Even Unto the Cross: an Eastertide Meditation

It never should have happened, but it did. The Messiah for the Jews, the Son of God to the Gentiles --- crucified, dead, buried, and with him the hopes of all the years. It took and takes a lot of explaining for Jesus’ followers to get people past this. That God raised him from the dead certainly helps the cause. In some ways, though, the Easter story just makes things worse. The enfleshed Logos a sacrificial lamb? Suffering a fate meted out under the requirements of a tribal mentality whose ethic of blood sacrifice was supposed to have been annulled long before the cross was even raised?

Not long after I first surveyed “the wondrous cross” for myself, I decided to give up on the kind of question that the early church kept asking, wrongly, about this ghastly event. Its question was: what made the manner of Jesus’death a necessary part of a divinely foreordained plan? My question increasingly became: how could I have expected anything else? People just like me --- self-centered, loving reluctantly and grudgingly if at all, looking for rules by which to judge others but never themselves, longing for a Paradise of their own making, contemptuous of trouble-makers --- all of a sudden had to confront a self-emptying, grace-filled, kingdom-proclaiming stonemason’s son audicious only in the confidence he had in their, and my, ability to live just like he did. Hey! Give us Barabbas, too!

The cross, then, was predictable, but never necessary. God could not have failed to anticipate the very strong possibility, probability perhaps, that his best effort to regain humankind’s loyalty would be rejected. But just as certainly, God could not have worked out the arrangement in such a way as to make rejection impossible. Not, at least, without destroying a part of God’s own nature in us, our freedom. Freedom only to say “Yes” to Christ is not freedom at all. If the price tag of getting right with God is giving back the right to stay alienated from him, then things are still not all right in the created order.

The mystery of Jesus’ suffering is not a mystery forever out of reach at the bottom of a great abyss of necessity, inevitability, or fatedness. Nor is it a prime time drama aimed at knocking off “The Ten Commandments” about a God whose hands were tied by a deal made in haste with a Denizen of the deep who once upon a time climbed down from heaven to lay in wait for a humanity created for nobler purposes. If all that Christianity can come up with by way of explaining the Cross is throwing together really dumb ideas about a divine placating of Satan and about setting the account books right on human sinfulness, then it is little wonder that its churches resort to believe-it-or-else arm-waving in order to get a hearing for it. No one in his right mind would go for it on her own.

Satan has no claims upon God to be placating. We are he (to clear up the indefinite antecedent, we delude ourselves by thinking we are the latter to avoid dealing with the reality that we are the former), and we lost the right to make demands on God long before our ancestors reached the base of Mount Sinai. God keeps no account books on obligations owed; his staff is too busy trying to track us down in our flight from him, so that he can still reach out to us, in love.

Unless handling snakes and drinking poisons and watching exorcisms still turn you on, you can probably get along at least reasonably well without a “ransom to the devil” theory of the crucifixion as an Atonement. But it still may be hard to give up the idea of his suffering and dying to make there “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world.” Certainly it is better to think in terms of our obligations to God than of God’s obligations to Satan. But having said that, it is even better to think of God’s mercies to both. Jesus’ crucifixion is an offer of grace; it is not a collection of debt.

And this is why surveying the “wondrous” cross can be and often is so painful. The greatest invitation anybody ever gave and ever will give to a suffering humanity --- and they missed it, and we miss it still. Grace, mercy, forgiveness, love, new life, singing, rejoicing, reuniting: that’s the real deal of a lifetime --- and beyond.