Sometimes You Need To Get Up CLose

One of the beauties of writing a weekly blog is that it exposes me to some things that I might not know or might not engage with all that much.

For example, today the church celebrates the “Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.”  I can’t really say I knew that this feast day existed. But through this remembrance, the church is inviting the faithful to dive more deeply into the theology of the cross.

In the first reading from Numbers 21, the Israelites are in the desert grumbling against God and Moses. Life is hard there, and they are weary. So God sends snakes to bite the people! The people repent and stop complaining. In prayer, Moses receives this instruction, “Make a saraph and mount it on a pole, and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent and put it on a pole. All who looked at lived.

There’s SO MUCH to unpack in this reading alone and I have previously offered some thoughts which you can read here. What I want to focus on, however, is the invitation to look at the source of harm as a means of finding life.

For me, this has a lot to do with today’s feast day when we are invited to look more deeply at the cross.

Now if we were together in a room, I’d ask everyone to think for a moment on what the cross means for them. If you grew up Christian, how was it explained to you and is that a belief you still hold on to?

I grew up hearing a theology of the cross that told me that it was a symbol that reminded us that God sent his [sic] only begotten son to die in atonement for our sins. The theology said that due to the fallen and sinful nature of humanity, a sacrifice had to be made to atone for it. And Jesus paid that price with his blood. In fact, he was the only one “good enough” to do so.

Maybe this sounds familiar to you. In fact, this might be a lot of people’s answer.

Over time, however, I have struggled more and more with this theology – for many reasons. Previously I have written, and it probably bears repeating, that when we read violent or punitive depictions of God, “they are really human projections.  We know that’s not how God is because Jesus – who read all of these same scriptures found in the Torah – came away with a VERY different view of God (and so did many others as well).  This is a message we probably need to keep hearing and working to recover from.  And the great scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann once commented that “God [too] is in recovery from all the violence that has been attributed to him [sic] and done in his [sic] name.” 

Furthermore, this theology of atonement did not emerge until about 1000 years AFTER Jesus died.  Which means that for almost 1000 years, Christians had other ideas about what the cross meant to them.

One phrase I heard which really resonates with me comes from John Phillip Newell who has written a lot on Celtic spirituality. He says that the cross “reveals God rather than appeases God,” and theologian Dottie Oleson writes that, “Jesus’ death on the cross was not something God caused or wanted. God is not a violent deity needing to use violence to save us.”

So why did Jesus have do die?

During his time on earth, as Jesus walked with the marginalized and oppressed, he saw what the domination systems of empire did to them. He saw what it did to their bodies, their hearts and their minds. And he decided to be with people in that pain – to literally put his body where the harm was. He knew that if he kept doing what he was doing and saying what he was saying,  those same domination systems would do to him what it did to every one else that it was threatened by or didn’t like. 

Could he have chosen a different, safer path? Of course.

You see the cross was not just a form of capital punishment that Rome used to punish criminals and the threats to its power. It was meant to be a public symbol of fear and intimidation. It was meant to show that “resistance is futile” and that Rome was the ultimate authority.

Bryan Stevenson from the Equal Justice Initiative tells a story about his grandmother where she taught him that you cannot understand the important things from a distance. Sometimes you need to get up close. Getting up close makes it much more likely that we will be changed and helps us to find a path forward that is redemptive and restorative.

In Christian theology, God took the form of Jesus to get up close to humanity. And through the cross, Jesus demonstrated that God would stop at nothing to get up close to us. Even more, this getting close to humanity – and especially in solidarity with those who are most marginalized and harmed – offers us a path that truly is restorative and redemptive.

There is, actually, an alternative to empire. Empire is not inevitable. Violence is not inevitable, and the cross goes from being a threat to a promise.

Looking at the cross – as we are encouraged to do in Numbers 21 – also does something else. It helps us to “see” the crucified people” of our own era.

Liberation theologians like James Cone (sometimes referred to as the “father” of Black liberation theology) saw the cross and Jesus suffering on it as a statement of solidarity with the oppressed in the face of state-sanctioned violence. He critiqued so much of Christianity for turning the cross into a “harmless ornament” rather than a call to radical solidarity in the face of suffering. And as a Black man in America, he saw the cross as legitimizing the  experience of oppressed peoples and offering hope that God was with them in the midst of the harm (and that God did not condone or align with the harm).

Our gospel today from John 3 is one of the most often quoted verses from the scriptures, “For God so loved the world that God gave us the Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

So as we gaze upon the cross, we see all of the harm that has happened by and to humanity. But hopefully that is not all that we will see. The cross might remind us that there is another way to live that does not require harm, that God is with us – even in the most painful and difficult moments, and that the cross is a path of solidarity whereby we recognize Jesus’ willingness to hold nothing back for the sake of love and justice.

We don’t mention it very often but for the first few hundred years after Jesus’ death, the Romans referred to Christians as fools and even depicted Jesus on the cross with a donkey head – because they just could not believe that a group of people would live in shared community, reject traditional models of power and might, care for the people on the margins, and find joy in all of this!

And if this cross saves us from anything, perhaps it saves us from the the hell of not pursuing the path of love. For as an old Yoruba proverb says, “If you say you are well while your neighbor’s house catches fire, then sooner or later you find out you are not well at all.”

May we all be well.