Because
we’ve compressed all of Holy Week into this one day, you may now be experiencing
spiritual whiplash. We started meditatively in the 4:00 hour with the somber
Stations of the Cross. Then this worship service began jubilantly with our Palm
Sunday processional. Now we are back at
the cross, the darkest moment in the Christian year, the "crux" of
the Christian story and faith. But maybe
the wildly veering emotions of Holy Week are best experienced in the liturgical
equivalent of time-elapsed photography.
To move abruptly with Jesus from his triumphal entry in Jerusalem to his
betrayal, arrest, trial, torture, and death—to hear the cheers turn to jeers over
the course of mere minutes—may allow us to fully appreciate the fleeting
capacity for human devotion, the fearsome power of mob mentality, and the
truest meaning of the cross.
I
must say, however, that I would prefer NOT to preach about the cross. It has
caused too much confusion and conflict.
I would prefer NOT to preach about the crucifixion. It is a horrific act
that has sometimes been memorialized in ways that glorify violence. At times I
feel about sermons on the crucifixion the way some people feel about the media
attention given to mass murderers. The
less said, the better.
But
Holy Week is upon us. The cross demands that even
progressive Christians like us answer for this dangerous symbol, acknowledge
this dark event, and align ourselves with this crucified Jesus. The cross still
has power. And we can contribute to either its harmful or its healing
effects. The cross is never neutral.
If
you think the cross of Christ harmed only one man, Jesus, over 2000 years ago,
then you have not seen the injurious way others continue to use it. From the Crusader's cross that led Christian
soldiers onward to slay people of other faiths—to the KKK's fiery crosses that
terrorized people for their racial or religious differences, the cross has
sometimes been used to sponsor and sanctify violence. When women and minorities have been counseled
to just accept injustice because "we all have our crosses to bear,"
the cross of Christ has been used to silence and intimidate.
And
in more subtle ways, the cross sometimes inadvertently promotes violence
because our culture's most popular Christian interpretation of the cross says
it’s an instrument of God's righteous anger. That’s a problem because as your
God behaves, so you behave. For many, the cross teaches that God required
innocent blood to be spilled to pay for the sins you and I have committed, sins
for which the penalty is eternal punishment in hell.
It’s
understandable that Jesus’s first followers immediately began trying to make
sense of their beloved leader’s death, so various theologies developed early to
construct meaning for Jesus’s undeserved death.
But the Church never settled on one theology of the cross. Perhaps the most common explanation today for
Jesus’s death is often called sacrificial or penal or substitutionary atonement
theology, a branch of Christian soteriology which posits that the life of a
completely innocent human was the price a just God required to forgive human
sins.
Certainly this theology “preaches well.”[i] The gruesome details of Jesus’s torture can evoke sympathy in all but the most heartless. Add to that story the explanation that he endured all of that so that we could be spared eternal torture—and we are moved from compassion for this innocent man to guilty gratitude. “He suffered for YOUR sake,” the preacher accuses. “Imagine that crown of thorns pressing into YOUR brow. Imagine those nails being driven into YOUR hands and feet.” We proceed through the stations of the cross or a sermon about the cross wincing at each blow. There is power in such preaching. Power. Or manipulation.
That’s
not a sermon I can preach. I
cannot. The problem with that
interpretation of the cross is that it describes a rigid God whose
punishment for any and every sin is the death penalty, but who will allow an
innocent to stand in for the guilty. The
problem with substitutionary atonement is that God the Parent and God the Son
are fractured into the punisher and the punished in ways that strain the unity
of Trinitarian theology. The problem
with this theology is that the God Jesus served in order to usher in a kingdom
of peace is a God who resorts to violence.
But the God we’ve seen Jesus pointing to, as we’ve been reading through Luke’s Gospel this year, is a God who blesses the peacemakers, who is pictured as a forgiving father of a prodigal son who welcomes home the lost one without any punishment, much to the consternation of the son who never strayed. Today’s reading similarly underscores Jesus’s rejection of violence, even as his enemies plot his death. When the temple police come to arrest him and a disciple defends Jesus by cutting off the ear of a man in the arresting party, Jesus rebukes both those arresting him and his own disciples drawing swords to defend him. “No more of this!” he cries (Luke 22:51). No more of this cycle of violence, he says with his own death. We cannot end violence with violence.
But the God we’ve seen Jesus pointing to, as we’ve been reading through Luke’s Gospel this year, is a God who blesses the peacemakers, who is pictured as a forgiving father of a prodigal son who welcomes home the lost one without any punishment, much to the consternation of the son who never strayed. Today’s reading similarly underscores Jesus’s rejection of violence, even as his enemies plot his death. When the temple police come to arrest him and a disciple defends Jesus by cutting off the ear of a man in the arresting party, Jesus rebukes both those arresting him and his own disciples drawing swords to defend him. “No more of this!” he cries (Luke 22:51). No more of this cycle of violence, he says with his own death. We cannot end violence with violence.
And
as he hung from the cross, Jesus forgave and empathized with his torturers, realizing
they did not know what they were doing (Luke 23:34). If Jesus is the human face of God, then God
is not interested in retributive justice.
God is interested in restorative justice that offers the possibility of
restoring relationships and transforming lives.
Certainly there are consequences for sin, but if Jesus is our best
revelation of God, then the Gospels completely contradict a theology that says
Jesus had to pay for our sins with his life.
The cross is what humanity does.
Jesus’s forgiveness is what God does—and what we can do by God’s grace
and Jesus’s example.
I
cannot preach a message of the cross that Christ suffered in my stead. In fact, I agree with Charles Hefling that
“it is the other way around. [Jesus] accepted [the cross] because we have
to. His was a cross that had always been
ours, the one way open to us, in a skewed world, for putting a stop to the
consequences of our own malice without adding to them—an appeal for us to
follow him by willingly taking up whatever crosses the world imposes” and “forgiving.”
By the power of God’s Loving Spirit still at work for peace in this
world, we can reject retaliation. We can
follow Jesus’s third way—which is neither the way of violence nor the way of
passive acceptance of injustice but instead is the way of creative,
transformative nonviolence.[ii] Sometimes that way does lead to a physical
death. Always it leads to a dying of false values and a false self and the
rebirth of a truer self in union with Christ.
The
cross is how God in Christ Jesus entered into our human suffering, so the cross
also draws us into solidarity with all others who suffer. It is a terrible calling—to stand with those
who suffer. But it is how WE are
saved—from our own egos, our isolated little lives, our sense that we are the
center of the universe.
The
cross can save the world. It shouts to us that
violence can never end violence, and our world will never be safe until we
learn that. The cross instructs us in
forgiveness, in compassion for neighbor and for creation. It widens the door to the kingdom of peace,
our saving hope. It shows that God is
all-sufficient. To misread the cross and
turn it into a symbol of divine violence is dangerous theology. Preaching AGAINST sacrificial atonement
theology is, I believe, an important corrective to popular Christianity.
Nearly
two years ago we began, with Todd’s excellent leadership, a process to create Open
Table’s logo. I initially hoped we would not use a cross in our logo because of
the bad theology that often gets associated with that most traditional symbol
of Christianity. It’s just so hard to
say, with a silent symbol, that WE view the cross differently. But the stylized,
modernized, subtle cross in our logo mitigates against associations with “The
Old Rugged Cross.” And the truth is, even progressive congregations that don’t hang
out a literal cross or don’t use it prominently must still grapple with the
theology of the cross.
Oddly
enough, you may have noticed that Open Table’s logo has been fading away from
the front page of our worship bulletins.
And oddly enough, it’s the cross that is no longer visible. I promise this has not been my intent. I’m trying to find a way to correct my technical problem with our logo’s jpg image.
But it’s an unintended irony that I’m speaking today about the primary
Christian symbol at a time when it has disappeared from our worship
bulletins. To paraphrase Robert Frost,
“Something there is that doesn’t love a cross.”
You
know, I’m a little envious of the symbols of other world religions. Other folks went with images of beauty and
light: a 6-pointed star for Judaism, a
crescent moon for Islam, a lotus for Buddhism. Christianity’s symbol? An instrument of death.[iii] Who was in charge of our marketing 2000 years
ago? There have been other Christian symbols over the centuries—like earliest
symbol, the ichthus (fish). The cross
didn’t gain prominence for several centuries.
New Christian symbols may emerge in the future.
Maybe we should gather some focus groups and hire Todd to create a new logo for ALL
of Christianity and do a rebranding. This symbol has been taken too literally, has
stirred up vengefulness when its purpose was the opposite, has been
appropriated for some bad stuff. This
image is at cross purposes with its intent.
The
cross’s beneficence, of course, can’t be rightly judged on this side of
Easter. On this side of Easter, it may
seem, for now, the cross produces only death.
But
Jesus bet everything on that cross, maintaining faith in God’s nonviolent
love. Recent translations of Paul’s epistles
suggest we’ve perhaps not only misunderstood the meaning of the cross but also
a key phrase in Christian theology.
Verses like Romans 3:22 have traditionally been translated to say that
we are saved by having faith IN Jesus. But the preposition “in,” implicit in
the original Greek phrase, can as easily be translated to mean we are saved by
having the faith OF Jesus. Many scholars
now believe Paul was talking about living faithfully, as did Jesus, who trusted
absolutely in God’s nonviolent love. The
cross saves if it strengthens our faithfulness to God’s loving ways.
As
our service concludes tonight, we'll extinguish the Christ candle, another
fitting symbol since Jesus is the Light of the World. We’ll extinguish the candle not because we
believe Christ's presence is absent from us, not because our faith has dimmed,
but because we're recalling a dark time in human history when it perhaps seemed
that love had been conquered by hate.
The
cross seemed to have obliterated all that was good. But it’s too early to know if the cross was
ultimately salvific—for you, for me.
It’s too early in the history of humanity, too early in the liturgical
year, to know if the kingdom of peace has a chance. But come back next Sunday. Maybe by the dawning of Easter light we’ll
see the cross marking a moment that is not about pay back but about paying it
forward. Maybe Easter will tell us the
rest of the story.
[i] Hefling,
Charles. “Why the Cross? God’s
At-one-ment with Humanity” The Christian
Century (11 March 2013). www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-02/why-cross.
[ii] This
idea of Jesus’s third way is from Wink, Walter.
The Powers That Be. New York:
Doubleday, 1998.
[iii]
Buechner, Frederick. “Cross” in Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. 21.
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