As I prepare to preach on Palm Sunday and start with others our journey toward the Triduum, I find myself thinking more and more about the meaning of the Cross.

Here’s a snippet from Luther’s thinking that shows how he followed St. Paul’s reasoning that the Cross is the singular complete revelation of God:

Link: Luther’s Theology of the Cross.

At the heart of [Luther’s] argument is his notion that human beings should not speculate about who God is or how he acts in advance of actually seeing whom he has revealed himself to be. Thus, Luther sees God’s revelation of himself as axiomatic to all theology. Now, there probably is not a heretic in history who would not agree with that, because all theology presupposes the revelation of God, whether in nature, human reason, culture, or whatever.

Luther, however, had a dramatically restrictive view of revelation. God revealed himself as merciful to humanity in the Incarnation, when he manifested himself in human flesh, and the supreme moment of that revelation was on the cross at Calvary. Indeed, Luther sometimes referred enigmatically to Christ crucified as “God’s backside”‚Äîthe point at which God appeared to be the very contradiction of all that one might reasonably have anticipated him to be.

The “theologians of glory,” therefore, are those who build their theology in the light of what they expect God to be like‚Äîand, surprise, surprise, they make God to look something like themselves [emphasis added]. The “theologians of the cross,” however, are those who build their theology in the light of God’s own revelation of himself in Christ hanging on the cross.

That’s the point isn’t it? People who deny the centrality of the cross are really in danger of creating a God (and a portrait of Jesus) that looks like themselves, and not like the God that Jesus revealed to us.

Of course the difficulty that so many people have in thinking about the cross is that they think it teaches us more about God than it actually does about ourselves. When we see a cross, we are in fact confronted with a symbol of just who we really are – and the depths to which we will go to not have to face the truth about ourselves.