Thursday
Thursday
Victory through the Cross
They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb.
Revelation 12:11
It is impossible to read the New Testament without being struck by the atmosphere of joyful confidence that pervades it. It stands out in relief against the rather insipid religion that often passes for Christianity today. There was no defeatism in the early Christians. Victory, conquest, triumph, and overcoming—this was the vocabulary of those first followers of Jesus. They attributed this victory to the cross.
Yet any contemporary observer who saw Christ die would have listened with astonished incredulity to the claim that the Crucified was a conqueror. Look at him there, spread-eagled on his cross, robbed of all freedom, pinned and powerless. It appears to be total defeat.
But the Christian claim is that the reality is the opposite of the appearance. What looked like the defeat of goodness by evil was more certainly the defeat of evil by goodness. Overcome there, Jesus was himself overcoming. The victim was the victor, and the cross is still the throne from which he rules the world.
In vivid imagery the apostle Paul describes how the powers of evil surrounded Jesus and closed in around him on the cross, how he stripped them from himself, disarmed them, and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross (Col. 2:15). What precise form this cosmic battle took is not explained. But we do know that Jesus resisted the temptations to avoid the cross, to retaliate, and to resort to worldly power. He remained uncompromised.
The theme of victory through the cross, which the ancient Greek fathers and later Latin fathers celebrated, was lost by some medieval theologians but recovered by Martin Luther at the Reformation. This was the thesis of Gustav Aulen, a Swedish theologian, in his influential book Christus Victor. He was right to recover this somewhat neglected motif. Yet we must not make the opposite mistake, emphasizing the theme of triumph at the expense of the themes of atonement and revelation.
For further reading: Revelation 12:1–12