Why the Cross?

Palm Sunday     April 4, 2004

Isaiah 45:21-25; Psalm 22:1-11; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:39-23:56

I’m searching for, I’m struggling to find an alternative to the standard interpretation of the atonement that’s deep enough and important enough to justify the cross.

I really liked what Martha wrote for the April newsletter about her reaction to Mel Gibson’s movie…that somehow this exclusive focus on the passion… excessively violent, out of context, separated from the birth and the teaching of Jesus, as well as from the community of the church, inevitably distorted the events it portrayed.  I saw a cartoon recently in Christianity Today that showed Jesus carrying the cross, saying “I told you, the question’s “why”, not “what.”

Yet I don’t find the standard answer to that question “why” acceptable.

That standard answer, the standard understanding of the passion, the “why” of the cross, at least for modern American Christianity, is based on the theory of vicarious atonement.  Adam sinned, somehow implanting original sin into human beings, and we continue to sin.  And the only sacrifice, in this view, that was thought to be pure enough to pay the penalty for that sin was the unspotted, perfect sacrifice of the sinless God-with-us person Jesus.  Christ died for us, in this view, means Christ died “instead of us” or Christ died “because of us”, to pay a debt we could not pay.

But if you go back to the source, back to the Bible, it is not all that simple, at least it’s not all that clear.  The Gospels, like Mel Gibson’s movie, generally talk about what, not why.  The whys are implied implied as clear within the context of the chosen people and the ancient scriptures and the new Christian community.  But we don’t share their context, so we can’t share their clarity.  When we turn to Paul, who does talk about why, it’s usually not the cross that is instrumental in taking away our sins, but the resurrection (which is one of the points that Martha made).  Paul tells the Corinthians, “If Christ has not been raised your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”, which for me doesn’t fit with the standard conception of a substitutionary atonement.

But an even bigger barrier to my acceptance of this idea relates to what it implies about God.  What kind of God is appeased by human sacrifice?  What kind of sadism creates fallibility, and then demands perfection?  What kind of masochism says “look at me while I torture myself and know that it is all your fault”?  I know that that interpretation comes in pretty early, and it’s lingered through the ages.  But in its rawest form it strikes me as less a part of some divine plan, and more like a rationalization for the unexpected and horrendously disappointing event of the cross…an event that maybe shouldn’t be rationalized at all, but simply entered into in the process of opening the whole of our life to God.

As I said, it’s a struggle to try to understand it.  But in the past few weeks of being particularly conscious of that struggle as I’ve wrestled with this concept I’ve found three points of focus that I think may offer clues, may offer keys .

One of these has to do with the concept of sacrifice.

We think of sacrifice as a kind of giving up.  We’ll sacrifice something for our children, we sacrifice something during Lent, we’ll sacrifice some current desire for a future greater good.  Something is lost in a sacrifice, something’s given up, something’s given over.

But the real meaning of the word sacrifice, the root meaning doesn’t have anything to do with “giving up” something at all.  It means “to make sacred.”  The cross isn’t a giving up by God of a son in such a way that the son is lost.  It’s really the semi-final, penultimate, act in completing the sanctification of the world begun in creation, continuing through human evolution, to the point of an awareness of relationship with God, through Christmas with its full embrace of humanity (rejecting along the way the worldly kingship that came with palms and the shouts of hosannas) up to the cross…open even to death…making sacred even death…the embrace of the enemy…the last enemy, death…loving the enemy… for the raising of it all.  

Fall and redemption theology is only one way to understand salvation history.  This view, promulgated initially by Augustine, starts in paradise with a closeness between God and human beings, and then says that, due to human sin, that closeness was lost, with the goal then being to get back what was lost…back to the closeness, back to the garden, back to where we started from…and the cross as vicarious suffering fits into that view.

But there is another understanding that the “fall” wasn’t really so much of a fall as the beginning of a journey…the leaving out of paradise…the leaving of a merely creaturely state  of being, necessitated by the loss of human innocence in the acquisition of knowledge and discernment.  In this view begins a journey which will eventually take us beyond where we began and closer to God than we can imagine.

Salvation history, including the cross, from this view is seen as a necessary work in extending the kingdom, rather than just trying to get back into the castle.  Sacrifice is the name of that whole work.  Bringing light to the darkness, and love where it is most needed.

Then there’s the Passover.  That’s another clue, another key.  The whole of the Passion is set into the symbolism of Passover.  In three of the Gospels the Last Supper is a Seder, a Passover meal.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus himself acts as the paschal lamb…but we need to be careful here.  This vicarious suffering understanding of the atonement, I think, confuses the Passover lamb with its linkage to Abraham and Isaac, its linkage with Moses in Egypt with the “scapegoat”, which is something else altogether.

The scapegoat was a part of a ritual where the sins of individuals and the sins of the people were symbolically put onto a goat that was then stoned and driven out into the wilderness.  The goat bore the sins of the people and took them away.

The Passover lamb is more an offering up than a killing.  It’s the symbol of our openness to the grace of God beyond our control, deserving, or comprehension.  Death passed over Isaac.  Death passed over the slaves in Egypt.  Christ passed over from life into death so that we might pass over from death into life.  Therefore let us keep the feast.

A third key, along with sacrifice and Passover, is the figure of the suffering servant.

The crucifixion, as I said earlier, was a terrible shock.  Again and again the Gospels tell us that the disciples didn’t see it coming.  It contradicted what was thought to be the triumphant essence of the Messiah.  So when it happened they combed the scriptures for some alternate image that would make sense of it all.  And they found the figure of the suffering servant that is mentioned four different places in Isaiah.  These passages had never before been associated with the Messiah, and it was in fact these passages, refined and interpreted, that gave rise to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice and vicarious atonement.

But there are alternative ways of understanding the suffering servant.  The most obvious of which occurs to me when I ask who it is this servant serves.

In the idea of vicarious atonement, where Christ’s dying for us is taken to mean dying instead of us, dying because of us, paying our debt so that we don’t have to pay it, it seems to me the servant serves us. But the servant in Isaiah is the servant of God.

We learned from Elaine Pagels, in our Lenten Study, that Jesus in the Gospels shows us not only what God is like, but always also what we are like as well, in our own true nature, in our most spiritual potential.

His suffering service even to death on the cross may be telling us to put our death as well as our life, our suffering as well as our bliss, at the service of God…to convert that suffering to the service of God.  Maybe there is no why to our suffering until we provide it …provide it by turning it over and offering it up.  Into thy hands I commit my spirit.

The cross may be telling us that it is not “our” live to gain or lose… that the stage we are acting on is far bigger than we thought.

Like I said, I’m just searching, I still struggling with all this.  I know some interpretations of the cross and passion that I can’t accept.  But I don’t really have fully formed alternatives, just thoughts and clues…sacrifice, Passover, suffering service….

I don’t really understand the cross.  But I am still willing to carry it.  I invite you to join me.

Thanks be to God.

The Reverend Jeff Kohn

Rector