel is no dialectic of logic, no system of ethics, no musty set of morals, no book of platitudes. The Gospel is love’s aching arms when life is lonely and barren. The gospel is inconceivable forgiveness when sin has been bleak and persistent. The gospel is hope when hope is long gone, dawning’s bright fingers clutching at the throat of night. The gospel is life when death has done its hideous worst. The gospel is the everlasting light of Christ’s mighty victory in the Incarnation, on the cross and in the resurrection. This – and only this – is the foundation for our message about both personal and social religion. Let us proclaim it with new confidence!
Earl G. Hunt was a United Methodist bishop in North Carolina.
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