Roughly 2000 years ago, a controversial religious leader was brutally executed on a cross somewhere in the greater Jerusalem area. So far as I know, there is more historical evidence for this event – the death of Jesus on the Cross at the hands of the Romans – than there is for the very existence of many other historical figures whose lives are taken for granted as fact (see, for example, Socrates). In other words, you are free as you like to deny the historicity of this singular event: But if you do, you are also logically bound to deny the historicity of pretty much most of the accepted history of important individuals from Jesus’ time backwards.
But the point of this post is not to engage a debate about history – which rarely gets anyone anywhere. Rather, it is to answer the question: What does this historical event mean? It turns out that even people willing to accept it as a likely historical event have differed wildly in their interpretation of what it means. The historian Josephus seems to regard the event as a kind of passing of a great teacher. The Jewish Talmud depicts it more like the just punishment of a heretic and sorcerer. Many say it was just the death of another random person on another lonely hill distinguished only by its brutality (and, perhaps, the ingenuity of his followers in capitalizing on it).
I was once asked by a thoughtful commenter on this blog to write more about the concept of substitutionary sacrifice. Although it appears to the inattentive layperson as if I mostly ignore the wishes of my readers, I have actually kept that thought in the back of my mind for some time. I view it as one of the central concepts of Christianity; and the idea is certainly the central reason I am a Christian and not, say, a vague and wandering Theist.
Of course, it goes without saying that I’m not going to focus this whole post on that concept and some of the many interesting and difficult questions raised by the commenter – let’s be honest…I’m not that user-friendly. (That last sentence is called lowering expectations. That’s a tip, folks). However, in the next three posts, I want to lay some groundwork concerning what the event that inspired my belief in God’s standing in my place means to me personally. I do hope to get back to some of the larger intellectual questions this raises, all of which are legitimate and important.
For the moment, before we begin (the masses scream: You mean we haven’t even BEGUN and I’ve already been subjected to this much boredom!), I’d like to make a couple of notes. First, this list is not intended to be anything more than an explanation of what Jesus’ death means to me personally. I wear a cross around my neck; and I’m simply explaining what that cross means to me. All of these things assume that the Christian interpretation of Jesus is roughly correct (e.g., Jesus was divine in a way we are not), and I’m not in this post trying to offer a defense of that interpretation. So, while I look forward to engaging in the useful intellectual discussions that may ensue, my purpose here is not overly ambitious – it is to answer the question of why I drape a cross around my neck each morning.
Second, although I’m going to break this down into six things the cross means to me – because, let’s face it, numbered lists are cool – this list is not exhaustive. I could actually list probably 1000 things before I took my first breath while I was writing my first paragraph. This is the defining symbol of my whole life.
Finally, these things are not in any particular order, except perhaps the order that they occurred to me as I went. All of these are equally important to me – and indeed, all of them are interrelated and pretty much inseparable. [Editor's note: This week we'll cover 1-3; next week we'll cover 4-6].
OK, without further delays, here is What the Cross Means To Me:
1. I matter. A lot of people over the years have implied a philosophy that the individual person does not really matter. Those people say that there is always some larger goal that is more important than a single person; and therefore the person is not really very relevant. Many of those persons have been within the church; some of them have been without. But wherever they lie, from whatever viewpoint they come from, they tell me that I, as an individual, do not matter.
When people say things like that; when they tell me that I’m irrelevant; that I’m just one drop in a huge ocean; that God has a higher agenda and greater things to worry about than a little guy from backwoods Louisiana; when people say it’s a big picture and I’m barely a pixel on the frame; when that haunting small voice inside of me tells me that I’m worthless; when I hear and feel and think these sorts of things, my reply is always the same:
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If I didn’t matter, then why did Jesus die for me? I – Luke the individual – must mean something to Him. God at least must think that an individual life is worth saving – because He died to save mine.
2. My sin matters. Equally as importantly to me – but likely much less popular with the me-first American culture in which I live – is the fact that my sin matters.
It’s true that God would not have died for me if I didn’t matter. But He also would not have died if He didn’t take sin super-seriously. If God didn’t care about my sin – if it weren’t important to Him – why all the fuss? I mean, I don’t offer my life for a piece of broccoli. The annals of history are not replete with the cry “give me the tuna salad or give me death.” Few – if any – people have ever died for a Milli Vanilli album. I would not trade my life for something that doesn’t matter. So when God died to account for my sin, that says something about how important my sin is to Him.
When I’m mean to people; when I’m selfish or angry or prideful; when my actions hurt others; that’s a big deal to Him. It’s a big deal because those other people matter, too (more on this in an upcoming post called What the Cross Means to Other People) and because He wants us to be everything we were made to be. He wants us in right relation to Him. He thought my sin important enough to die for; so I should, too.
3. Mercy meets justice. “There is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” the Bible says in Romans. I’ve done a lot of bad stuff, and God wants me to repent and stop doing that stuff (see #2 above). He almost always told the people He encountered to stop sinning (a fact often lost on people when they read stories about His mercy). And yet – and yet – before that obvious and necessary step; before the thing every decent person would say to do, which is to stop behaving badly; before this obvious thing, which is justice, He did something maybe not so obvious and certainly not necessary: He Himself stood in the way of condemnation. He offered mercy and pardon and a chance to start over.
This is the central theme of the New Testament, and it is woven throughout it in multiple ways and with multiple stories and metaphors. Perhaps the most common expression goes something like this: Jesus took my place; he literally bore my sin inside of Him; I should have been punished, but He was punished instead.
There is an ancient Arab parable that is along the following lines. A rich Prince was walking one day in the marketplace. He saw a hungry man steal a piece of bread. The thieving man was caught, and the Prince watched as the authorities stretched out the criminal’s arm – in order to chop off his hand. A sword was raised and about to strike before the Prince, having mercy on the criminal, said: “Stop! I am the Prince of this kingdom, and I order you to spare this man’s hand.” The policeman in charge looked at the Prince and – somewhat apologetically – replied, “I am sorry, oh noble Prince, but the laws of the land are clear – a hand is the penalty for a theft. Not even your majesty can countermand that.” The Prince nodded, stretched out his own arm for all to see, and said, “I know that – which is why I want you to take my hand instead.”
I feel like that in my own life; I feel like Someone has loved me enough to take my place, to take what I deserved; to offer His hand for my theft. There is some sense in which I understand that God cannot make it all right to steal – He cannot simply declare my theft, which is evil, to be good. That would go against the truth of what is; it would be unjust. He can, however, offer in some wild and incomprehensible way to take my place; and Christianity says that’s exactly what He has done.
Next week, we pick up this theme by discussing in more detail some of the implications of this Great Exchange (via numbers 4-6 on the list). In the following week, we end this three-part series by discussing what the Cross means for how I view other people.
Reading Paradise Lost some, I’ve had a few interesting thoughts and self-conversations about various aspects I like or dislike or find interesting about Christian thought. Not to mention these delightful Apologetic Professor articles. Since I haven’t replied to most lately, I’ll throw in my 2 cents here, hoping it won’t cause delay in more writings.
While the first two points are pretty straight-forward in my thoughts and not terribly interesting (How can the individual matter when it was for all humanity? That is counter to you, Insert Name Here, is universally important – but if the individual was worthless, then it wouldn’t mean anything anyway, so it comes at a draw… Or why would God die to rectify the abuses others heaped onto him? That self-destruction is kind of disturbing to consider, as it makes himself both the victim and the perpetrator, like a divine suicide victim… But then again you separate them into God and Jesus, and the Law and so on and so on…).
What was more interesting to me was the final point with an apt parable with it that got me thinking, “Well that’s fine and dandy, but it won’t do anything unless people already accept that moral code.” For instance, take a barbarian who wanders into an Arabian market and takes an apple. The prince shows up, gets mutilated in an act of great self-sacrifice, and our hero barbarian eats the apple and wanders away to take a pie – with a completely clear conscious.
Unless the individual accepts the weight of guilt over the death of Jesus and the weight of Christian conceptions of sin, they cannot be affected by the sacrifice at all. It simply isn’t possible. Now many might argue that the sacrifice was inherently acceptable (i.e. impactful morally) to all humans because it was god and morals are universal, but that didn’t save countless monasteries from being sacked by gold-craving Vikings who thought it rather convenient to house so much wealth in single-locations guarded by half-bald robed men. Those Vikings felt not a shred of guilt about slaughtering them, and probably their most significant thought was how easy it was to pillage the place.
So, if the sacrifice only works on those already inside the moral structure, how can it be for all humanity? It means that they’d have to be ‘taught right and wrong’, which seems odd considering it ought to be universal. To any Roman of the day, Jesus being crucified wasn’t a big deal – just another man being executed for being irritating to the State. To all the Jews who called for his blood, it wasn’t any more significant than stoning any other dude they disagreed with. One can argue it HAS had a huge impact since then, but I’d think if a deity died, any mere mortal would think, “Well, SOMETHING just happened,” at least without having to be taught a thing.
Oh bugger, and I thought the first one didn’t give me an interesting thought, but I guess it did. I was thinking before on major differences between the Christian and the Greek gods, and I thought the deity’s perspective on humanity was interesting. The Christian god is personally invested in them because he made them and they are apparently the most interesting things ever made, and he wants to basically be reunited with them and have them praise him forever universally. Kind of like Prometheus, only that Titan seemed mostly to just make his creation happy even at the cost of the gods’ monopolized powers rather than making himself happy and unified with his creation. Anyway, thats the ‘God is interested in YOU’ part, and sooo interested that he will either love you to death or throw you into hellfire (or let you fall, take your pick), a sort of feeling the late Christopher Hitchens described as a ‘Divine Dictatorship’ – whether benevolent or not, it is totally top-down.
Greek gods are also top-down sorts, but from a rather different perspective. In the end of things, they really don’t give a damn what happens to people. Sure they love having the little buggers worship them, hate it when they insult them, bang some of them, love some, toy with others, etc etc… But the gods have been and will be with or without mankind there to observe. Now the gods like mankind in the way we like entertainment – we’ll laugh and cry and root for the characters that come and go at the bidding of the plot, and if we are able to we might just manipulate how things turn out if the media allows it. But the gods aren’t innately personally invested in humans, and a lot of times don’t even notice what they are even doing (like when they took a break to party and when they got back they saw humans acting like gods with the fires Prometheus gave them). The difference then between the Christian god and the Greek gods is one where the individual *might* matter, in a kind of separated manner. They might hound or help you, but they don’t necessarily judge you as a human against themselves (thankfully – most of them are kinda dicks). It’s like how we might give ants sugar or the hose, but we don’t praise or condemn their tiny souls like it matters to us personally. And so in a way it might be actually a bit more comforting to consider than an intent eye always watching you, if you’d rather prefer that the gods likely don’t even know you’re there in the wide world.
Anyway, that is just vering off topic, so in short guilt appears necessary to make the sacrifice work (and without it nothing happens), and a personally invested god is in some ways more disturbing than a gaggle of occasional observers and meddlers.
Uh-Oh,
Great to hear from you again! Sorry for the delay in my response; I began teaching a week earlier than most UM profs for reasons I won’t waste space on, but suffice to say this is a busy week.
About your comment: I think you are right on target. Your commentary on the differences/similaries between the Christian and Greek gods is fantastic — I think it’s better than the article I wrote in its depth and complexity. And I mostly agree with it, although I would probably put a somewhat different framing on it. As I wrote in one of my responses to Grundy, while I don’t care much for top-down myself, I also don’t think something is inherently good or bad because it is top-down or bottom-up. I’m not sure you’d agree or disagree with that; but I think probably our disagreement isn’t about the difference between the Greek gods and Christianity’s interpretation of God, but rather in how the Christian God strikes us, so to speak. I find it a rather happy event to imagine that there is someone all-powerful who takes a great interest in me and loves me unconditionally — I’m happy for that person to run the universe if He exists. (Being a kind of rebel myself, I do understand the other reaction, though. I’m not trying to dismiss your experiences and point of view, only to explain what I imagine is the primary difference in our view of the same set of facts. Maybe I’m wrong about that!). In any event, I loved your commentary in this regard.
For all that, the part I liked the most in your comment was the insightful discussion of guilt/grace. You are right! Christ’s sacrifice doesn’t have any meaning to anyone who doesn’t feel some guilt. (Loved your reinterpretation/addition to the parable — brilliant!) C. S. Lewis famously said something like “if you do not feel a sense of your own sin, you are not even in the audience to whom Jesus was preaching.” And I think that’s true.
Truthfully, at an intellectual level, it isn’t quite as simple as we Christians sometimes make it sound, and not as simple as even I have made it sound on this blog. I think we could separate your excellent analyses into different questions. (1) Is there some kind of consensually-shared human morality? I think the answer to that is “yes,” depending on what you mean, but as we’ve debated that before, I’m going to mostly move on. Yet I do want to pause here and note that you are completely right in that it is NOT consensually shared in the sense that everyone feels guilty about the same stuff all the time. I grant the Vikings examples, etc., in their full force. I quite agree with you there. I would bet that the Vikings were not completely disconnected from typical morality so much as is supposed; but there is no denying that many cultures have had brutal war-like qualities to them.
(2) More interesting is the question: What does it mean that people differ in their moral code at least to some degree? The Bible itself says that the Ninevites needed to be taught right and wrong. So while I think to some degree the people of Ninevah already had a sense of right and wrong, even Christian Scripture would agree with your assertion up to a point. And what are we to make of that? (a) We could make of it — what I assume is partially your point — that morality is just a subjective thing that isn’t really “real” in some sense. (b) We could also make of it that morality is in fact real but it is something that can be learned. I was taught that 2 + 2 = 4, and I don’t think it is the less real for all that. I taught my daughter how to share, and I don’t think it is the less real of a principle because I tried to teach it to her.
Don’t get me wrong — that’s not really an argument for b over a, and I realize this is complicated. I’m only offering a quick response for another possible way to frame the set of things that I think we (for the most part) agree on.
Finally, I think your comment (at the beginning — for some reason I’m working backwards) on the Cross being a kind of strange divine suicide is very appropriate. In fact, one of the things that writing this series has done for me is to make it clear that the whole idea of “mercy meets justice” is not as simple to articulate as I had supposed. Indeed, attempting to articulate the meaning of the cross and dealing with some of these sorts of questions is one of the reasons I ended up writing 2 additional pieces to this series — so I’ll hold off further comment until then. But suffice to say, I can certainly understand your reaction!
Keep those comments coming! I appreciate the honest and thoughtful feedback as always.
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