Upon the Cross Extended

Upon the Cross Extended, Paul Gerhardt, 1607-1676

Upon the cross extended
See, world, your Lord suspended.
Your Savior yields his breath,
The Prince of Life from heaven
Himself has freely given
To shame and blows and bitter death.

Your cords of love, my Savior,

Bind me to you forever,I am no longer mine.
To you I gladly tender
All that my life can render
And all I have to you resign.

In teaching various classes in religion at the university over the years, I have found it interesting at the initial session to get answers to a generic question like, „What is the Christian faith really all about?“ Admittedly, many of the students have little Christian background, but even more shockingly, I got the same answers from those who do. They often say things like „It has to do with obeying the Ten Commandments in the hope that God will accept you“ or „Follow the Golden Rule and you can’t go wrong“ or „Try to be a good person and God will reward you.“

If I counter such commentary with a question like „Now, tell me what all that has to do with Jesus,“ they think about it for a moment and realize that their initial comments were inadequate: „Jesus died for our sins,“ they say. However, the relationship between Jesus‘ crucifixion and the moral life of the Christian has all too often not been thought through.

Too much reading of Gospel stories and too little study of Romans and Galatians shows up in the end. Christianity is after all a religion of both the heart and the mind. Those who avoided Christian instruction at an early age need to catch up now or they will miss the point of the Christian life.

Paul Gerhardt, the 400th Anniversary of whose birth we are remembering this Lenten/Easter season, knew that very well. In his many hymns, he is a good theologian for us. In fact, it is surprising that many can sing his hymns and not be clear about the relationship between the Good News and the good life. Especially in our hymn for today, Upon the Cross Extended, Gerhardt makes it very clear that what we do in the way of obeying commandments or living morally has nothing to do with God’s acceptance of us.

Using very personal language, Gerhardt says, „Your soul in griefs unbounded, Your head with thorns surrounded, You died to ransom me; The cross for me enduring, the crown for me securing, You healed my wounds and set me free.“ Gerhardt says that it is God himself, acting in the death of Jesus who cancels our sins and failures and rejects any need on our part to earn acceptance. That the Christian is to understand this act of God as transforming love, Gerhardt makes clear: „Your cords of love, my Savior, Bind me to you forever, I am no longer mine. To you I gladly tender All that my life can render And all I have to you resign.“

Here is the power of the Christian life, spelled out in encouraging clarity. It is not that we are left to ourselves to trump up a pious perfection. We are not seeking sainthood in that sense of the undefiled prim and proper. We recognize that God’s love in Christ is at work in us by faith, motivating us, encouraging us, challenging us to let that love be operative as our life principle. What follows is not our acceptance, however. That took place on Calvary. „I am no longer mine,“ Gerhard exults. What follows is, as St. Paul explains, a life in which Christ lives in me, reaching out through me, to touch others with his love.

Of course, there is a sense in which this can be understood too mechanically, too perfunctorily: „God did it, I believe it, So be it!“ says the Fundamentalist. There is more to the Christian faith and life than such simplicity. As God’s love embraces us, and we are more and more transformed into those who love others, the process called Christian life and living works itself out in and through us. As Jim Perkinson once put it in an article in Cross Currents (2001), „To understand Jesus‘ death too quickly as apart of a divine plan worked out totally in advance, is, in fact, to give up too quickly …“ on the hope that through Christ’s love we and others can stop their oppressing and sinning before they do harm to themselves and others. In other words, the impact of Christ’s cross shapes us over time.

Gerhardt knew the importance of giving love a chance, of letting God’s love in Christ have its way with us over time: „Your cross I place before me; Its saving pow’r restore me, Sustain me in the test.“ The place of Christ’s crucifixion, the role of the cross for the Christian, guides and attends us through all our days until our final one. In many years as a pastor, I often had the touching responsibility to be the only one who was left in a person’s life to be in contact with them. All relatives and friends had died and they were now totally alone. The cross of Christ, to such people, has great power and meaning. It assures them that when all human love is gone, God’s love is forever. This is really the point of the Christian life-to know that love, to know it sustains us in the test, and that when all else is gone, it alone remains.

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David Zersen
President Emeritus
Concordia University at Austin
E-Mail: djzersen@aol.com