Little Christs, Crucifixion, and Resurrection

The entire object of Christian faith is not to be made comfortable, but to made over in the image of Christ.

Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call ‘good infection’. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Martin Luther also speaks of Christians being "little Christs," which necessarily entails crucifixions, as well as resurrections.

First of all, of course, our old sinful selves must be crucified. This happens in several ways.

One is in repentance, the process by which God incites and empowers us to recognize and turn away from sins--favorite or otherwise, seek God's forgiveness offered only in Christ, and receive the power of the Holy Spirit to live in that forgiveness and seek to live as one reconciled to God. This is what Jesus has in mind when He tells those who would follow Him to take up their crosses. Honesty about our sins and our sinfulness so that they and our sinful natures can be crucified is the most critical element in becoming Christ-like.

Ultimately, of course, we will all be crucified at the moments of our deaths. The wages of sin is death.

But Christians believe that because, in His innocence and perfection, Jesus died, He has the power to give the life that He took back from death and hell, not just for Himself but for all who believe in Him, on the first Easter.

As Jesus puts it: "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die." (John 11:25-26)

Being little Christ also means that, through our faith, we have invited to live within us. We no longer live in our own feeble power, a limited power condemned to death from the moment we're conceived. Instead, we live in the power of Jesus Christ. Daily, we invite Christ into the centers of our lives so that, no matter how obstructed by our sinfulness or inborn human hypocrisy, increasingly Christ's thoughts become our thoughts, Christ's priorities are our priorities, Christ's worldview is ours.

Until the crucifixion and resurrection that happens at our deaths, Christians battle the temptation to go the easy way, the way of going along with the world, the way of death. But Christ gives a different way of life...that never ends.

Holy Saturday: The Day Christ Spent in Hell

In the Apostles' Creed, we Christians confess that after dying on the cross, Jesus "descended into hell." This, of course, is the logical conclusion of Jesus' self-sacrifice. He was paying the full price for human sin, bearing in Himself the full punishment our sins deserve in spite of His complete sinlessness. This necessarily meant that after Jesus died, He had to go to hell.

When people die naked in their sin, without the protective armor of God's grace given to all with faith in Christ, hell, separation from God, is their destination. Jesus warned of this when He told Nicodemus, "Those who believe in [Jesus] are not condemned; but those who do not believe in Him are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God" (John 3:18).

Jesus made His atoning sacrifice complete by sharing not only in death, but also in the experience of hell itself. 1 Peter 3:18-20 says:

For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, ¹⁹in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, ²⁰who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. 

(Peter goes on, by the way, to speak of baptism as the means by which the old self is drowned and God's Holy Spirit brings new life in Christ.)

We remember Maundy Thursday as the day on which Jesus, with His face set toward dying for us, instituted the Sacrament of His Body and Blood (Holy Communion, The Lord's Supper, The Eucharist) and gave a new command to His Church: that believers love one another as Christ loved us, sacrificially.

We remember Good Friday as the day on which sinless God-enfleshed died in our places on the cross, so that all who believe in Him will find their sins covered by His life-giving blood and grace, His undeserved favor.

We remember Easter Sunday, of course, as the day when Jesus rose from the dead, claiming eternal life with God for all who believe in (that is, entrust their lives to) Jesus Christ.

We should also remember Holy Saturday, the day on which Jesus bore the full punishment our sins merit, descending into hell, but at the same time, proclaiming that God's plan had been fulfilled; the perfect sacrifice had been offered; the powers of the devil, evil, and hell had been crushed for all eternity. The devil, evil, and hell still wreak havoc in this world. They will until the day when Christ returns to fully establish His kingdom. But they are in their death throes. Christ has conquered!