What happened on the cross?

I hear it said frequently that God died on the cross. Then I hear the next statement that God in Christ died on the cross. Or that Jesus' human nature died on the cross but his divine nature didn't. There are a million different variations on this theme.

But it hit me in church today that what happened on the cross was the door shut when Jesus died. That open door to heaven, that immediate access to God through Jesus closed when his heart stop beating. That was the darkness spoken of in the Gospel accounts. God was still in the world as there is nowhere He is not but what happened there on Calvary is that intimacy, that intensity, of God present in full through the fleshly being of Jesus was gone.

God was intimately present in Genesis. Over time, as the Biblical writings attest, God is more and more distant from His people. Yet the Second Temple period is not silent; the "400 years of silence" of which Christian tradition speaks is a myth. No, the literature of this period of time is immense. The Nag Hammadi caves attest to this. So they were looking, seeking, asking, writing amidst the continuous confusion their lands being swarmed with invaders, from the Babylonians to the Greeks to the Romans, a whirlwind in which the Jewish homeland was caught.

So he was sought in a Book, in the Word, both in the Hebrew writings and the Greek philosophy that had made such inroads. And here comes the Christian claim that God Himself was found not in a book, not in philosophy, but in a person. God, in fullness, dwelling in and through Christ. It was if you could look into Jesus and, seeing through him, see God.

This was what was closed when he died on the cross. The stories of him lived, books about him were written and the Holy Spirit is ever present within the hearts of believers making Jesus very real and very present in their lives. But these are growing pains, both of the individual who accepts this call, and that of the world as a whole made up of the individuals who accept the challenge to follow him and make him real in the world.

But on the cross that door was closed. To those who witnessed it they sensed that communion with God has been broken, that there was a rift in the universe.

And then there is the resurrection. Jesus, no longer entangled in the likeness of men, is free from the fetters of death. He is the resurrection; he is the new life; he is the firstborn from the dead; he is the Alpha and the Omega point of this new creation, restoring the original creation that men had lost.

He has opened us a new door into the heavenlies, having entered the Holy of Holies, his life, his sacrifice, his blood, the completion and perfection of all that the Law desired to do in men. There was nothing left for men to do; he had accomplished all that men could ever hope to achieve, all that men longed for in the deepest parts of their bowels. He is now priest, king, lord, all of those titles given to lesser men as "types" of what Jesus was to become.

So God did not die on the cross. Jesus died on the cross.