Sooner or later, every human being, no matter who they are, will have to come to the Crucified Christ. As Creator and Redeemer of all, He alone is the Judge of what we each have done in our lives and of who we have become as a result. That’s true whether we have believed in Him, denied Him, ignored Him or never even heard of Him. And He will judge us, not by our own standards, but by His. No matter how sincerely held, our views about Him, about ourselves or about others, are but a breath. But His judgment on us will be quite simply the truth. He is the measure of genuine humanity. He gives the verdict on each of our personal histories and of all history. He is not just on the right side of history, but its core and consummation. To Him belongs all time and all the ages.

“Truth? What is that?”, asks Pilate. When he himself came to die, the truth of his own life will have been mirrored back to him by the very Truth he crucified. And in whatever ways he chose and became a lie, Pilate will have realised as he died that the Crucified bore that lie so that he could be forgiven and become true again. We are all Pontius Pilate. Our sins deny the truth of Christ in one way or the other and so deny the real truth about ourselves. At our death we too will see, to our dismay, the lies to which we have given birth and, to our amazement, how Christ has absorbed our iniquity into His crucified body. We will look on the One whom we have pierced and weep for Him as for an only son. Those bitter yet blessed tears will break the hardness of our hearts, and His loving gaze will renew and restore our hearts to make them at last capable of loving as He has loved us. His pierced side and His piercing gaze will cleanse us and rebirth us into truth.

We cannot come to the Cross with excuses or justifications or try to somehow outargue the Crucified with our personal world view. We will be dumbstruck and silent, for the truth then will not be somehow a matter for discussion. It will stare us in the face, it will be visible, irrefutable. If we are truly sinless, we will see it reflected in the innocence of Christ’s pierced heart and join Him in suffering for the guilty. I may think in all sincerity that I am a good person, or that someone I know or love is a good person, but only Christ is truly good, and only He can judge the goodness or evil of any person. If we truly love Christ, we will desire to know and obey only His truth about sin, justice, right, wrong, good and evil. If someone is truly good, their goodness will lead them sooner or later to Christ and to living faith in Him and in all He commands. At the Cross, every mask and veil and façade and barrier will fall. Christ Crucified is the Revealer of every truth, without exception. He is the Apocalypse, the Revelation.

And if the Cross faces us with the truth about ourselves, it more wonderfully yet reveals to us the truth about Christ. As I get older, I begin to understand the true cost of true love. I also realize with greater pain how little I still understand, and can ever understand, of the true cost of the truest, most wondrous love of Christ crucified. Facing such love is almost too much to bear. Of old it was said that whoever saw the face of God would die. Well, to look upon the love of Christ Crucified is to see the face of God. Opening yourself to the gradual realization of the love which that face reveals, is like being forced to gaze on the blazing sun and to be drawn irresistibly into its gravitational pull. It’s too much, Lord! It’s too prodigal and prodigious! And even if the number of human beings who have ever lived were to be multiplied to the exponential of a billion, this redemptive love of yours would still infinitely surpass our need!

Corresponding to the utter immensity of Christ’s crucified love, there is the immensity of His pain: not firstly the pain endured in His humanity, but the spiritual pain which the oceanic cess pit of our sins has caused Him in His divinity. I can so easily talk my sins down and whitewash them with all manner of self-justification. I can talk so easily of “white lies”, and “just wee sins”, and rely on ambiguous judgments of conscience. But in this way I fail miserably in sensitivity to the heart-breaking sorrow I cause the Crucified. I may procrastinate in separating myself from certain sins with a heartless presumption that someday I will do Jesus the favour of repenting. I might even appeal to the certainty of His compassion and mercy as an excuse to keep on sinning, when His heart is bleeding for me to listen to His proclamation, “The time has come! The Kingdom of heaven is close at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel!”

Christ has done so much for us as if to prove not only how well He loves us but also that there is nothing more He could have done, can do or will do. There’s no more water in the well of divine love: it has all gushed forth to the last drop on the Cross. Ironically, it is this utter self-emptying of his love which stands as the condemnation of those who, even in the face of it, will not be moved. The Cross saves those who will weep for the only Son; it will condemn those whose eyes remain dry and cold because their hearts have no room for the love of God.

To His Cross, Jesus desires to draw all the dross of our souls: the broken hearts and lives, the pain of rejection and betrayal, the slavery to sin and addiction, the mental and spiritual sickness, the torment by evil spirits, the deadly sins, the lost and abandoned. Any ill, evil or woe of any kind or intensity in any person of any kind must eventually come to the Cross of Jesus, because in His body on the Tree He has already taken control of every evil, he has exercised judgment upon it and he has delivered his beloved human race from it all. “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all to myself”, says Jesus. It’s an expression of the inevitable, but it’s also an expression of the age-old yearning of the Heart of God to bring all His prodigal children home. As the Cross stands still, the world revolves. But eventually the world will stop and stand still with Mary and John before the crucified Lamb of God. For, in the end, the world has nowhere else to go.