Nielsen’s Nook

Resolution in The Cross of Christ

In the introduction to Wiesel’s Night, François Mauriac contemplates the day in which the young Wiesel had questioned him about God and evil. He writes:

What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him – the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished?…This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.¹

I do not know that I would have had the wherewithal to know how to pastorally apply the truth of Mauriac’s affirmation had I been in his place. No doubt the necessity to apply the truth of scripture to those crushed and struck down by this world is paramount. The immensity of immanent evil that Wiesel had suffered is in itself overwhelming. However, there is no peace in the face of any amount of suffering apart from the Cross of Christ. It is through the Cross that the transcendence of Eternal God of heaven and earth, comes down through suffering to apprehend our hearts for hope, giving meaning to all suffering and pain.

Calvary is judo. The enemy’s own power is used to defeat him. Satan’s craftily orchestrated plot, rolled along according to plan by his agents Judas, Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, culminated in the [torturous] death of God. And this very event, Satan’s conclusion, was God’s premise. Satan’s end was God’s means. It saved the world.²

Our hope as Christian people, which is universally offered to all people, is that the transcendent God of all Heaven and Earth has come down and bound himself by way of covenant to His people. He has proven ever faithful, decreeing the immutable and infallible means to securing His covenant with us. It is Christ who is the Man of Sorrows, who is familiar with suffering, despised and rejected by men. It is Christ who was crushed for our transgressions, a spotless lamb led to slaughter. It was He who came and made his dwelling in the ghettoes of humanity. It was He who was assigned with the wicked, though He Himself was purer innocence than the gentlest of babes. Yet it was the Lord’s purposed-will to crush Him, to cause Him to suffer, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring us to the Lord (c.f., Acts 2:23).

__________
¹ François Mauriac, introduction to “Night”, in The Night Trilogy, by Elie Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 11.
² Peter Kreeft. Making Sense out of Suffering. (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1986), 132-33.