If you were to invent a religion, you probably wouldn’t want to make it as unfathomable and sometimes unpalatable as Christianity. You wouldn’t insist that God is three persons and yet one. You wouldn’t assert that God became human for a time, yet remained fully God and fully man, full of divine power yet completely vulnerable. And you certainly wouldn’t orient your worship around a story about that God-man being executed by crucifixion, a death reserved for criminals and insurrectionists.
Yet, as the early church proclaimed the Life of God revealed in Jesus Christ, that story became most central. In all four gospels the narrative slows and zooms in for more detail when it comes to Jesus’ passion and death, which occupy more chapters than other incidents. The Gospel of John sees the cross as the place where the Son of God is glorified. Yet this emphasis on the Cross also caused trouble for the early Christ-followers – as it does for many today.
For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
The idea of a crucified Messiah was anathema to many of the era’s Jewish people. Many thought it blasphemous to claim that Jesus had a special relationship with God, or was God; others were appalled to think that God would send a Messiah to deliver his people from oppression, only to allow the oppressors to kill that man on a cross. The idea that God may have been about a much bigger deliverance than a military one did not compute.
And to many Greeks, so fond of logic and philosophy, the story was ridiculous. They could embrace the notion that the mind of God could be expressed in human form, in the way a thought becomes a word, but then to live a life of poverty and weakness? That was unlike any god they could conceive.
How does the crucifixion strike you? Can you see the freedom and love in this horrible tale around which we weave our faith? Many Christians turn away from this brutal story, preferring to emphasize Jesus’ wisdom as a teacher, or goodness as a moral exemplar, or power as a worker of miracles. But Jesus was also, perhaps primarily, savior, redeemer. Understanding the Cross as the place where he took upon himself the penalty of all humanity’s sin, and endured the agony not only of human cruelty, but of estrangement from God, helps us to more fully experience God's forgiveness and freedom.*
Can we see in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God?” It takes special vision, the eyes of faith to make sense of this awful paradox. In fact, our minds can’t make sense of it; it’s a mystery that seeps into our hearts through contemplation and worship. Let’s open the cracks.
*You might read The Crucifixion: Understandng the Death of Jesus Christ, I have not yet read it, but it was named Christianity Today’s Book of the Year, and is authored by the Rev. Fleming Rutledge, whom I have known since my days at Grace Church in New York. It comes highly recommended for those who want to delve more deeply into this mystery.
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