The Cross: How Low Must God Go?

---

NOTE TO READERS: This Lenten essay was originally published on Open Salon, FEBRUARY 15, 2009. It is part of my Christian Calendar Series. It is intended to set a tone for thinking about the season of Lent. I have edited it for 2010, clarifying certain points and improving the flow of the text.

Christian liturgy, ritual and most of Christian theology change little from year to year. The reason for the Christian Calendar is to encourage Christians to rehearse, ponder and reflect on, year after year, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, so that His life becomes part and parcel of our family history.

The story of Christ changes little, but we, His disciple, change and grow, become ill, or face death, our own or a loved one's, and in so doing we come each year to view the events of Christ and the traditions of His Church through different eyes.

Hopefully, what I write in this series will have a certain timelessness, updated slightly each year to improve clarity and thereby open more deeply our understanding of aspects of the events celebrated during the Christian Year.

This opening Lenten essay for 2010 lays out some basic parameters of orthodox Christian belief. However, even within Christianity there is no unanimity on what are essential beliefs and what are not essential. I will not argue any of that here.

What is laid out here are my own beliefs, which are widely shared by Christians in most mainline Protestant denominations and in the Roman and Orthodox Catholic denominations in the United States as being fundamental to Christian faith.

---

We begin this reflection at the foot of the Cross upon which Christ is crucified. Most Christians have been here many times before, but we come back now to explore an aspect of this poignant scene that is crucial to understanding why there is a season of Lent at all.

St. Luke tells us:

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" But the other one rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?" [23:39-40]

Before this scene at the Cross, Jesus, in utter agony, has been driven with whips, carrying the instrument of his own death on his back, struggling up the dirty hill outside Jerusalem which serves as the city garbage dump. He has been nailed to a Cross which has been raised as a barren tree on which he hangs.

There is something utterly, painfully earthly and totally unnerving about Luke's description of the crucifixion because, however some Christians might want to pretty it up, it is nothing less than the painful picture of the death of God's own Son, hanging from a tree like a common criminal!

If you contrast this scene with later descriptions of who Jesus is, the difference is startling in its clarity. As Christianity moved further and further from the recording of eye witness accounts of Jesus' death, a "higher," more theological, description of who Jesus is began to emerge.

For example, St. Paul, in his Letter to the Colossians (Col 1:15-19) says of Jesus:

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers -- all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together."... "For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his Cross."

Paul's picture of Jesus is one of the highest, most holy images of Christ as the powerful ruler of all creation that one can imagine. Christians like me believe that it is true.

Compare this with Luke’s gut wrenching picture of a bruised and battered man hanging on a Cross between two convicted criminals. Can there be a more stark contrast? Yet, as a Christian, I say that this picture is also true.

Can you begin to sense the paradox, the stark contrast between the very human Jesus in Luke's Gospel and the gloriously and powerfully divine Jesus portrayed by Paul? Can you feel the painful, bewildering irony of the crucifixion when one comes to believe that both descriptions are true?

Both writers are talking about God. Paul calls Jesus the very "image of the invisible God." The Jesus Paul is talking about is the One hanging there on the Cross, being ridiculed by hypocrites, power mongers and thieves.

All the power, the might, the majesty, and the glory of God is hanging there: being spit upon, a sword thrust into his side, humiliated, left to die.

And what is the response of the One in whom Paul says all things in the universe are held together? Of the one whom St. John says was there before the beginning of time, before the cosmos was created, from whom all things came into being; the one John says literally gave us life?

Since he has all this power, does he unleash the fury of Michael, the archangel, and his host of heavenly warriors? No. Rather, he says, "Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." (Luke 23:34)

And what is their response to that? They shout more insults! What does it take to get through to them?

To paraphrase William Barclay, How low must God go to prove that God loves you? That is the question this text poses to us. God went as low as the Cross, and only one person on earth understood it that day, a simple thief hanging on a cross beside Jesus.

---

We need to get a clear mental picture of that scene: There was not just one cross. There were three. Three crosses, Jesus in the middle, a thief on either side. When we have that mental picture before us, can we see the symbolism that would spring from the cross? Can we see God saying, with outstretched arms, “I love you this much!”? Can we see that there are no depths to which God will not sink to offer us the gift of divine love and grace?

One of the best explanations of the meaning of the Cross comes from William Barclay, the great writer of Bible commentaries for ordinary people. Barclay seldom spoke of the Cross in the traditional legalistic terms of atonement, or of ransom, or even of sacrifice for our sins. He knew those were traditional and accepted explanations of the theology of the Cross.

But, for Barclay atonement was not enough. For Barclay, even Jesus' sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins was not the essence of what Jesus was saying to us from the Cross.

For him, and for me, the Cross was the ultimate sign of God's complete and unequivocal love for us. Barclay said that God was saying to each of us, "Nothing you do can make me not love you. You can disappoint me, break my heart and grieve my Spirit, you can spit on me, scourge me, beat me, ridicule me, and even kill me -- but you can not make me stop loving you. See that Cross? I love you like that!"

In the 8th chapter of Mark, Jesus asks the disciples, "But what about you? Who do you say I am?" (v. 29) Each of the synoptic Gospels records this question.

The Cross can help us answer that question. And that question is vital to understanding Christian faith. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter to you what anyone else's view of Jesus is. Whether it is the thief on the Cross who believed him or the other who did not; the Pharisee on the sidelines or the soldier at the foot of the Cross; your best friend or your worst enemy, your Sunday School teacher, the bartender down at the corner tavern, or even your pastor or priest.

All that matters in the end is how each individual answers the question that has echoed down through the centuries, asked by Christ to generation upon generation of seekers: "But what about you? Who do you say I am?"

---

There is only one way for a Christian to answer that question. When a seeker comes to me and talks about becoming a Christian that is the only question that I ever ask her or him. I don't ask them about the Bible, or about where they live or where they work, or what they did before they got there. I don't care what church they came from or if they have never set foot in a church in their life. None of that really matters.

Often their honest answer to the question Jesus asks is "I don't know." And that is a good enough answer at that stage of their faith journey. Some never move beyond that stage, but most do. From my perspective an honest person who sincerely struggles with answering that question is in a far healthier spiritual place than one who gives the answer he or she is "supposed" to give but really doesn't believe.

So it is with us. If we think that we really aren't quite sure of the answer to that fundamental question, then we can learn a bit more about the answer by spending a little time with the two thieves on the Cross.

And, as we look at them keep in mind what we have already learned: that whatever else the Cross means, it means that God will do anything to prove to you that He loves you. He is saying to you, "See that Cross? I love you like that!"

The unrepentant thief asks Jesus, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" (v.39)

Although the question was rhetorical and sarcastic, it’s still an important one. If Jesus is simply a great teacher who has met an unfortunate end, then the story of the Cross is touching, but not truly relevant to Christian faith. In fact, there would be no Christian faith. Christians believe that Jesus was, in fact, a great teacher. But that is hardly the basis for believing that he is the Son of God, God come down, Emmanuel, to save us from ourselves

The irony of the unrepentant thief's question to a Christian, is, of course, that Christians believe that Jesus was, indeed, the Messiah -- but that man could not see it.

Yet, if Jesus were not the Messiah, then how could he promise the other thief, "This day you will be with me in paradise?" Only the Messiah, a Messiah even greater than the one the Jews hoped for, or a deluded mad-man, would make such a rash promise.

And, in a very real sense that is the choice a Christian must make: is he God or is he mad? C. S. Lewis argued that is the only real choice humans have to make about Christianity.

There is no middle ground to be found here. Either Jesus is the Messiah, or he is not. And, if we decide that Jesus is, indeed, the Messiah, a Messiah capable of actually welcoming the repentant thief into paradise with him, what more might that tell us about a Messiah who is able to offer such a promise? Answering that question will get us to that next step in faith that has to be taken if we would claim to be a believing Christian.

---

To help us get to that next step we need to explore the question asked by the good thief to the other thief who continued to mock Jesus: "Do you not fear God?"

In other words, if this man should truly be God's Messiah or more, have you no fear in continuing to hurl abuse at him? Luke records no response from the unrepentant thief, but leaves it that, even at the outer limits of his mortal existence, this man has no room for even the possibility of God working in the life of Jesus!

How do we know this? Because of the words Luke uses. Luke’s account of the conversation between the criminals and Jesus is unique. The words in the New Revised Standard Version, in English, "kept deriding him" translate the word "blasphemeo" in Greek. The NRSV translation is a weak translation. The intensity of feeling in that word is immensely strong and is not captured by the tame, "kept deriding him". In koine Greek it means to speak evil, revile, defame or vilify GOD.

The man hanging on a Cross knows he’s going to die but, nevertheless, Luke tells us that he is blaspheming God. Even if Jesus is the Messiah, or if Jesus is not the Messiah, but is merely "of God" in some undisclosed way he is not someone this thief has time for. The thief is in deep pain and anger with a soul closed to the possibility of God, or of caring about one who serves God. Nor is he open even to the idea of his own possible redemption.

That’s a scary place to be. This poor, pitiful man is locked in a prison of absolute loneliness. There is no room in his heart even for even the fear of God. And there is no room for hope.

This thief rejects Jesus. To a Christian to reject the love Jesus displayed on the Cross is to reject the love of God.

The other thief chose not to reject that love. Hanging from his own cross that thief made his choice: "Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom." (Luke 23:42)

So how does Jesus respond to this thief? This man is a convicted felon, who was guilty of his crimes, but he has chosen to fear God in these final moments, and most importantly, he has chosen to believe that Jesus is indeed the Messiah of God. And the response of God to his deepest need is instantaneous. Jesus says, "Today, you will be with me in paradise."

---

Luke's story shows us the very radically different decisions that two thieves made. It tells us that one rejects the Messiah, the Son of God, while the other asks to be remembered in Jesus' Kingdom. And Jesus promises that second thief that he would, that very day, be with him in paradise. Christians believe that only the Christ, the Son of God, could have made that offer.

That is how looking at the two thieves can help us to understand just who this Jesus is. He is the one who could offer to the thief who only asked to be "remembered" the gift of paradise. It can provide to those who, like the "good thief," are willing to make a leap of faith with insight about how they might answer Jesus' most important question to all of us.

When Jesus asks, "And you, who do you say that I am?" he is asking the ultimate question of Christian faith. The answer of the repentant thief is consistent with the clearest answer to that question found in the Gospels.

St. Peter, speaking for himself and all of the disciples in the 16th chapter of Matthew, says it clearly and succinctly: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God." (verse 16)

It is that belief that causes Christians to gather each Lent at the foot of the Cross, to strengthen and renew their faith in the One who offers peace, salvation and eternal life to those who believe that he is their Lord and Savior, God come down, Emmanuel. Jesus, the Christ, is the One who says, in Barclay's words, "Nothing you do can make me not love you. See that Cross? I love you like that!"

---

May the Season of Lent bring to each Christian a clear sense of what the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross means, and may it also be a time of introspection, looking into our own lives and reflecting on what we might do that will help us turn ourselves away from worldly things and toward the greatest gift of God: God's everlasting love for all humankind.

I hope that those whose faith is not Christian but have joined in the reading of this essay have a better idea of one reason, I think the most important reason, why the Cross is so central in the lives of those who follow Christ. That reason is love.

And I ask all Christians who read this essay to remember that Christ did not die upon the Cross out of love for Christians alone, for there were no Christians then. He died that all might know the love of God. He died for all of us.

As we enter this season of Lent 2010 my prayer is that all may know the unequivocal, unconditional, everlasting love of God.

Monte

The Bible

First published on JULY 13, 2009 7:06AM

Click "Submit Abuse" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

Cancel

---

Note: This post contains teaching applicable to Christians. However, much of it is equally applicable to Jews. I also think that it can be helpful to those of other faiths and of no faith at all who approach it with good will. This is how I view the Bible, nothing more, nothing less.

This is, of course, not the only way to look at the Bible. Unfortunately, too often those other ways have lead to abuse of the Bible and of those who trust the abusers. Many people have used it as a club with which to beat others over the head, to laud their superiority over others, to keep them in submission and under control, to foist their own agendas upon it and then claim that the Bible justifies their actions, and in hundreds of other both stupefyingly ignorant abuses of it as well as in highly intelligent yet devious and equally abusive uses of it.

It is time that we realize that the Bible is not our book to abuse as we please. It is God's book and we should do our best to use it as what it is meant to be: a source of God's revelation of God's self to us. If we believe, as I do, that the Bible is a Holy Book then it is incumbent upon us to treat it with respect. At the same time it is equally incumbent upon us not to worship it.

---

What follows flows from an discussion first of a small portion of a letter from St. Paul to his disciple, Timothy.

2 Timothy: 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, 15 and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

As we read above, in this letter Paul is admonishing his beloved pupil that Timothy should persevere in what he believes. He is to remember that he has known from childhood the "sacred writings" that are able to "instruct" him for salvation through his faith in Jesus Christ. Paul goes on to say that these scriptures are inspired by God and all are useful for teaching and for training in righteousness.

Paul was talking about the book we now call the "Old Testament" or the "Hebrew Bible." In Christian teaching Paul's admonitions have long since been applied to the New Testament writings, including, of course, Paul's own writings.

---

Today, Christians believe that Paul's teachings to Timothy are equally applicable to us. And so, some 2000 years later we are still to look to the Bible for teaching and training in righteousness. In fact, Christians look to the Bible as the primary source of God's revelation to humanity. It is to both inform us and to form us as to how we are to live.

Unfortunately, well meaning pastors, seeking to never offend a single soul in their flocks, see their jobs as taking what has long been considered an old, culturally conditioned, sexist, and often racist and narrow minded book in parts, and, rather than dealing with those issues head on, choose to poke around here and there in it and find the parts that might be "compatible" with our way of living. It then becomes kind of a soft, easy to swallow and digest, bland and tasteless gruel, but at least that is not offensive to anyone.

So too many then poke around in it and take some from part A and some from part B, conflate them, and wonder why they provide no nourishment. Worse, some then think this gruel needs to be spiced up a bit so they decide to tell the Bible what is possible and what is not, what they think is rational and what isn't, what they think make sense and what doesn't. All this is in some vague hope that we will pay attention to it, or at least be able to ignore it without having a guilt trip from hearing it.

For decades Robert Schuller filled the Crystal Cathedral and wrote dozens of "Be Happy" books by taking note of the American craving for self esteem and crafting a message which rendered Jesus into a personal therapist. Today, varying the theme just a bit, Joel Osteen fills his Lakewood Church with tens of thousands by preaching another form of feel good religion, calling himself a "life coach."

At the other end of the spectrum we have preachers like Jimmy Swaggart who preached hell fire and damnation for those who did not subscribe to the strictest of guidelines which he carefully picked selectively from the Bible. Ironically, of course, when he was caught in the act of sin, he then appealed to his public and, in tearful confession, managed to stay in the ministry and, within two years, was preaching the same old time religion that failed to keep him from straying.

When I was in seminary some self proclaimed feminists were somehow "shocked" to learn that the Bible was sexist, although there had been dozens of books written on the subject and a class was taught on the fact for two decades, and refused to take essentially any of the Bible seriously, rewriting it before giving practice sermons to say what it should have said, and would have said had a woman written it.

Since then, with a predominance of women now graduating from the nation's mainstream seminaries those soon to be pastors have taken to dealing with the sexism issues in the Bible head on, not shocked at all, but discussing the problem, shining a light on it and moving on to find the truth that lies behind the culturally conditioned words. Those are two very different ways of dealing with the same problem. And it proves that progress in Biblical interpretation is not impossible.

In conservative evangelical circles entire denominations and their seminaries have chosen to concentrate exclusively on one or two types of "sin" that they define and rail out against those. They conveniently exclude worrying about the other million or so sins that they themselves indulge in and have declared somehow "lesser" sins, although the Bible does not distinguish sin on the basis of severity. Some of the "sins" that they claim are not even sins when the Bible is carefully studied and interpreted.

There are literally hundreds of other examples I could cite, and no doubt you have come head to head with some of this arrogance that is allegedly "in the Bible." Now, some of this highly indigestible stuff actually is. But most is not. And when it is it needs to be dealt with directly and a light shown upon it. For some reason, however, many pastors and preachers don't have a stomach for dealing with these issues honestly.

---

All of this is simply to prepare you for my belief that I do not think it is my job, or the job of any pastor or theologian, to make the Bible palatable to modern men and women, nor do I think it is the job of any legitimate pastor, teacher, preacher or theologian to use the Bible to make it tell us what they want the Bible to say.

Rather, my job is to make modern men and women, including me, able to hear what the Bible is saying to us. And that job extends to making us able to hear what the Bible is saying even if we don't like it, and even if we disagree with it. I do not assume that task is easy. It is much harder, in fact, than doing any of the easier things above. It is infinitely easier to read into the Bible what we want to hear (eisogesis) that to read out of the Bible what it is saying to us (exegesis).

It is hard to do exegesis because we often approach the Bible not as the sophisticated, educated and erudite people that we think we are, but rather as parochial, myopic folk whose vision doesn't extend much further than what has or is happened to us.

When I was preaching I know that many of the people in the congregation came to church wondering whether or not I was going to preach about something that would make them feel better, solve a particular problem that was bothering them, or give them a lift. I tried to do some of that, but that was never the real reason they should have come. They needed to come to worship God and hear what God was saying to them. If they did that chances are that they would feel better without worrying about whether they would or not.

I think that the Bible sometimes has rough going among us not because we are modern, sophisticated, astute, logical and rational, but rather because we can become quite content to be naive, narrow minded, narcissistic, inexperienced critics of the very book that Christians say we depend upon to guide our understanding of the world and our life in it. And when we allow ourselves to be like that, well, the Bible just seems odd. And there is the rub. Because when it comes right down to it our true feelings about it and abilities to understand it do not match our stated allegiance to the Bible. Too many Christians prefer to "talk the talk" and not "walk the walk."

Nevertheless, millions of Christians gather in churches on Sunday and act as if the Bible knows more about life than they do. We even pledge ourselves, over and over again, to living as though that is true. But far fewer actually live as if it is true. If we were honest we would admit we spend very little time with the Bible, and that we think that it is odd, difficult, demanding, and dogmatic.

But, what, in the name of heaven, do we expect? It is the BIBLE! Do we really want and expect that the Bible should read like a third grade primer about Dick and Jane? Do we really want a book that deals with complicated issues like life and death to read like a Doonesbury cartoon?

The Bible is, after all, about life. Where did we ever get the notion that it should be simplistic? Where did we come up with the idea that the solutions to life's problems are simpleminded, do-it-yourself formulas? Life is messy. And so is the Bible.

---

So, if it is a big, complicated book about life and living, and death and dying, and everything in between, what, specifically, is it about? And to that question I have bad news for our egos. It is mainly not about us. It is first about God! And therefore it is really big! I don't mean big as in long, although it is long. I mean big in the sense that God is big. The Bible is about big things, big events, big cosmic, earth shattering, mind bending, turn the world on its head happenings.

And it matters not whether the story is as big as the parting of the Red Sea, or as small as the parable of the mustard seed, or as commonplace as getting a drink from a well in a strange neighborhood, the stories are all big because they are about God. This God, this YHWH, is not some tame, timid, little idol that we can manipulate to fit our needs, or teach to do tricks. Nor is God the kind of god who is content to be used only as a consultant in those hours of our desperation when we finally turn to God.

So, I think that our main problem with the Bible isn't that it is so primitive and outdated. Rather it is that the Bible isn't designed to fit the way we are most comfortable thinking about ourselves. Our main problem with the Bible is that we come to it, if we come to it at all, with ourselves mostly in mind, to get a better glimpse of who we are, to receive help for ourselves. And sometimes that happens.

But the Bible simply isn't mostly about us. What we really find in the Bible is a big, prickly, outrageous God who demands justice, and paradoxically, and simultaneously, demands obedience to a love covenant that he sets before us, wants to be in with us, by his grace.

As Christians, we find his Son, Jesus, the Christ, who, by doing the outrageous thing of dying for us on a cross, turns on its head every idea about power and privilege that we ever had. This Son's actions are outrageous, yet he tells us that he loves us in spite of every evil that we do. This is a love that is so grand that St. Paul can only stutter and call the very telling of it a "stumbling block."

And, then, if that is not enough, we find this Holy Spirit in the Bible that dogs us and prods us and insists that we "listen to" this strangely loving and forgiving Son of God. And the Bible tops it all off by telling us this incredible story of God raising him from the grave, telling us that he is alive. He is "Emmanuel," God with us. Here and now. Wow! What a story! Who can top that?

---

No. The Bible is not first about us. That is the first hard truth to swallow about the Bible. And here is the second truth, a truth we will never understand until we believe the first truth: that, in the end, the Bible is about us, but only in a very peculiar way.

The Bible is about us understanding that we are creatures, mere mortals, finite, ultimately helpless over everything that really counts in life; and certainly helpless over death. We are creatures that are dependent on God for our very existence. Yet this God calls us his "children." So the Bible is about us, but only in relation to our God.

And because the Bible is about us in relation to God, it is messy! We are messy creatures, after all. And the Bible stories that recount the lives of the saints of God who came before us are messy stories. Few Bible stories follow neatly, one after the other. Things get repeated; get out of place; even Jesus tells parables that make no sense to us without careful study, and many of his parables don't even end! In fact, the Bible itself really doesn't end, because the story it tells, the love story between God and us, does not end.

The Bible is a bit like those old Saturday matinee "serials" of my childhood. They always "ended" with the words "to be continued." The Bible is "to be continued" because God isn't done with us yet. And perhaps that is why, even when we don't quite understand it, we keep coming back to it and trying to understand. We have this hunch, this faith, that maybe, just maybe, it will turn out to be our story after all. That is, after all, what the Bible wants us to do: to see that its stories are, in fact, our stories, that the God it describes is, in fact, our God.

If we can just manage to see ourselves as small enough, there is a lot to learn from this big, wonderful, unwieldly, unpredictable book that we call the Bible.