Linger at the Cross: A Good Friday Reflection

I have an ecumenical heart. While many people feel threatened by the diversity within orthodox Christianity I view it as a great gift. We have much to learn from other traditions, and as we do, our faith becomes more thoughtful, nuanced, humble and resilient.

Although I am not catholic, I'm grateful for the many gifts of the tradition and how some many catholic writers have impacted my faith. Given my upbringing it was easy to drink the protestant kool-aid all-the-while making inaccurate assumptions of our catholic brothers and sisters.

I've always found it interesting that Catholic Churches display crucifixes while Protestant Churches display empty crosses. I get the logic of the empty cross for protestants, after all, Jesus is alive and the story doesn't end on calvary. Nonetheless I appreciate why catholics have a commitment to display the body of Jesus on the cross. In the words of one catholic priest:

A simple cross doesn’t have the same visual or spiritual impact. Many non-Catholics will state that “my Savior is risen” and that “having an image of the suffering Jesus on the cross takes away from the power of the Resurrection.” Catholics also believe that our Lord is risen, but we also need to be reminded of what Christ had to endure before the Resurrection could take place, namely his Passion and Death on the cross. The crucifix helps us better understand and appreciate our theology of redemption.

Hmmm. Maybe protestants have missed something? At least we need to be more balanced. After all, so many of us have sentimentalized the cross, draining calvary of its truth and reality. When we picture the cross we envision an inspiring image - streams of light beaming out from a silhouette of the cross - meant to motivate and encourage. Or even worse, the cross is a fashion statement attached to a chain that dangles from a celebrities neck.

But this was not their cross. For anyone living in the 1st century under Roman occupation the cross was neither inspiring, sentimental, motivating or fashionable. Quite the opposite. The cross elicited spine-tingling, stomach-churning fear. The cross was a torture apparatus meant to inflict a maximum amount of pain over a long period of time; an approach to "justice and order" that came straight from the pit of hell. I'll be honest, as I've studied roman crucifixion this week leading into a message I'll give at my church on Good Friday, I have felt sick to my stomach from passages like this from New Testament scholar's N.T. Wright and Michael Bird:

If you had ever seen a crucifixion (and they were common in places like Judea and Galilee), the experience would have been terrifying, It would leave you with impressible memories of naked half-dead men dying a protracted death for days on end, covered in blood and flies, their flesh gnawed at by rats, their members ripped at by wild dogs, their faces pecked by crows, the victims mocked and jeered by sadistic torturers and other bystanders, while relatives nearby, weeping uncontrollably, would be helpless to do anything for them

This was their cross.

Maybe that's why we are so prone to sentimentalize the cross and rush to easter. However tempting and understandable this may be, it's a toxic combination for discipleship to Jesus:

A Sentimentalized Cross + A Rush to Easter = Discipleship Problems

This is precisely where my mind and heart has been this Holy Week. If the above equation is true, what are the discipleship problems that result? And let's be honest, it's been the white church in America that is most susceptible. Books like The Cross and the Lynching Tree remind me that black Christians, given their history of oppression, aren't able sentimentalize or skip over.

What follows are three (of I am sure many) ways a sentimentalized cross and a rush to easter negatively impact our discipleship.

We minimize the lengths God went to on our behalf.

It's interesting to note that there is nothing especially unique about a religion that worshiped a resurrected God. As Brian Zhand writes,

the ancient world was awash with such religions. But Christianity is the only religion to have as its central focus the suffering and degradation of its God! Easter alone does not make Christianity unique. It’s with Good Friday and Easter together that we find the uniqueness of Christianity.

Part of Christianity's uniqueness, and indeed central to our understanding of what God is like, is God being crushed under the worst of all that sin and evil could muster because of great love. In the passion narratives we are confronted with wave after wave of the suffering of God.

To use Mark's passion narrative as an example, we see betrayal (14:43; 15:50; 14:66-72), humiliation (15:16-20; 15:32) and great suffering (14:65, 15:15; 15:17; 15:24; 15:37). We need to remember this. Followers of Jesus can't look away. The means (the crucifixion of the son of God) and the ends (resurrection life and new creation) both matter. You can't have one without the other.

We forget where resurrection life comes from

As Jesus was lifted up on the cross the messiah was inaugurated and the Kingdom of God - a space filled with God's resurrection life free from the pollution of sin and death - was launched.

Who doesn't want resurrection life? We all do. But few of us actually trust the means by which God brings about resurrection and new creation. We want the blessing without the sacrifice. We want the gifts of the gospel through the dynamics of Christendom (society where the majority culture is assumed to be Christian and where the church assumes culture and state will align with the churches purposes/values), not Jesus-centered Christianity. But, as we see in the culmination of Jesus' ministry, life does not come through coercion, violence, control, manipulation, grasping for power or self-righteous judgementalism. Instead, humility, self-sacrifice, co-suffering love and a commitment to give ones life away for others is what ushers in resurrection.

This all sounds well and good on paper, but trusting this way of life is the hardest thing followers of Jesus will ever do. Many of us - turned off by Christians who work to establish the kingdom through coercive, violent, manipulative, fear-based and self-righteous means - are so disturbed by the brokenness and hypocrisy of the church that we think none of it is worth our time. But have we actually tried it? Christendom church is different than Christianity. As G.K. Chesterton said,

The Chrstian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

Giving our lives to try - imperfectly of course - takes great faith. If we never linger at the cross, we will swap out cruciform living for whatever Americanized framework of discipleship feels more palatable.

We water-down the reality of sin

Unfortunately, many of us were handed a Christian story that centered the deplorableness of every human being, a wrathful God who needs retributive violence in order to forgive, and a never-ending cycle of conscious torment that awaits a vast majority of all human beings. As we have reacted against this story towards a more christ-like God, it's very easy for the pendulum swing to too far on the other side. It seems many of us, who long to recapture an understanding of the cross that centers God's love instead of wrath, minimize the depth and breadth of sin and evil in the world and our need for God to deal with it.

When we linger at the cross we are unable to minimize the depth of sin that has wreaked havoc on God's good world. As Brian Zhand says,

Good Friday is the divine indictment of the world as we know it

Like a magnifying glass, the cross provides a close up view of the ugliness of sin is and how desperately we individually, collectively and cosmically need to be liberated from it. The worst of what sin and death could muster came together around the cross and delivered its worst. Evil coalesced into a "hideous singularity" and killed God. Apart from God's life-giving presence this is what we are capable of. God didn't kill Jesus. We did. But let's be clear. Moving away from a theology of the cross that is all about wrath and penal substitution does not mean we water down the reality of sin and our need for Jesus to enter sin and death in order to defeat it and break open new creation space.

We need to see the cross. We need to remember the cross. Turning our attention away from sin, although perhaps more digestible for a post-Christian, secular age, does us no good. Our brothers and sisters in Ukraine can’t do this. Nor should we. They, like many other Christians around the world, see human evil and atrocity at their doorstep in undeniable ways. If the way that we think about sin, and the need for God to intervene, doesn't work for our brothers and sisters in Ukraine, it doesn't work. Holy Week has been Americanized. And we've likely minimized the sin and evil in our own contexts as well.

As we look at the tortured body of the son of God on the cross, we remember the extent of human sin, of which we have contributed. Jesus absorbs thew worst of it and returns forgiveness, grace, love and restoration.

Linger at the cross: The Women Are Our Teachers

In mark 14:40-41 we catch a glimpse of some followers of Jesus who refused to leave his side as he hung on that tree:

Some women were there, watching from a distance, including Mary Magdalene, Mary (the mother of James the younger and of Joseph[a]), and Salome.41 They had been followers of Jesus and had cared for him while he was in Galilee. Many other women who had come with him to Jerusalem were also there.

It's these women who are our teachers. Sure, it was more dangerous for men to be associated with Jesus (Rome would have been much more likely to arrest and execute men who were attached to the movement), but it still took these women great courage, resilience and strength to stay present with Jesus at the cross.

This moment must have been excruciating. I wonder if they could even look? Or, with heads down and eyes closed, could all they do was just be near?

There is no way these women, given the time they spent near the cross, could have sentimentalized what took place on Good Friday. Nor could they, as life continued, rush past the passion of Jesus during Holy Week to get to the celebration. As a result, they would never forget the extravagant lengths God went to on our behalf, the source from which resurrection life flows, nor the sobering reality of sin in our broken world. Neither should we.