Good Friday and The Centrality of the Cross...Continued from page 1

Across the Horizontal
Across the horizontal, the Cross links all that has gone before with all that is yet to come. Standing at the interface of eternity past and eternity future, the Cross is the junction of both historical time and historic time. Although these two expressions of time appear synonymous, they reflect the differing aspects used in the New Testament: chronos and kairos.
Time as a quantity is chronos: a linear measurement of historical change. It's from chronos we get the term chronological time: the continuous thread of time sewing the past, present and future into a seamless fabric.
Kairos time is qualitative of a moment or event metaphysically pregnant with meaning and importance. It is the time spoken of when Paul writes the Galatian church, "But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons." Kairos brings together the types, "shadows," and prophesies of the scriptures with their fulfillments in the spacetime continuum in which, the Cross is central.

In chronos, the Cross splits historical time into B.C. and A.D. In kairos, the Cross stands between the epochal phenomena of the Creation and the New Creation, the Fall and Redemption, Israel and the Church, the Old Covenant and the New, law and grace, and the pre-incarnate Word and the Word made flesh. In kairos, the eternal transcends and fulfills the temporal.
Where They Meet
Where the upright timber and crossbeam meet is a crown of thorns adorning Him whose utterance, "It is finished," announced to the universe the unimaginable: Everlasting communion with God is possible! At that momentous juncture, a pair of hands fastened to a rough hewn log reaches out to a broken and hurting world.
In a posture of divine openness, God invites us to move out from the crossroads toward the Cross and be taken up in his embrace.
From the Crossroads to the Cross
It is at the crossroads of Golgotha we face our true condition: one so desperate, it is beyond our ability to fix. As German astronomer, Johann Hieronymus Schroeder, once wrote, "It has been the cross which has revealed to good men that their goodness has not been good enough." And that can be a hard message indeed.
For those who don't believe in God, feelings of guilt and remorse are not the result of violating some divine code of morality, but are hang-ups to be overcome.
For others, God is a cosmic scorekeeper who keeps track of performance to determine our merit and worth. If the good done in this world outweighs the bad, then heaven awaits. If not, our destiny is either a purifying process of re-cycling or final removal. But since the criteria for a passing grade are unknown, our "worthiness quotient" is up to guesswork and uncertainty.
But for those who accept the divine call, God is the Savior who extends the gift of eternal life to all who receive Him. Like Clapton's protagonist, they have come to the crossroads acknowledging both their need and debt. But unlike him, they move from the crossroads to the Cross. It's there they look up, fall to their knees, and ask the Lord above, "Save me if you please."
Instead of the restless uncertainty haunting the hero of "Crossroads," these sojourners have the settled confidence spoken of by the apostle John: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life."
Such is the centrality of the Cross.
"The cross is central. It is struck into the middle of the world, into the middle of time, into the middle of destiny. The cross is struck into the heart of God." ~ Frederick W. Norwood