Numbers 21:4‑9
God sends snakes into the wilderness to punish the disobedient children of Israel.
John 3:14‑21
The author tells of God’s loving actions in sending Jesus into the world.
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The cross may be the most quickly and universally recognized symbol in the world. Everyone knows what it means… Or do we? The Apostle Paul in his first Letter to the Corinthians said the cross would be a stumbling block to many.
This cross both divides and unites God’s people. Is it a sign of victory or of suffering, of death or new life? Some crosses are adorned with the gruesome visage of Jesus and some are empty. Still, this instrument of torture became a universally recognized sign of love and hope… and so much more.
Whatever meaning we take from it; or whatever differing convictions we have about its meaning, we cannot dismiss it as irrelevant. One way or another we have to deal it – with what it represents for us personally, for those who claim the name of Christ, and for the world.
So here’s the continuing challenge that Elsa and I are exploring with you during Lent this year:
Classical Christianity claims that God sent his son Jesus to the cross to pay the ransom for our sins – dying in our place as a substitute for the death we deserve because of our sins; that Jesus took our place by God’s will and design, and in that act spared us death and gave us an invitation into eternal life if we only accept it by faith.
There’s reason the cross is a stumbling block: what are we to make of the twin assertions that this God is just, merciful, loving, and grace-filled; and that this God sent God’s own son Jesus to the most hideous and gruesome of deaths as a ransom for our souls?
That question has often come from outside the church… from those who say it’s a deal-breaker and those who say they can no longer believe what the church has claimed.
Over the centuries the Church has enforced its claim by dismissing or denouncing, or even executing the questioners as heretics. That only deepens the dissonance as the Church has enforced its orthodoxy about God through violence. That’s the theme of my message next Sunday.
But let’s first be very clear. Christians can question. Faithful followers of Jesus are free to ask, struggle, wrestle, and doubt. I don’t think God will marginalize you or me as a heretic; quite the opposite as our “Still-speaking God” invites us to live into the questions.
I may be speaking your struggle when I say I cannot hold these two contradictory ideas: (1) that God became incarnate among us in Jesus as an act of love and grace, and (2) that God planned, ordained, or intended the crucifixion of his son.
If we hold God accountable for sending Jesus to the cross, mustn’t we also hold God accountable for the suffering and inhumanity around us today? If we claim God sent Jesus to the cross doesn’t it make sense that God also sanctions the suffering, bloodshed, violence and hatred haunts humankind?
Or does God, like a flustered parent, simply say “do as I say, not as I do?”
I don’t believe God planned Jesus’ death on the cross or required it as a ransom for our sins. Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t God’s doing but the consequence of human hatred and fear. He was not a victim but a conscientious objector. God could have found another way.
There’s an important element we might forget from our perspective of 2,000 years later: Jesus and his contemporaries lived under the darkness and terror of Rome. The struggle between darkness and light was a daily reality in Palestine. The imperial power was everywhere. In Jerusalem, Herod the Great built the Antonia Fortress, a huge headquarters and barracks, to cast a shadow over the great Temple.
No one, nothing, could stand up to the empire. They levied heavier taxes than any other government in the history of the world. The disobedient were summarily executed. And they reserved the cross as a particular vehicle of shame, disgrace, and torture for the few. Including Jesus.
Roman subjects were expected to call the emperor their savior. Jesus’ followers refused. They knew God loved them and that Jesus was their savior.
When they saw Jesus die on the cross Rome thought it was over. It wasn’t.
He had promised the disciples that even though he would die, he would still be manifest among them, present in the life of the community. And by our faith in God’s loving power and purpose the same is true for us.
I believe that Jesus so embodied the spirit of God, so embodied the love of God, so embodied the justice of God, so terrified the rulers of Rome, and so threatened the elders of the temple, that the imperial powers could not let him live.
They thought they had a way to silence him; a solution. Jesus’ disciples begged him to save himself, to flee the danger, to stay out of Jerusalem during Passover. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t because God’s passion for justice and love and grace overflowed through Jesus and could not be contained.
If Jesus had turned and walked away he would still have been Jesus but not the Christ. He would still have been a godly teacher and healer, a gifted rabbi, and an astounding spiritual soul. But he would likely have been forgotten. He could not turn away to save himself.
He was the Christ, the savior, the anointed one, both because of the way he showed us the path to abundant life in his three year ministry, and because of the way God showed us the path to eternal life on the far-side of the cross.
Our Gospel reading for today, from the third chapter of John, is the key to our whole Lenten emphasis. This Lent we don’t start with ransom and substitutionary atonement and Jesus dying on the cross in our place. We start with God’s love for the world which made everything else possible.
So the ancient author wrote in the Gospel of John (Common English Version):
14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so must the Human One be lifted up 15 so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life. 16 God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. 17 God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him isn’t judged; whoever doesn’t believe in him is already judged, because they don’t believe in the name of God’s only Son. “This is the basis for judgment: The light came into the world, and people loved darkness more than the light, for their actions are evil. 20 All who do wicked things hate the light and don’t come to the light for fear that their actions will be exposed to the light. 21Whoever does the truth comes to the light so that it can be seen that their actions were done in God.”
That light is God’s gift for us. By faith we step out from the shadow of the cross and into God’s love forever. So what is the cross? Certainly it’s an instrument of torture and death, and a sign of Rome’s claim to power. It’s also the symbol of life-changing self-sacrifice. And it is certainly the assurance that bodily death is not the end.
But I can no longer believe what orthodox Christianity has claimed: that it was part of God’s plan for Jesus; part of the ransom God demanded for the salvation of our souls, as you and I were taught. I found this beautifully expressed in the book A Stone for a Pillow — A Book of Reflections on Scripture, by Madeleine L’Engle, the late artist and author who wrote more than a dozen books — novels, children’s stories and inspirational classics. She was a member of a United Church of Christ congregation in Connecticut. In that book she wrote:
A young friend said to me during Holy Week, “I cannot cope with the atonement.” Neither can I, if the atonement is thought of forensically. In forensic terms the atonement means that Jesus had to die for us in order to atone for all our awful sins, so that God could forgive us. In forensic terms it means that God cannot forgive us unless Jesus is crucified and by this sacrifice atones for all our wrong-doing.
But that is not what the word means! I went to my etymological dictionary and looked it up. It means exactly what it says: at-one-ment. I double checked it in a second dictionary. There is nothing about crime and punishment in the make up of that word. It simply means to be at one with God. Jesus on the cross was so at one with God that death died there at Golgotha, and was followed by the glorious celebration of the resurrection.
[pg. 22-23]
As we observe this Lenten season, 2012, and wrestle with what God’s love may mean, let’s give thanks for a faith that is never complete, never chiseled in stone; never sealed in a tomb. God lives among us today and God is still speaking.