The Scandal of the Cross

 

The Scandal of the Cross

September 13, 2022

 

Let’s face it. Jesus of Nazareth was a loser. He came to transform the world, and the Romans crucified him for it. To them he was a criminal not a savior. They treated him like the criminal they thought he was. They didn’t just execute him, they crucified him. Crucifixion was and was meant to be a horrific way to die. Mostly the Romans crucified political prisoners, and that certainly is what he was to them. They didn’t crucify him because he had an unorthodox view of Judaism. They didn’t crucify him because he had come to save souls. They didn’t crucify him as the last part of some divine plan of salvation. They couldn’t have cared less about those things. They crucified him because he proclaimed the kingdom of God. The Romans knew what kingdom was real, and it wasn’t the kingdom of God. They knew who the king was, and it wasn’t God. They crucified not because they thought he was a spiritual threat, they crucified him because they saw that he was indeed a political threat. They crucified him just like they had crucified thousands before him and would crucify thousands after him. He wasn’t special, he was an ordinary political criminal. So nail him up. Leave him there to die a miserable death. They had no moral qualms about it. They probably did it on an order from the governor or some high military official. They probably did it without a trial. Just like the many other would-be messiahs before him and after him he had gambled on world transformation and lost. In the eyes of the world, he really was nothing but a loser.

And we Christians accept and cling to this pathetic loser as our Lord and Savior! How can that be? Yes, Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t the end of his story, but his resurrection doesn’t obviate his crucifixion. His crucifixion still happened. It is perhaps the one thing that most clearly differentiates his life from the lives of the founding figures of other great faith traditions. As far as we know, the Buddha, Moses, and Muhammad all died of natural causes. Jesus didn’t. He was executed, that is, he was legally murdered by the secular authorities of his time and place. He was a loser. His death on a cross should have been the end of him and of his movement. That’s certainly what the Romans who killed him expected his death to be.

But it wasn’t. How could that be? Yes, Jesus’ resurrection is a big part of the explanation for his death not being the end of him. Yet there is still that damned cross. I’m sure that people who heard what the Apostles said about Jesus had to wonder: Would God turn an abject failure into the savior of the world? Could a common political prisoner be the Son of God? Would God become human as a meaningless peasant from a meaningless little town in a meaningless part of the Roman Empire? To most people in the decades after Jesus’ crucifixion the obvious and undeniable answer to those questions was “No.” The cross of Christ certainly was, as St. Paul said, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles. 1 Corinthians 1:23. The cross of Christ was indeed something the earliest Christians had to come to terms with.

And come to terms with it they did. How? They proclaimed Christ crucified to be “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” 1 Corinthians 1:24. NRSV. But that really doesn’t make any sense, does it. A crucified man is utterly powerless, and wise men don’t get themselves crucified. Isn’t Christ on the cross an image of powerlessness not power? Doesn’t a man dying miserably on a cross to which the local authorities have nailed him an image of foolishness not wisdom? At first glance they sure seem to be, don’t they.

So how could Paul think that Christ on the cross is the opposite of what Christ on the cross sure appears to be? Most Christians would say it’s because in suffering and dying on the cross, Jesus, as God the Son Incarnate, was paying the price for human sin. That’s not an acceptable answer to my question for me because I reject that notion absolutely. I won’t go into why I do in depth. I’ll just say here that that theory of salvation makes God a cosmic child abuser. For more of an explanation of my rejection of what is usually called the classical theory of atonement see Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement,” in either the original or the revised version of my book Liberating Christianity. And actually, Paul didn’t have that kind of soteriology (the theology of salvation) in mind when he wrote 1 Corinthians either. That soteriology hardly appears in the Bible at all. It wasn’t fully developed until centuries after Jesus. The monk Anselm of Canterbury did that in his book Cur Deus Homo?, published in 1107 CE. The classical theory of atonement, also called substitutionary sacrificial atonement, is not what either Jesus or Paul was about.

We come much closer to what they were about through a theology called “theology of the cross.” That name is not entirely satisfactory, for classical atonement theory is a theology of the cross too, but never mind. That’s what this other theology is called. Theology of the cross asserts, correctly, that what we see in Jesus on the cross is God entering into every aspect of human life, even the aspects of suffering and death. In Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?—we even see God in solidarity with us in the human experience of the absence of God, indeed, even in the experience of believing that God has abandoned us. That’s theology of the cross in a nutshell. For a fuller exposition of theology of the cross see Chapter 9, “The Meaning of the Cross, The Demonstration of God’s Solidarity,” in either version of Liberating Christianity.

OK, but how does Christ crucified become the power and wisdom of God as Paul says it does? Here’s my best explanation of how. I’ll start with the notion of the power of God. To understand how anyone or anything has power, we must begin by understanding what power is. One of the definitions of power google.com gives us is, “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.” OK, but it seems to me that there is often another element in our understanding of power. When we think of someone with power we probably imagine someone or something that influences the behavior of others through force, that is, either through violence or the threat of violence. The ancient Hebrews certainly thought of the power of God that way. They believed that God sought to force them to obey God’s will through the threat of violent punishment if they didn’t. To them, both the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and the Babylonian conquest of the southern kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE were the result of God using or at least allowing the power of gentile empires to crush the Hebrews as punishment for their idolatry and multiple failures to do justice.

God certainly could have expressed God’s power through violence. Lord knows, enough people today want God to do so. Some people even believe that God will do that some day. That’s what the nonsense about a second coming of Christ is all about. This desire says to God, in effect, “You tried it your way with Jesus. It didn’t work. The world is still a big mess and is still full of unpunished sinners. So come back and do it our way next time. Forget this peace and love stuff. Come in power and glory and set the world right.” But here’s the thing. The ways of God are almost always (or always) the opposite of the ways of the world. That’s why the power of God looks like weakness to those who operate only from a worldly perspective.

Did Jesus on the cross influence the behavior of others? You bet he did! Jesus on the cross looks weak, but he has influenced more human behavior than any other human ever has. Of course, we humans often get the meaning of the cross wrong. Far too often (and once is far too often) we have thought that Jesus on the cross somehow authorizes us to use violence against people who, for whatever reason, don’t believe in him and even against people who do believe in him but not in the way earthly powers, including a powerful institutional church, want them to. Because we earthlings so readily see Jesus on the cross as weak, we impose our worldly concepts of power onto him and onto God. We don’t like weakness, or think we don’t. We want force. We want the bad guys eliminated through whatever method it takes. We don’t see that in Jesus, so we think he’s weak.

Still, how many people have had their behavior affected, for good or for ill, by their image of Jesus on the cross? Too many to count actually. Jesus on the cross has inspired deep faith in more people than we can even imagine. He has also caused a great many people to reject Christianity altogether because they find no redeeming virtue in the image of a man being put to a horrendous death that he didn’t deserve. They see no virtue in a man who looks so weak to worldly eyes. But God knew better. God knew that demonstrating salvation God’s way would have a power unlike any other power the world had ever seen. That, I think, is how Jesus crucified is the power of God.

Paul also says that Christ crucified is the wisdom of God. I’ll turn again to google.com for a definition of wisdom. One place Google directs us for a definition is merriam-webster.com. The various definitions of wisdom at that site all use the word “wise” as part of wisdom. That same source defines “wise” as, among other definitions, “characterized by wisdom: marked by deep understanding, keen discernment, and a capacity for sound judgment.” If that definition doesn’t fit God it fits no one! Surely God’s understanding is deeper, God’s discernment is keener, and God’s judgment is more sound than the understanding, discernment, or judgment of any mere mortal could ever be. God knows what so few of us humans do, namely, that God’s ways of love, justice for the least and the lost, peace, and nonviolence are, in the long run, more powerful than any physical force has ever been or ever could be.

Jesus on the cross shows us God’s love for us through what God gave up for us. He demonstrates God’s demand of justice for the weak and the poor by becoming one of them and showing them that neither their weakness nor their poverty can separate them from God. Jesus on the cross demonstrates God’s desire for peace on earth by demonstrating that violence is not the proper way to peace or to anything else. Violence, actually, is not God’s way to do anything. That, I think, is how Jesus on the cross is the wisdom of God.

So to the eyes of the world Jesus’ cross truly is a scandal. To the eyes of the world Jesus on the cross looks like abject failure and absolutely not like divine triumph. To the eyes of the world, Jesus is the image of impotent weakness not power. But it only looks that way because we see him only with our worldly eyes, beliefs, and expectations. The cross is a scandal because it fools people. It makes Jesus, and God for that matter, appear weak, powerless even. It makes Jesus look like a fool who went and got himself crucified when he could have avoided that fate easily enough. Yet in truth it shows exactly the opposite. It looks like weakness, it is divine strength. It looks like foolishness, it is divine wisdom. May we have eyes that see through the illusions of the world to the truth and wisdom of God.