Biting and unbelieving comedian Bill Hicks challenged Christians about wearing crosses around our necks. He chided us that when Jesus comes back, the last thing he would want to see is another cross. Not unlike Hicks, liberal theologians get squeamish about the saving power of the cross and distance themselves from it with critiques that attack academic euphemisms like blood atonement.
My friend, colleague, and our “religion and culture”
book-discussion leader assigned our Sunday school class homework this week:
Consider and contemplate our understanding of and relationship with the cross.
And do this in the context of a compelling and challenging chapter called “The
Cross as Futility, Not Forgiveness” in an excellent and provocative book we’re
reading by Robin Meyers called Saving
Jesus From The Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus.
This blog serves as part of my response to that homework.
Crosses as powerful symbols predate Christianity and
are not the singular insignia of our faith. Some Christians prefer the fish to
the cross as an identity marker for Jesus followers. I confess I simultaneously
love the empty cross and accept brutality of the bloody crucifix. As contradictory
and ubiquitous its grip on our consciousness, we cling to it in comfort. As
theologically problematic as we might render its salvific power, we sing of
“the rugged cross” and need “nothing but the blood.”
From my enormous sympathies for Meyer’s intentions
and investigations, I’m ultimately left lingering with discontent at his
conclusions. I easily devoured Saving
Jesus, and alongside my mixed reactions to the text, our class discussions
have helped me to wrestle with not just my responses to the book in particular
but to clarify my faith and theology more generally.
As an activist-poet-professor who’s taken up
residence in the emerging church as a lay preacher-theologian-seminarian, I
feel the most solidarity with Christians concerned about issues of inclusion
and creation care and peace and civil rights. Raised by my movement veteran
parents in a household that’s had a Sojourners
subscription for three decades, my faith journey is inseparable from a
commitment to radical social action. In this regard, I presume Reverend Myers
and I are fellow-travelers. So it’s with some trepidation that I tread back
towards what feels like a more conservative position theologically than his,
away from what I perceive as his partisan progressive Jesus-ism, admittedly purported
in his book as an overdue antidote for the out-of-control errors of an overtly-Americanized
fundamentalist Christianity.
In the chapter on the cross, Meyers bypasses blood
atonement, replacing Jesus dying for our
sins with Jesus dying because of our
sins. He rejects the worst aspects of an atoning theology this way: “Instead of
a verdict on the ultimate futility of violence, it actually commends it and
sends a chilling message to the human species: violence saves.” Many of us can agree with Meyers that we need to
be careful in understanding where the theology of substitutionary blood
atonement can take us and preach against the religious justification for the prevalence
of gratuitous violence—real and imagined—in politics, foreign policy, police
work, and popular culture.
But what about the cross—not just in our theology
but in our liturgy, not just in our politics but in our personal lives—has this
symbol exhausted its purpose or its iconic pull? Does it still maintain a saving
and prophetic role?
Crosses in the cosmic sense compel us to contemplate
the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of God, the unavoidable intersection
of the vertical and horizontal axes of life, the incarnate mystery of God’s distance
and closeness, a God who is both our companion and our creator. Add the circle
to the Celtic cross, and we have a symbol with interspiritual implications, a
Christianity engaged and embedded with an essential lunar or solar or
terrestrial unity linked to a perennial naturalism and its pagan predecessors.
But crosses in their contextual and corporal sense cause
extreme discomfort. That one as beautiful as Christ requires a cross so curdles
our consciousness, so confronts us with the violence embedded in our confession
of a gentle and loving God who was tortured and murdered by the state that
we’ve made it curt and cute with sentimentality and signification. Some prefer
the cross as souvenir and sign because to embrace the full potency of its
symbolism could make the entire prospect of our religion unpalatable and
disgusting.
That’s what my atheist sister sees and my
fundamentalist brother still promotes as a reading of this narrative: a violent
vengeful domineering God who requires the murder of his beloved son to save the
rest of us wretched cretins from an even greater wrath. It’s no wonder liberal
theologians seek an alternative narrative to this. At its worst, even this
Jesus is a rebel son whose teachings are irrelevant and who doesn’t reveal the
nature of his father God but rather flees Him in the garden and ultimately submits
to be tortured alive by Him. But erasing atonement might not be the only
alternative to this.
But doesn’t Christ’s sacrifice end all sacrifice,
redeem all sin? Of course we claim “it is accomplished,” but we don’t act like
it. In the years since Jesus, we never really acted like it. Sin and evil are
still loose in the world. In the 20th and 21st centuries,
we sell these symbols in a manner that would prompt Meyers to bemoan the
“perfumed rack” where a “symbol of evil is now worn as personal adornment” from
“belly-button rings” to “expensive bling.” In the 20th and 21st
centuries, we’ve seen crosses and crucifixions proliferate in bomb and bullet,
looting and lynching, disease and destruction.
But finally my faith forces me back to Golgotha and
its harrowing holy horror. For the Christian to deny cross and crucifixion would
be for the soldier to deny artillery and enemies, for the addict to deny drug
and drink, for the lover to deny longing and loneliness. Brennan Manning boldly
charges, “The day we cease proclaiming Jesus Christ nailed to the cross is the
day we effectively part company with the gospel.”
There’s no comfortable
workaround for the narrative sting: our nonviolent Godman died a violent death
at the hands of an empire. Question as we might at the cold missteps of Nietzsche
or anyone who speculates about the death of God, admittedly our worship and
wonder must pass first through the
death of God.
The holy meal that precedes this sacrifice to end
all sacrifices seems no less sickening at the surface, and yet we relive it
daily or weekly or monthly or cyclically. As disciples, we’re consumed and
consuming in what makes outsiders uncomfortable, a meal made of our savior, a
strange love feast it or rude cannibalistic rite the Eucharist still appears to
be.
The cross as symbol fulfills an ultimate faith but
at its face value forces us into the chamber of its antithesis, the
annihilation of the great commandment of love and loyalty in a spectacle that
sure looks like hatred and domination. The obvious futility of the cross cannot
crush its overarching reality, its truth, its pain, plain and profane. We meet
the soul force of Christ’s love on the cross in contrast to the chasm it
crosses. The nonviolent way of the peacemaker savior breathes light into the
shadows where violence still lurks.
All the shame and blame of centuries of accumulated
violence—that’s certainly Jesus dying because
of our sins. But if Jesus didn’t die for
our sins as well, it’s not because we were not collectively aching for such a
cosmic rescue mission. Some folks who have lived genuinely decent lives
generally free of serious sin question whether our human nature is as
fundamentally flawed as Christian doctrine suggests. For those people, it might
be more helpful to reframe sin as a general state of estrangement and distance
from our essential unity with God. For others who have consciously participated
in evil, who have felt the demonic grip and wholeheartedly denied God’s love
through selfish acts whether individual or collective, we have become sin and
have begged in foxhole prayers in desperation for the one who would become sin
for us. We have crosses to bear and thorns to wear. We have felt the nails,
tasted the blood.
That Christ chose and even accepted crucifixion
shows the paradoxical power of powerlessness as an alternative to the powerful
structures of a world that worships power. But the wisdom of grace and
nonviolent solidarity succeed in sacred terms because they also fail in a world
that at times is anything but filled with grace and nonviolent solidarity. The
“pre-Easter Jesus” (to borrow Marcus Borg’s phrase) may or may not have been
fully cognizant of his saving task for all time, but centuries of Christians
have been convicted and converted by it. We accept a Jesus who accepted the
world’s rejected ones and rejected values the world finds all too acceptable. We
know Jesus’s nonviolence in the context of violence. We know grace in the
context of sin—not just collective, social, and institutional sin, but
individual, personal, and secret sin.
Ought we revise the core of Christianity to please
the morality of a modern liberal sensibility? Or undo orthodoxy to appease
those Americans revolted by burning crosses or the cross compared to the
lynching tree? Or offended by contemporary crucifixions wrought with a bullet
in Memphis or an airplane crashing into New York City? The politically
grotesque passion narrative possesses an undeniable drama and a personal
magnetism that’s even more tragic, and the tragedy touches us at our inner core.
Granted, we’ve all encountered a preacher in whose hands this story has been a
tool of fear and foreboding, terror and control. But how many more of us have
had to meet Him in all our naked vulnerable humanity, when embracing Christ’s
suffering has been a window to understanding and ultimately being freed from our
own?
I know a conservative theology exists that takes up
cross but not teaching, ignoring the humble practices that could inhabit all
preaching. But a progressive critique of that twisted and authoritarian cross need
not rob us of the salve that stains the palms of our paschal savior, our
marvelous mediator and living liberator. At the feet of the cross we revel in
the mystery and martyrdom, savoring His sacrifice without over-romanticizing
the banality and brutality of its context or ours.
After Paul, we preach and teach Christ crucified. We
follow Christ resurrected. Are we not a revolutionary Easter band still willing
to walk the solidarity stations of a Good Friday plan? Such lonely soul
sickness our savior saves us from with limitless love. Such restoration
promised to the beauty of creation spoiled by the arrogance of civilization.
Such liberation offered from the blindness of ism and schism, derision and
delusion.
Shocking still, the scandal of that hill. A folly
full, but we follow its will. A place exists past categories conservative or
liberal, past distinctions of ideology or theology, past wars and rivalries,
let’s meet our risen Lord there, touch those hands like Thomas, a meal there we
will share.