When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: A Good Friday Reflection

 

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross:

A Good Friday Reflection

April 15, 2022

 

The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.

 

Good Friday. A day in the Christian calendar when we especially remember an event that , on its face, was anything but good. As that Friday so very long ago dawned, Jesus of Nazareth was under arrest and in the custody of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. The Romans had arrested him the evening before. Yes, our Gospels want it to have been the Jews who arrested him, but it wasn’t. The Jewish temple authorities, though not the Jewish people generally, may have been in cahoots with the Romans to get rid of him; but the police power in Jerusalem at the time was with the Romans, not with any Jewish person or institution. The Jewish leaders at the time did want him gone. They accused him of blasphemy for claiming to be God’s Son. Whether he did that or not as a matter of historical fact, we know that he rejected and condemned the system of sacrificial worship over which those authorities presided. He also taught an understanding of God and God’s requests of us that, while thoroughly Jewish, was radically different from the law-based faith of first century CE Judaism. They also were afraid that Jesus might incite a popular uprising against the Romans who occupied the Jewish homeland and oppressed its people at the time. Those leaders had a deal with the Romans. The Romans would not interfere with the Jewish life of faith (about which they couldn’t have cared less), and the temple priests would work to prevent public disorder.

Both the Romans and the temple authorities knew that there had been violent uprisings against the Romans in the past. One of the more significant ones was the rebellion led by Judas the Galilean in 4 BCE when Herod the Great, a Jewish Roman puppet king, died. The Romans crushed that rebellion, but they didn’t want to have to do it again. So they took out anyone they thought posed even a threat of public unrest. Jesus, though he was thoroughly nonviolent, at least seemed to them to pose such a threat. So they were perfectly happy to be rid of him. Pilate had legal authority to crucify anyone he wanted to, a power the Jewish temple authorities definitely did not have. So they executed Jesus the way they had executed thousands of people and would execute thousands more throughout the Roman Empire. They nailed him to a cross and left him there to die, which of course he did. Crucifixion was a terrible way to die. Having nails driven through your hands and fee of course hurt like hell. Even worse, it usually took crucified people as long as two or three days to die, though our texts say Jesus died much more quickly than that. The cause of death was usually suffocation as the person on the cross could no longer hold his body up so he could breathe.

For the Romans crucifixion was more than a nasty way to get rid of people they wanted rid of. It would have been much easier for them to kill people the way their soldiers killed people in battle, with a sword. The Romans used crucifixion not just as a means of execution but as a terror weapon. They crucified prisoners where the people of the area could see, indeed probably could not avoid seeing, the crucified man suffering horribly and dying. By crucifying prisoners in public view they showed the people what would happen to any of them who got too badly out of line.

Yet we Christians see the crucifixion of Jesus as unique. He was in fact the only founding figure of any major religion who was executed as a criminal rather than dying a natural death, but that’s not why we see his crucifixion as unique. We Christians see Jesus’ crucifixion as unique because we see it as salvific. How can that be? Wasn’t he just another guy the Romans and maybe the temple priests wanted to get rid of? Well, superficially, yes. To anyone observing the crucifixion of Jesus it would have looked like any other crucifixion, except perhaps that Jesus died more quickly than most crucified people did. So how is it to us unique and even salvific? It is to us unique and salvific because for us Jesus of Nazareth was not just another guy the Romans wanted to get rid of. To understand why Jesus’ crucifixion is so important to us Christians we have first to wade into the thorny thicket of the theology of incarnation.

For us Christians, the human being Jesus of Nazareth was nothing less than God the Son Incarnate. Though most New Testament authors probably did not see Jesus as divine, the Christian conception of the Incarnation has at least some roots in the Bible. In the Gospels of both Matthew and Luke, Jesus’ conception was by the Holy Spirit not by the usual human biological processes. Then in the last of the canonical Gospels to be written, John, we read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and lived among us….” John 1:1, 14a. John’s “Word”  is actually a masculinization of the older Jewish feminine concept Wisdom, and it had not yet morphed in Christian language into the Son. It would do that later. By the fourth century CE orthodox Christianity proclaimed that Jesus of Nazareth was both fully human and fully God at the same time. He had two natures in one person, one nature human and the other divine. Of course, what our faith says about Jesus as God incarnate is impossible, it’s just true.[1]

The doctrine of the Incarnation completely transforms the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion. To us Christians there is of course a human being suffering and dying on the cross; but that is by no means all that is happening on Jesus’ cross. Because Jesus was God Incarnate, God Godself was nailed to the cross of Jesus. Traditional Christianity says that only Jesus’ human nature suffered and died on the cross. Our faith says that, I think, because it so hard for us to accept the true horror of Jesus’ cross. The great German theologian Jürgen Moltmann understands the cross better. He titled one of his books The Crucified God.[2] The correct understanding of Christ’s cross includes the shocking truth that God Godself was nailed to that cross and died. Once again it’s not possible, it’s just true.

This understanding makes Jesus’ crucifixion unique, but how is that crucifixion salvific? That question leads us straight into the greatest theological error Christianity has been making for at least the last nine hundred years. That error is usually called the classical theory of atonement. More technically, it is the theory of substitutionary sacrificial atonement. It says that Jesus took our place and suffered for us because of human sin in order to procure God’s forgiveness of that sin. It has a bit of a root in the New Testament, though it is by no means the New Testament’s primary understanding of salvation in and through Jesus Christ. The classical theory of atonement didn’t get its classical formulation until the year 1107 CE, when a monk named Anselm of Canterbury published his book Cur Deus Homo? The literal translation of that title is Why God Man? In English translations it us usually rendered as Why God Became a Man or Why God Was Made Man. In that book Anselm advances his theory of the dynamics of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Anselm’s book is thoroughly medieval. In it he posits that human sin is evil because it dishonors God. His model for that theory is what happens when a person in the social order of feudalism fails to do what a person farther up the feudal social scale has a right to expect them to do. That failure by the subordinate person dishonors the person whose bidding the subordinate person did not do. To get back in the superior person’s good graces the subordinate person must do more than at last do what the superior person told them to do. Merely doing that would not restore the dishonored honor in question. Only something more than that was needed to restore that honor.

Anselm applies this model of the relationship between a superior person and a subordinate one in feudalism to the issue of human sin and divine forgiveness. God, he says, has the right to expect us humans not to sin, yet of course we sin all the time. Our sin, Anselm says, dishonors God. We often seek God’s forgiveness of our sin, and of course we can, in theory, stop sinning. The problem for Anselm is that our merely not sinning anymore is not enough to procure God’s forgiveness of our prior sin. That sin has so dishonored God that it would be unjust for God to forgive that sin unless we sinners pay a price for our sin beyond merely not sinning any more. For Anselm, God’s got to get paid more than that before God can forgive human sin without committing an injustice, which Anselm of course says God would never do.

Which raises a problem for Anselm. What, after all, could we mere mortals do other than stop sinning (assuming for the moment that we could even do that) to restore the divine honor we have tarnished with our sin? The most we could to would be to die because of our sin. Yet for Anselm all human sin, however minor we might think it to be, so grossly dishonors God that even a human death would not be enough to restore God’s honor, which we have supposedly so horribly tarnished with our sin. Yet God wants to forgive our sin. It’s just that Anselm can’t imagine God just doing so just because it is God’s nature to do it. To restore the divine honor we humans must do more than we can possibly do, which was a big problem for Anselm.

So did Anselm think that God just didn’t, indeed couldn’t, forgive human sin? Not at all. He concluded that a person who was also God could, by suffering and dying, pay a price high enough to restore God’s honor and thereby make it possible for God to do what God wanted to do anyway, namely, forgive human sin. Just what advantage God gains in that scenario isn’t clear, but never mind. We’ll deal with other faults of this theory anon. Coming as a human to suffer is, Anselm said, Cur Deus Homo?, why God became human. The human being that God became suffered and died on the cross, which is precisely what God became human to do. Christians who accept this classical theory of atonement, and most of them do, have believed essentially the same thing ever since Anselm. You may recall that the marketing slogan for Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ was “Dying was his reason for living.” Christians whose faith is solidly grounded in the classical theory of atonement loved that gruesome movie no end. The rest of us not so much.

There are more things wrong with the classical theory of atonement than I can possibly relate here, but we must at least look briefly at some of them. The first fault of the theory I’ll mention is that it posits that a price had to be paid to procure God’s forgiveness of human sin. Anselm said that was because human sin so dishonors God. Today few if any classical atonement Christians speak of God’s tarnished honor. They do however insist that, basically, God’s forgiveness of sin has to be purchased. A price has to be paid. We can’t possibly pay that price ourselves. The problem with this aspect of classical atonement theory is that it denies grace. The concept of grace is that God’s love and forgiveness are freely given to everyone. We don’t have to pay for it. God’s grace is there always and everywhere because that’s just who God is. God is love, and, as the Beatles sang, “Can’t buy me love.” Can’t, and don’t have to. I’m sorry Anselm. You were just wrong about that. Christians who have accepted your classical theory of atonement have been wrong in the same way ever since no matter how they have expressed your theory.

There’s another way in which that notion that God’s forgiveness must be purchased is wrong, namely, it makes God too small. It reduces God’s grace to the level of a commercial purchase and sale. The notion that a price had to be paid before God would or could forgive sin says that God’s love is for sale. Here’s the price, one we humans can’t possibly pay. We humans of course engage in commercial purchase and sale transactions all the time, and for the most part there is nothing wrong with us doing so. The idea that we had to purchase God’s grace is nothing but a projection of the human way of being onto God. Yet if God is real, and God is, God is not human. God is present with us in creation, and we may relate to God on a personal level; but at the same time God transcends the human absolutely. God’s ways are not human ways and God’s thoughts are not human thoughts.

Our Judeo-Christian tradition has known this truth for a very long time. In verses probably written in the sixth century BCE the book of Isaiah has God say:

 

For my thoughts are not your

thoughts,

     nor are your ways my ways, says

the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than

the earth,

     so are my ways higher than your

ways,

     and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaian 55:6-8.

 

The classical theory of atonement to the contrary notwithstanding, God is not a forgiveness merchant. God just is forgiveness.

Here’s another problem with the classical theory of atonement. What does it do with all of Jesus’ teachings? The Christian Gospels, or at least the first three of them, have more in them about how we are to live than they have about anything else. Yet the classical theory of atonement says that the only thing Jesus Christ was about was suffering and dying to procure God’s forgiveness of human sin. If that’s all or even primarily what Jesus was about, why is all that stuff about what Jesus did before he suffered and died even there? Why did he go about teaching the ways of life to which God calls us, ways that turn the ways of the world upside down? Christians who accept the classical theory of atonement don’t usually ignore all of Jesus’ teachings. Yet when the classical theory of atonement is faith’s foundational theology—and for most Christians it is—minimizing or even ignoring those teachings becomes a legitimate possibility. Yet the world needs Christ’s teachings about peace and justice achieved through nonviolent opposition to evil a whole lot more than it needs a suffering savior, which is just one more reason we must jettison the classical theory of atonement.

Then there’s this. It is an objection to the classical theory of atonement that means a lot to me though I don’t know that I have seen it expressed anywhere else. The classical theory of atonement says that divine forgiveness of sin came to humans when Jesus Christ died on the cross. A necessary implication of that notion is that before Jesus died on the cross God did not forgive human sin. Yet ancient Hebrew people knew that God forgave their sin. There are more references to God forgiving sin in the Old Testament than I can include here, but here are a few of them. At Numbers 14:20 God says to Moses, “I do forgive, just as you have asked.” Psalm 103:10 tells us that God “does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.” At Isaiah 1:18 the Lord says “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” At Isaiah 43:25 God says, “I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” I suppose some Christians hold on to their belief that Jesus brought forgiveness of sin to humanity for the first time by saying that these ancient Hebrew passages somehow predict what would happen hundreds of years after they were written. They don’t, and it is not appropriate for us Christians to try to force Hebrew scripture into a Christian mold. People of faith have long known that God forgives human sin, but the classical theory of atonement says God began to forgive human sin only with the crucifixion of Jesus. About that it is simply wrong.

Here is what is perhaps the most shocking but also the most important flaw in the classical theory of atonement. What it says God did to God’s Son so that God could and would forgive human sin constitutes cosmic child abuse. I once read of a conservative Christian pastor who illustrated the classical theory of atonement this way. He took a human baby in his arms in front of his congregation. He stretched out the child’s little arm and turned the palm of their hand toward the congregation. He said, “Which one of you would drive a nail through this little hand?” He point was that of course none of us would, but that, he said, is what God do to God’s Son so that God could forgive human sin. Of course driving a nail through a human infant’s hand is unthinkable child abuse. Yet the classical theory of atonement posits that that is precisely what God did to God’s Son. “Dying was his reason for living,” remember? The classical theory of atonement models child abuse as the way to salvation. Not only do we not need that model, we must get rid of it if our Christian faith is ever to become the faith of nonviolence that Jesus intended it to be.

OK. So we reject the classical theory of atonement. But then we must ask: Does that mean that Christ’s death on the cross has no power to save us? To quote St. Paul, “By no means!” There are at least two other ways of understanding the salvific work of Jesus Christ. One is called the ransom or Christus Viktor theory of salvation. It is the most common understanding of salvation through Christ in the New Testament, though classical atonement theory Christians are forever reading the passages that express it as really expressing their theory. The ransom theory says that the human existential dilemma is that we have been taken captive by Satan. That’s why we sin so much. To free us from sin, which is what Paul and others say Christ did for us, God had to pay a ransom to Satan just like the relatives of a person kidnapped by other people must pay a ransom to the kidnapper for the release of the one kidnapped. The ransom God had to pay to Satan was the suffering and death of God’s Son. Once the ransom had been paid by Jesus’ crucifixion, we were freed from sin and free to live sinless lives the way God wants us to do, not that any of us ever actually do that. This theory of salvation has in common with the classical theory of atonement that a price must be paid. The difference is that in the classical theory of atonement the price is paid to God, in the ransom theory it is paid to the devil.

Few Christians accept the ransom theory of salvation anymore. Indeed, most Christians read the New Testament as setting forth the classical theory of atonement, which for the most part it doesn’t do. Yet our rejection of the ransom theory does not leave us only the classical theory of atonement as a way of understand the meaning of the death of Jesus on the cross. There is another way, though relatively few Christians know about it. As its lead exponents today say, it has been a minority voice through most of Christian history.[3] It is the way called “theology of the cross.”[4] It is a Christian soteriology, a theory of salvation, with none of the numerous shortcomings of the classical theory of atonement. It has the power to save Christianity from the dead end of cosmic child abuse into which classical atonement theory forces us. It goes like this.

First, we must understand that theology of the cross sees the human existential dilemma differently than does the classical theory of atonement. For the classical theory, sin is the human existential dilemma. It is indeed the only human existential dilemma. For that theory, to be saved is to be saved from sin. Yet today few people are as bothered by sin and its supposed consequences than most Christians were in the past. Other things concern us more. Most particularly, most humans today are more concerned with the threat of nonbeing and the meaning of life than they are about sin. One of the great virtues of the theology of the cross is that it can address whatever existential dilemma we struggle with. It is thus a much broader soteriology than is the classical theory.

Like the other two soteriologies I have mentioned, the theology of the cross requires the Incarnation.[5] It begins with an acceptance of the truth that the human being Jesus of Nazareth is also God Incarnate. It is grounded in the traditional Christian confession that Jesus Christ was both fully human and fully divine at the same time. Because for the Christian faith that’s who Jesus is, in him we see God living and experiencing a truly human life. Though Matthew and Luke (though no other New Testament authors) express Jesus’ dual nature by saying that he was a human being conceived by the Holy Spirit, even in those two Gospels Jesus lives a human life. As only one human being he of course lived only one life. He didn’t live your life. He didn’t live my life. The important point, however, is that Jesus’ life really was human. It didn’t just appear to be a human life, it really was a human life. When the Gospel of John says that the Word became flesh and lived among us, it means that God lived among us precisely as a human being, as one of us, not as some transhuman sort of being.

Now, the classical theory of atonement says that God sent Jesus to us as God the Son Incarnate for the purpose, indeed probably for the sole purpose, of suffering and dying. Theology of the cross doesn’t say that God sent Jesus to die, but it doesn’t say that God sent Jesus not to die either. God sent Jesus as God the Son Incarnate to live a truly human life. And of course, as we all know, human life includes death. Because Jesus was truly a human man, it was inevitable that sooner or later he would die one way or another. All of us do, after all. God didn’t send Jesus specifically to be tortured and crucified by the Romans, but God didn’t send Jesus not to be tortured and crucified by the Romans either if that was where his life led.

And of course it is where his live led. God didn’t prevent Jesus’ torture and miserable death. But we must understand that God didn’t prevent them because God needed them to happen before God would forgive human sin as the classical theory of atonement asserts. God didn’t prevent them because if God had prevented them Jesus as God Incarnate would not have lived a full human life with all of its risks and tragic possibilities.

Yes, Jesus suffered and died, but in that suffering and dying theology of the cross does not see a price being paid either to God or to the devil. Rather, in Jesus’ torture and execution theology of the cross sees God Godself, in the person of Jesus, entering into and experiencing the fullness of human life including the worst that we humans do to each other. God entered into and experienced the dynamics of human sin at their worst. God didn’t avoid them. God didn’t mitigate their horror. God took them into God’s own being and suffered them just as any human being would.

In God incarnate suffering and dying on the cross we see how God truly relates to us humans, and therein lies the saving significance of the cross. Theology of the cross sees the foundational human existential dilemma as being the we don’t know just what God’s relationship to us is; and it isn’t what most people think it is. Christians as well as people of other faiths often believe that if their faith is strong enough and they pray hard enough, God will stop bad things from happening to them or their loved ones. Folks, that just isn’t true. We should be able to draw that quite obvious conclusion from our own lives and from human history, yet so many of us don’t. So God demonstrates that truth to us on the cross of Jesus. God didn’t prevent a horrifically bad thing from happening even to God Godself as God the Son on that cross. God didn’t let Jesus’ crucifixion happen because  God had to be bought off as the classical theory of atonement asserts. God let Jesus’ crucifixion happen because in Jesus God was leading a full human life. In Jesus on the cross we see precisely that God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening to us humans, not even to the best of us humans.

Rather, in Jesus on the cross we see God entering into the worst that can happen to a person. In doing that God shows us that God is always with us as we suffer and as we die. In Jesus on the cross we see that God is with us even when we are positive that God’s isn’t. On the cross Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46. Many people try to avoid the existential horror of that cry of dereliction by saying that all Jesus was doing with that cry was reciting the opening lines of Psalm 22, which does indeed open with those words. It is true that Psalm 22 as a whole is a prayer of trust in and praise of God. But reducing Jesus’ cry of dereliction to a prayer of trust and praise completely misses the profound meaning of that cry. Jesus cry of Godforsakeness gives us one of the most profound paradoxes of our faith (and all of the most profound truths of our faith are paradoxes). In that cry we see God present in God’s own experience of the absence of God. Yes, our rational minds say that isn’t possible. It is a logical fallacy. Our minds say it isn’t possible. Our souls say it isn’t possible, it’s just true. God getting crucified and dying isn’t possible either, it’s just true.[6]

Salvation in the cross of Jesus lies precisely in this, that we see demonstrated in the most concrete way that God never leaves us. God never abandons us. Not in life, not in death. God is always there. God is there even when we cannot feel God’s being there, even when we would cry with Jesus, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God is always with us to turn to, to hold onto, to trust, to be the one from whom we can draw the courage and strength to endure whatever we must endure. Even the courage and strength to die in peace, knowing that even death does not separate us from God. St. Paul expressed this truth beautifully when he said he was convinced that neither death, nor life, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39. On the cross Jesus isn’t paying a price. He is demonstrating to us who and how God really is.

Friends, I have experienced the truth of theology of the cross in my own life. I have known the presence of God with me during the worst times of my life. I have held on to God in deepest grief and most intense pain. I have prayed to God through both grief and pain and have felt the courage, strength, and consolation that only God can give us. I know from contemplation of Jesus on the cross and from my own life experience that God will never desert me. God will never desert you. God will never desert anyone, not in life and not in death. And that is about the best news there is or ever could be.

So today and every day let us celebrate and rejoice in the unfailing presence and solidarity of God with us and with everyone. Let us celebrate and rejoice in our good times, for God is with us in those times too. Even more importantly, let us know not just with our minds but with our hearts and souls that God is with us as a source of strength, patience, and hope in our bad times. Even in our worst times. That is the good news of Good Friday. That is theology of the cross. Thanks be to God!

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[1] The notion that the great truths of our faith are impossible but true is one of my favorite notions about it. By it I mean that our truths are illogical. We cannot reason our way to them. Our rational minds reject them, but our hearts and souls know that they are nonetheless profoundly true.

[2] Moltmann, Jürgen, The Crucified God, The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1993. First published in 1972 as Der gekreuzigte Gott.

[3] The leading exponent of theology of the cross in English today is the Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall. See for example his book The Cross in Our Context, Jesus and the Suffering World (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2003).

[4] This is perhaps an unfortunate name for it. The classical theory of atonement and the ransom theory are both theologies of the meaning of the cross. Sometimes you’ll see theology of the cross called theologia crusis, but that’s just Latin for theology of the cross. Theology of the cross is what this theory is always called, so we stick with that designation though we might prefer to have some other one.

[5] And the doctrine of the Incarnation requires the doctrine of the Trinity for it to make any sense at all, but I won’t lead us into the morass of trinitarian theology here.

[6] In a note above I mentioned trinitarian theology and said I wouldn’t go there. I will say here that it was God the Son who died on the cross. God the Son both is and is not the fullness of God, another of those wonderful paradoxes of ours. Moltmann says that in the death of Jesus one the cross God experienced the horror of the death of God’s Son. He can say that only because he understands that God the Father, like God the Son, both is and isn’t the fullness of God.