Maybe it is just a cheap cross, but He is gone again. Maybe Jesus went on walk-about in Africa or wading through a rice field in Japan or lost in a sea of people in downtown London. I am not sure where He goes, but this is not the first time that I can’t find him. The funny 
thing is I have affixed Him to
this cross with superglue a few times before.
Not sure why Jesus can’t just stay put nice and neat on the middle of the cross where I can always find Him.
The real question is who is missing? Me or Jesus? I mean I see the cross, the pain and suffering. The struggle to do His Father’s will and pay the price for our human failures, our willful sins that separated us from God in the first place. But why? Why do it in the first place? And even more paradoxically why get off the cross and return to the same people who put you there. The same people who, when you were no longer breathing, turned, walked away as if it had all been a dream. A long, hot, weary dream that left them with nothing but a few distracted years learning or not learning the ways of a Rabbi that claimed to be God’s only son–the unblemished Lamb, the final sacrifice to put right what Adam and Eve had so quickly thrown away,
Yes, yes I know it was my sin that placed him on the cross the first time but why come back? Why be found again on the beach cooking breakfast for his fearful, forgetful disciples. What attracts Jesus to us so desperately that he returns to claim His own from the jaws of eternal death.
What are we that Jesus is so fond of us.
Why did Christ become a human at all? A tiny vulnerable babe contained the creator of the world. Did my sin, the sin of the fallen world force the hand of God to act. Like at tantrum 2 year old in a grocery store our act of disobedience cause the the maker of the world to take on flesh rushing to save us from ourselves. We, humans manipulated God into acting on our behalf?
Or as Chris Webb asserts in his life changing book The Fire of the Word 
All Creation was made for Christ,…in Paul’s earliest letters; in {Christ} all things in heaven and on earth were created…all things have been created through him and for him” Col. 1:16.
What if Jesus came”rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race” Prov 8;31. Returning to a creation he loved for that primary reason, to love us. Not to scold, reform or remake us but to love each person right in the space and time of their walk on earth.
Jesus did not return because we sinned. He returned because He loved us.
Hugh of St Victor wrote:
“All sacred Scripture is but one book, and that one book is Christ, because all divine Scripture speaks of Christ, and all divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ.”
Christ real offering is his love for all of us. We did not force his hand by our depravity. With or without the fall, Christ would have come for his beloved. That changes everything.
Christ would have come for the human race even if we had not sinned.
There is no neat box to place Christ in. His love is so expansive. We focus on the single act of sacrifice rather than the whole of scripture where He continually reveals His true nature. Love.
By continually gluing Him to the fixed position of the cross we often forget the threads of love that He wove through the Old Testament. Christ met his beloved people in all the pre and post phases of scripture through heroes, ( Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Gideon, Samson) and miracles, parting of the red sea, holding back the sun, crumbling the walls.
All this is offered as one great glorious witness to Jesus, who is greater than the angels, who mediates a better covenant than Moses, who embodies the Sabbath rest of the covenant, who fulfills the great priesthood of Melchizedek, who ministers to the true heavenly sanctuary of which the earthly temple is simply and imitation, who offers the supreme and final sacrifice, who establishes the foundation of the heavenly Jerusalem.
Webb, The Fire of the Word p.135
Pinning Him to the cross simply denies the true vastness, depth and LOVE of God.
For More Jesus:
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