In His death Christ embraces the world; the very world howling for His crucifixion. Was there ever a love like His that overcomes the world's hostility by patiently absorbing it into Himself? The Psalmist prophesied His universal mission, 'You have worked salvation in the midst of the earth' ( Ps 74:12). Although (we think) Golgotha is not at the geographical center of the world, Jesus makes it the epicenter of His mission of compassion for sinners. By stretching out His arms at Golgotha he pulls all that needs redemption into the mathematical point of His cross. Nothing is beyond His grasp; no sin is too great or too powerful, too insignificant or too unimportant. No human is too great for Him to draw to Himself nor too small for His concern. No future or present or past is unable to be drawn into the point of the cross. It pinions all under the pole round which everything revolves. The nails, which affix Him to the pole, enable Him to embrace the world. What makes Him captive to death frees Him to unfetter the captives.

 

This one truly free person puts His freedom into the chains of death that we might be set free. The one truly righteous person puts His righteousness at risk by placing it in our hands by faith, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. And how did we repay Him for this? What have we returned to Him for this one act of mercy? We return to him nothing but vinegar and gall to drink. When He looks for good fruit in us, we have only yielded bad. The branches have been unfruitful. But He, the Vine, has determined to give His life-sustaining body and blood for us Christians to eat and to drink. While we produced only sour grapes, He has given us to drink of His blood returning again and again to draw us into the fellowship supper of His love. We behold God, and eat and drink ( Ex 24:11). Who goes away from this repast unchanged?

 

It is ironic that the narrower the point under the cross the more there is to experience of God's compassion in Christ. The more completely we focus on Christ and His cross the more rich and broad our experience of the grace of God. When the Church proclaims the narrow message of Christ crucified it embraces all people, races, languages, nations, and tribes. Christ stretches out His arms to embrace all. In C. S. Lewis's consummation of the Chronicles of Narnia, entitled The Last Battle, he portrays Aslan's faithful coming into a tiny stable on a battlefield where his warriors presume a faithful but certain death will befall them. As they enter the stable they become aware that as it grows smaller everything gets greater and ever larger. As they pass from Narnia into the paradise of the blessed, experiencing the full expanse of Aslan's world, their refrain is "Further Up and Further In." The Lord Jesus calls us from the narrow confines of our sin-sick world into the point of His cross where all the expanse of His love will open out for us. Our refrain then this Lenten season should be, "Further Up and Further In." Let's go into the cross!