Ladder this to sinners given,
By which Christ, the King of heaven,
All things to Himself hath led;
Whose form rightly comprehended
Shows that its four arms, extended
Wide, o’er earth’s four quarters spread [1].
Adam of St. Victor’s twelfth-century sequence holds out for us this image of the cross as extended over the whole world. Constantine was famously told in a vision, “In this sign, conquer,” yet the cross’s conquering power did not lie waiting for a Roman emperor or his military or social victories. It was already a sign of conquest just as much as it was a sign of surrender. It was the death of one man but the ladder to immorality for all men.
This only begins the long catalogue of paradox stemming from this “sign of contradiction.” The sinless one dies for sinners, the just for the unjust. Through death he brings life. By his stripes we are healed. St. Ambrose writes, of the hatred of the angry mob, “Wickedness has just such laws as to hate innocence and love guilt.” But it is through this cruel hatred and injustice that we meet the love and justice of God.
Scripture speaks of the wrath of God. Many a critic of Christianity, as well as not a few misguided Christians, take this to suggest that the cross represents some kind of divine punishment, where the Father pours out his seemingly uncontrolled anger on the Son. Yet, as Margaret Turek puts it, “God’s wrath is the form that God’s love takes when it encounters whatever is opposed to and hardened against the designs of his love. It is always exercised in the service of these designs. God’s wrath coincides with his zeal to carry out the work of his love against sin” [2].
There is no opposition between wrath and love. The cross indeed represents God’s anger and anguish over sin, but as an aspect of God’s own nature we dare not conceive of it as some sort of irrational passion that must be quenched through violence. The violence is what we do, addicted to the powers of darkness. God’s wrath and his love are both represented in his zealous willingness to accomplish his will, to destroy and conquer that power of darkness from within through the sign of the cross.
Perhaps one of the most unfortunate side-effects of those who view the cross as a divine punishment—as something inflicted on the Son by the Father—is that we lose any sense of the Father’s own passionate love, the love so visibly and wildly depicted by that parable of the prodigal son we heard just two Sundays ago. This is a difficult reality, because the Tradition takes great pains to assert the impassibility of the divine nature; patripassionism names a heresy whereby the Father suffers on the cross. Even our Lord Jesus Christ, we must say, suffers and dies in his human nature but not in his divine nature.
Yet we can overplay what the Tradition actually says here, for Scripture and Tradition likewise give us picture after picture of God’s passionate love for his children, his providential care for them, his grief and anguish over their infidelity and sin. The Fathers’ insistence on the divine impassibility is fundamentally an attempt to preserve the distinction between God and not-God. Whatever we mean when we speak of the suffering of God, it cannot mean what it means when we speak of the suffering of creatures. It is not that God does not suffer in any way at all, but he in no way suffers like a creature; he is not ruled or conquered by passions, but only suffers in a way compatible with his freedom and perfection. His suffering, unlike ours, is not merely passive, but active—an expression of his love and his will.
All of this should lead us to this central insight as we turn our gaze to the cross today and for the rest of this week: The anguish of the Passion is not some abstract transaction of the cosmic accountants. It is God’s work with us, in us, through us, for us, and despite us. It is the work of the whole Trinity, and the work of the whole of humanity. God’s love for us isn’t an idea, but an eternal decision, played out and realized in time. We walk through it again this week as if for the first time, so that we can open our own arms wide to the embrace of the cross.
[1] Sequence for the Invention of the Holy Cross, Laudes Crucis, Adam of St. Victor, trans. Digby Wrangham. “Haec est scala peccatorum, / Per quam Christus, Rex caelorum, / Ad se traxit omnia; / Forma cujus hoc ostendit / Quae terrarium comprehendit / Quatuor confinia.”
[2] Margaret Turek, Atonement: Soundings in Biblical, Trinitarian, and Spiritual Theology (Ignatius, 2022), 140.