In the last two posts, I’ve discussed six things that the Cross of Christ means to me. The astute observer will no doubt have noticed that in so doing, I made nary a single mention of any other person in humanity. While this sloppy focus on myself fits with the milieu of the internet quite well, it perhaps falls a little short of the higher Sermon-on-the-Mount-like standards that Jesus Himself raised.
Presuming then, as I do, that God did not make the universe only for me, I thus think it important to pause for a (comparatively smaller) moment on what the Cross means for how I view other people. I’m not going to lie to you – I don’t think about other people too much. I figure the best thing I can do for the rest of humanity is to try and keep my own heavily-listing ship afloat on the storms of life; and anyway, it’s the only ship to which I’ve been granted anything like a sail and a rudder. Yet, when I do pause on the implications of the Cross for others, it occurs to me that all the things I said in my last two posts about myself, equally apply to other people. So, for your consideration, I present the Six Meanings of the Cross, the Re-Hash: Or the Apologetic Professor Realizes Other People Exist. In this post, I briefly look at the implications of the six things outlined in my prior two posts for how we should view other people.
1. Other people matter. If I matter to God, then every single person in the whole world matters. That includes the people that I like and who matter to me a whole lot – such as my wife and my daughter – and the many people that I don’t like and who don’t matter to me at all – such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher. They all matter equally to God. Every starving child; every irritating co-worker; every jerk and saint and homeless person and rich fool; they all each have infinite value as individuals to Him.
And because they matter to Him, they should matter to me. The Cross tells me not just that I am important to God, but that you are important to God, too. Your soul is just as worth saving as mine, because He died for you and me alike.
2. Other people’s sin matters. Our culture is all a-gaggle for a theory of tolerance and looking the other way when people do bad stuff. (They are all a-gaggle, I say, for the theory; in practice, no one actually likes looking the other way, when the bad stuff has been done to them). Now I’m all for tolerance, properly defined; but the Cross implies to me a view of other people that is starkly different from the soft-soap food generally cooked up by our culture [Apologetic staff editor’s note: Please do not try to cook your soap and eat it. This is merely a terrible mixed metaphor typical of our senior writer.]
Some people think that love means accepting all the bad stuff, and thus if I am to truly love other people, then I should kind of look the other way at the bad stuff you do. No! God did not accept all the bad stuff. God thought your sin so bad that He died on the Cross to overcome it – to pardon it – to give you a second chance. And I do not think showing you God’s love and mercy means that I pretend like the bad stuff inside of you is really not that bad. (You can probably begin to understand why, in Christian circles, I am not a popularly-sought-after mentor.)
Maybe it is the bias of my own experience as a screwed-up person. No one – not a single person – in my life ever helped me one iota by telling me that the bad stuff in my life was really not bad after all. Oh, that may feel good for a short time, but that’s not really love. The only people who ever helped me were those who told me that the bad stuff was really, really bad – but that there was hope to change, and grace and forgiveness for a second chance. And this is what the Cross means to me: It means that the best thing for you is to recognize that your sin matters and that you will be infinitely happier if you see it as the horrible thing it is, repent, accept forgiveness, and – never do it again. I do not think I will help you very much by pretending to you that you are right when you say 2 + 2 = 5. Better to admit you are wrong and give grace to change (more on the grace part shortly).
3. Mercy meets justice. Of course, just as useless as the people saying your sin is really ok are the people who point self-righteous fingers and shout you are going to hell without offering any hope for mercy. “There is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” doesn’t just mean for me – it means for you, too. And the Cross means that I should look at every single person through the lens God looks at them; which is at the intersection of mercy and justice. (Yes, editorial staff, there really might be a lens at an intersection – it could happen – so get over yourself!)
Jesus had a lot of nasty things to say about people who accuse others but do not help them get better; I don’t want to be one of those people; and, as we discuss in point #4 below, the Cross is one of the things that most inspires me to treat other people in the correct mercy-meets-justice sort of way.
4. There is Someone standing between my stones and you. The truth is, other people irritate me – a lot. Some of them have done some pretty nasty things to me; some of them have done nothing really to speak of and yet I find myself frequently annoyed at them anyway.
The order viagra cheap real problem was that I could not even get an erection like I used to get in touch with a health care professional with all your reports and medical prescriptions. In November he purchasing this cialis prescription online will be judging the Members Show at the Waccamaw Arts and Crafts League in Myrtle Beach, SC. With erectile dysfunction being a problem that is they don’t know how to delay the climax. buy generic levitra unica-web.com Moreover, they also do not have to mean planned intercourse. unica-web.com order cheap viagra
But whether deep legitimate wounds or mild temporary irritations, I constantly find myself angry at other people. And here’s the thing: Both within and without the Church, there has been much namby-pamby cacophony written about how best to deal with anger at others, how best to forgive other people, how best to get over this kind of frustration and hostility.
Now I don’t necessarily have a problem with all the stuff that has been written at a conceptual level. Nonetheless, in the strange world that is the psychology of Luke Conway, it is still true that none – and I mean absolutely none – of that psycho-babble has ever mattered one whit to me; none of it has ever helped me even an inch towards the goal of forgiving others and living in harmony with them, except the thing I’m about to say. And that thing comes from the Cross.
That thing is this: If God forgave me for my terrible sins on the Cross, then – for His sake – I should forgive other people. That’s all.
Jesus emphasized this theme over and over in His teachings: It is expected that if you are forgiven, that you should forgive. And that makes sense to me on a level of sheer reciprocity and it helps me when I try to forgive others. But deeper still is the revelation that in forgiving others, in a sense I am returning to God what He gave me freely – in loving them, I am loving Him. And since He at least has been incomprehensibly merciful to me, then I should show mercy in return.
So, when I look at other people, I not only think of myself as the sinful woman in Jesus’ famous living parable – with Jesus standing in between your stones and myself. I also (less frequently perhaps, but no less powerfully) think of my own stones, ready to cast at you – and Jesus standing in between and saying “are you without sin yourself? If so, cast away. If not, forgive! For I forgave you.”
5. Freedom. If God gives me grace and freedom to grow and to fly, then I need to give other people the same room to grow. I need to offer them the same Land of Beginning Again that Jesus offers me on the Cross.
6. The limitless love of God. If the Cross means that God’s love for me is limitless – and it does – then it also means so His love for you is limitless; and thus my love for you should aspire to be limitless, too. (Just for the record, I chose the words “aspire to” carefully – as anyone that knows me knows, my love for anyone is fairly, shall we say, finite).
There is an important and deep meaning here that I do not want to be missed. Everyone is welcome at the foot of the Cross. The Cross means that God’s love for people knows no boundaries of race, gender, creed, religious background, or [insert political buzz-word here]. Whatever walk of life you travel in, whatever side of the proverbial street you are from, I am no better – or worse – than you. His arms are open – to everyone.
And that means everyone. It doesn’t mean that you can just keep doing anything you want – no matter how bad it is – and everything will be ok (see #2 above). If you think that, then you simply haven’t come to the Cross at all. Rather, it means this: That there is no sin you or anyone has committed that could keep you from God, if you come back to Him. It means that no matter how far you have fallen, you are still welcome at the Cross. God has shown that His love for you is without limits by giving everything He could for you; and the evidence is at Calvary. And since that is true of you, that attitude should also permeate my belief about you – and everyone else.
Thank you Luke for expressing in beautiful language exactly my own sentiments. An awesome read.
Thanks, Schuyler. Appreciate the positive feedback!
I’ve withheld comment on the prior “What the Cross Means” posts because it’s certainly not my place to criticize or dissect your personal beliefs. But since I consider myself to be included in “other people,” allow me now to say this: I can make no sense of the claim that God gave “everything he could” for me or for anyone else. I get the point–Jesus was God, and Jesus died on Calvary, so that was the ultimate sacrifice: God allowed himself (and/or his Son?) to be crucified for our sins. But God didn’t actually die on Calvary, did he? God continued to rule the universe between Good Friday and Easter; he wasn’t dead. In fact, he caused earthquakes in Jerusalem when Jesus died, opening tombs and setting the dead free to walk through the streets (Matthew 27: 51-53). And Jesus himself only “died” temporarily, according to Christian belief–I suspect a lot of us, if it came to that, would sacrifice our beloved son for a worthy cause if we knew he’d be alive again in three days (and glorified to boot!). Perhaps I’m just unable to grasp the profound soteriology of the cross, but I remain a little unclear as to what God actually “gave” by letting Jesus be put to death.
Jack,
A perfectly reasonable question stated with kindness and thoughtfulness. I do not think your perfectly reasonable question has a perfectly reasonable answer, but I’ll give a quick shot. But let me say how much I appreciate the prodding — I love the comments you and others offer to push ideas when they should be pushed! And this one DEFINITELY needs to be pushed.
During the next two posts, I’m going to break down the “necessity” of the Cross a bit more in depth, so I’ll hold off commenting on that here. Rather, I’ll focus on your excellent points that (1) God, in some sense, did not die on the Cross, because obviously He was still living to raise Christ from the dead; and (2) that it isn’t really inspiring to offer yourself up if you knew you were going to be raised again (as Jesus clearly did, if Christianity is true — he predicted several times He would rise again).
(1) About God not dying: Clearly what you are saying is true — in one sense. There is a sense in which, if God exists, He cannot really die. And you are perfectly correct to say that Christianity has always taught that God was still alive when Christ was physically dead.
Let’s just for a second pause and, if we can, forget Christianity and consider this question: If there WERE an infinitely powerful and perfectly good God, and that God were to put part of Himself (for some reason) into human form, what would that look like? And I think the answer, to me, is that the very idea seems so unfathomable that it’s hard to picture. In terms of possibilities, I can imagine (a) that God actually completely gives up His power, so that there is literally no one running the universe. I can also imagine that (b) He puts part of Himself into the human, but keeps part of Himself somewhere else. I can further imagine that (c) He takes on human form but still retains all of His power (thus, although in the form of a human, He is unkillable, etc.).
Well, all of those ideas (and those are just a few off the top of my head; there are doubtless many more) have immense problems. (a) Would a good God actually give up power and let the universe run amok? Does that even make sense? (b) How does God put PART of, say, His ominpotence somewhere? Huh? (c) If he “takes on human form but still retains all of His power,” then that’s hardly human, is it? It’s like a contradiction in terms. Being human means being limited; and God cannot retain all His qualities and be limited, right?
Now, please don’t imagine that I’m saying that because Christianity is unintelligible, it must be true — this isn’t really an apologetic argument, but rather just an attempt to answer the reasonable question posed here. But I think something like this, as an IF-THEN statement: IF Christianity is true, THEN there is a sense that part of it is beyond our ability to fully grasp. If God in some sense offered Himself in human form, it’s going to be hard for us to fathom exactly what all the intellectual implications look like. Even St. Thomas Aquinas said that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity (which exists, or so it seems to me, in large part to help explain this problem) was basically something you accepted as a revelation — you couldn’t really argue your way to explain it, exactly.
I’m not as troubled by this as you might think, since it turns out that most of the universe is full of hard-to-understand enigmas. Light is both a wave and a particle (huh?); an electron can actually be in two places at once (huh?); the specific location of an atom is in part dependent on where I think it is (huh?); the forces that operate on atoms seem to be incompatible with the forces that operate on people and planets, even though people and planets are made up of atoms (double huh?). If there is a God in the universe, He clearly likes unfathomable contradictions.
Now, despite my claim that this would be a “quick” effort (I trust, Jack, that you knew better than that, haha), I’m only getting warmed up here. That’s just the precursor to my point, which is this: Christianity reads more like a story than a doctrine. The doctrines come later to help us make sense of the intellectual questions, but they aren’t the thing. The story’s the thing. I think Christianity is true, and I think its orthodox doctrines are true. I think it is a revelation to help us frame what happened at Calvary and beyond. But for the most part, that revelation is more like a story than a doctrine. The Bible says that Jesus was the image of God, in human form — that’s what it says. There is a sense that God came down from Heaven to us in Christ. But God is everywhere; He didn’t cease to be IN Heaven when He came to us. We talk of Jesus as God’s son — an apt metaphor for this purpose. Jesus Himself both claimed to be God and prayed to God. Jesus is God’s son, God’s perfect representative; but He is also God Himself. As far as we know, that’s never quite happened before in human history — God sending something of Himself into a human body.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, that doesn’t really ANSWER your question. I’m only trying to give some pictures here to explain how I myself think about it (which, to be honest, it not all that often).
(2) Is it really all that big a deal if Christ knew He was going to rise again? Excellent, excellent question, and a very common one in my experience. (Kind of the opposite of the question I’ll consider next week, which is “why did God have to suffer at all to obtain our pardon?”) I can only respond as to what it means to me personally, which you are of course free to take or leave. I say that caveat because I’m not sure this is going to be a very intellectual answer.
I’ve never imagined that Christ’s physical death was the main thing the Cross was about. Don’t get me wrong — I believe He physically died and was physically resurrected. But I’ve always imagined that it was His carrying my sin that was the real pain — the agony of taking on all the horrible stuff I’ve done, of my spitting in His face. I think there is a sense in which Christ’s wounds are eternal — that He bears my pain and sin all the time, like as a symbol almost He still had scars in His hands for Thomas to feel. So I think His death is somehow far more profound than His physical death, and what He exchanged on the Cross for me was not less than that — but more.
That said, I fully grant your point. On the surface, it’s clearly true that if I knew I was going to be raised again in three days, my sacrifice seems a bit less than otherwise. I guess I just put it in the larger picture that, given that we’re talking about God here, He went as far as I can see He logically could to save my soul. I mean, He didn’t HAVE to do any of that…and I can see that He did an awful lot…and that makes me very happy.
Sorry for the somewhat-hackneyed answer to your great questions — I have to prepare for a talk today. Keep those questions coming!
Luke–your answer is not the least bit hackneyed, and I thank you for your patient response to what in retrospect were certainly glib, if not rude, remarks on my part.
I’ll just say this much more: for the notion that Jesus/God died for our sins to seem the least bit persuasive to me, it would have to mean, not that such death occurred one time at one place in human history, where it was quickly followed by a triumphant resurrection; but that instead God’s death continues to occur every moment and everywhere on earth, because people are and will be forever sinning. Preach to me a God who’s decided to suffer helplessly on the cross, for our sake, for all eternity (or as long as sinful creatures exist), allowing the world to go its own way without any further intervention or direction on his part, and I’ll consider that a powerful story of metaphysical tragedy and of a love that knows no bounds.
Not that I’d necessarily believe that story, of course; but I’d certainly appreciate it.
Thanks, Jack! I honestly did not consider your prior comment either remotely rude or glib, only a set of perfectly reasonable questions asked with good tact.
Now, about your last comment, you said:
“…for the notion that Jesus/God died for our sins to seem the least bit persuasive to me, it would have to mean, not that such death occurred one time at one place in human history, where it was quickly followed by a triumphant resurrection; but that instead God’s death continues to occur every moment and everywhere on earth, because people are and will be forever sinning. ”
I feel the same way you do, I think, though we might could debate some small nuances of your comment (e.g., I don’t actually believe I’ll be forever sinning; only sinning for quite a long time). Let’s leave the small points aside, though, if you don’t mind, and focus on the bigger picture on which we agree.
I’m reminded here of something you said a long time ago about the difference between a collective creed and the personal internalization of that creed. I don’t think Christianity really comments, in the collective creed kind of sense, on the issue at stake here — at least, not in a formal way that I’m aware of. I think the latter half of your statement here (about God’s sacrifice occurring every moment) is a perfectly viable framing of the Cross, but it’s not the only framing. So I don’t think Christianity as a formal system would really agree or disagree with it.
C. S. Lewis once distinguished between the basic idea of the Cross/Resurrection as what Christianity was, and that there were many theories about how it worked and what it meant — these additional theories were fine, but they weren’t Christianity directly. And I think something like that here.
Now, I say all that to say this: I think my own internalization of what the Cross means in this regard is perfectly Christian, but it is neither opposed to nor directly supported by the collective creed (so to speak). And my own internalization is much like (though not entirely like) what you said — I think there is a sense that God does die, every day, for my sin; that what He does is in some sense always eternal; and that the Cross is the physical event that represents that truth.
I also think at least some other Christians feel something similar, though I can’t speak for them. There is a line from a popular Christian song on the radio right now that repeats: “I’ll never know how much it costs to see my sin upon that Cross.” That’s the sentiment I feel. I think when we conceptualize the Cross JUST as physical suffering that was alleviated a few days later — and no more than that — we haven’t really understood what God did. Rather, I think that the loss for God was so profound, so eternal, that we really can’t even begin to fathom how hard it was for God and how much He really did give up.
But I’m no theologian, and I haven’t really read much of what Christians have written about this beyond the Bible — I may be getting this wrong. I may nose around a bit and see if I can read what other folks have written, to see if my sense of the collective state of Christian thinking, historically speaking, is what it appears to me to be. If I find anything useful, I’ll try to write a short blog piece about it.
For my part, the basic idea of Christianity is pretty clear to me, and for the rest, I’m persuaded by the spirit of the thing — it’s clear the spirit of it is that God offered something that was difficult and precious and painful to Him, and while I don’t fully understand all the implications (from His point of view) of that thing, I can see that they must be pretty vast.
All of that to say that I agree with your assessment! But hey, I apparently am incapable of writing “I agree with your assessment” and saying nothing else.
Thanks, Jack, for the thoughtful comments as always!
Oh man, good luck if you start to nose into theological debates on what the crucifixion means – there is no end to it!
But I thought of Prometheus the moment Jack asked for a god that suffered every moment for his action on behalf of humanity. And as another creator deity, I suppose thinking about his story might be interesting, as it is kind of a mirror of the Jesus one in some ways.
First, Prometheus is the ‘sinner’ and the humans are pretty much innocent buggers. That’s a huge difference between Jesus dying because people are bad right from the start. And the reason why Prometheus transgresses the heavens and steals sacred fire to give to the humans was because in one way he pitied man – built in the image of the gods and yet suffered like mindless beasts. At least in his perception, anyway. Plus he also made them himself, and as a creator of anything you hate it when those things suffer ill fates. So he acted on behalf of humanity and basically enlightened and empowered them so that they became very much like the gods – which pissed off Zeus, but later on proved to be pretty fun for the gods to have little godlet-things running around living mortal lives… The Christian God doesn’t seem to be focused on entertainment though and cares more about guiding the people to be like himself as much as possible, but Prometheus didn’t guide them in anything – he just gave them the potential to be happy.
Back to the comparison again about the suffering: Jesus, the man-version, is tortured brutally but not exclusively by the Romans occupying Jerusalem and crucified, dies, suffers in Hell for awhile for everyone’s sins, and pops back up three days later good as new mostly (not very much unlike Lazarus on the surface, which further begs the question why is one more ‘miraculous’ than the other). Prometheus gets chained to a mountain and tortured every day by two eagles that eat his innards, sent by Zeus basically because Prometheus refused to apologize for helping mankind like that. We could get into a measuring contest of ‘who suffers more’, but suffice it to say both fellows suffer – one a sort while, another one over an extended period of time. One is punished by humans (and I suppose Hell’s wrath, but isn’t the whole torture of Hell mainly being a place without God? What if God pops up there then? Is it really Hell anymore?), the other one by the King of the Gods. One dies, one wishes he would. If it wasn’t for Hercules letting the titan go, he’d still be there getting his liver munched eternally. I suppose the Christian equivalent would be that upon Jesus’ death, he’d stay in Hell and bear the torments of everyone’s sins until Judgement, which as an outside would seem a little more impactful I suppose.
As for making heads or tails of the God = Jesus = God = Jesus deal, I guess my foot comes down on whether or not a certain understanding of it would result in clarity in other matters of the faith – otherwise it is arguing how many angels can fit on a pinhead. Granted there is a huge difference between Jesus = God and Jesus < God with massive theological implications and whatever, but I feel like the mysticism about the Trinity and whatever Jesus actually was (both man and god completely so everything works out, if you take the Nician Creed as a starting point) serves mostly to confuse, bewilder, and mystify people to the point of saying, "Welp, God is unfathomable – My faith is so deepened by the nonsensicalness of it all!"
I don't like that mysticism personally, and lots of religions have it – probably all of them do, because it is the process of trying to unravel that Gordian Knot that you get really engrossed in the theology and deepen your interest and faith in the matter. And like Greek mythology and Jesus' parables, the better versions in my opinion, they offer up stories chalk-full of metaphors, images, situations, and that is it – You have to determine what the message is and what you can apply it for. Now that's useful and interesting to debate about! Like what does it mean that 'Hope' was at the bottom of a jar containing all the evil's of the world? Does that mean Hope is a mercy sent by the gods, or is it actually the worst evil in a world of unavoidable miseries? Or how are we supposed to act once we hear of how the father treats his Prodigal Son? Does that mean we should forgive immediately and unconditionally, or should we do otherwise? Well, Prodigal Son is tough since supposedly it is straight-forward and not quite so flexible as Greek mythology parables (You start with 'Jesus was correct – now what does it mean?' whereas Greek mythology starts with 'That's what happened, right or wrong – what does it mean?), but there are lots in there open to interpretation.
Uh-Oh,
The truly tragic thing about my being so busy lately is that that my delay in commenting on your comment might implicitly suggest that I thought it was unimportant — and your comment was brilliant! Indeed, I largely agree with it and I love your use of mythology parallels.
For time’s sake, I’ll focus on only one part — that about the nonsensicalness of the Trinity. I quite agree with you in the main, actually, although I’m more of a “mysticism” sort myself (depending on how you define it, I suppose), and probably find mere mystery more subjectively appealing than you do. But I think you are right in that a doctrine probably serves little purpose if all it does is confuse, and I myself have struggled with this particular doctrine in this regard and wondered about its value along the same lines. So, even though we differ in that I of course believe and accept the Trinity doctrine (and I assume you do not), I empathize with you. My reasons for being a Christian are not that I was compelled by the Trinity doctrine and therefore became a follower of Christ — rather, I accepted the revelation of Christ on other grounds (His death and resurrection); and given that if that happened, it was an incredible and hard-to-understand event, the Trinity is the best and most sensible thing I’ve heard to make abstract sense of it.
But, from a practical point of view, other Christians have pointed out that Jesus Himself did not live an example of praying to a “Trinity,” exactly — He taught us to pray to God. So while I certainly don’t think Christianity has any meaning unless Jesus was uniquely Divine in a way that I’m not, and I do accept the Trinity doctrine for multiple reasons…yet I’ve never really cared much about the whole issue beyond asserting my basic beliefs, because experientially it makes intuitive sense to me and I really don’t think about it much — in some (but not all) ways, it strikes me as more a point of esoteric theology than a point of practical importance. (Of course, I say “in some ways” because I do recall writing some blog pieces on the importance of the Creed…and I don’t want to sound like a TOTAL hypocrite…)
That’s not to dismiss the perfectly reasonable points you raised! Obviously you are right that the Trinity can be a real problem as a doctrine on the “understanding” dimension.
Thanks as always for the insightful comments!
Oh my goodness! a tremendous article dude. Thank you Nevertheless I’m experiencing concern with ur rss . Don’t know why Unable to subscribe to it. Is there anybody getting equivalent rss drawback? Anyone who is aware of kindly respond. Thnkx
I wish to convey my respect for your kind-heartedness in support of those individuals that really need assistance with this field. Your very own commitment to getting the solution up and down turned out to be pretty significant and have really allowed guys and women like me to realize their aims. Your personal interesting suggestions implies so much a person like me and even more to my office workers. Thank you; from everyone of us.