Readings: Ephesians 2:11-22, Mark
6:30-34, 53-56
Let us pray: May the
words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight
O God, our rock and our sustainer. Amen
It is Bible Sunday today – and it seems a good time to think
about how it is that we, each of us, ‘read’ the bible. The Thursday evening Bible Book group has
just started here in Opoho – on to Exodus this month – that is a way to explore
and experience the biblical narrative.
The church catholic over time and with various lenses has ‘read’ the
bible, including choosing what is to be included in it. We hear excerpts each day in church – the
lectionary reading of the bible! We read
it at home, in groups, differing in translations and interpretations.
Ourselves, we bring different understandings over time, perspective and as we
journey in faith with Jesus Christ.
I have been sitting in on some difficult discussions over the
last week – at our Presbytery Resource Group meeting and at a minister’s
meeting on Friday. I have heard
divergent opinions, wise words of grace, and genuine bewilderment. The theologies, defined by St Augustine as
‘the rational discussions respecting the deity’, the theologies of the church
catholic, of denominations and of individuals are many, varied and always open
for challenge and examination. Some
discussions are, you quietly feel, are more about who can use the biggest words
or talk the loudest or quote the most bible verses, but all are part of growing
our understanding of God in this world.
Just last week I read a blog online that seemed to me to be one
of the most erudite, clearly stated opinion on one of the theologies that is
pivotal to our faith, that of the theology of the cross.
And when I read the Epistle reading for today the connections
were obvious – Christ is our peace, he has made us one, broken down the
hostility between us reconciling us to God in one body through the cross, thus
putting to death that hostility through it.
The blog is called ‘The judgement of the cross’[1]
and these are the thoughts of Rob Grayson – a person who defines himself as one
who seeks to strip away the layers of Christian culture and find the truth
embodied in Jesus. He questions a long held view and offers an
alternative. His words:
Christians are generally
accustomed to speaking of the cross as the place and time where God enacted
judgement on the world. But what does this actually mean, and what are its
implications?
Usually, the cross as the place of judgement is understood to mean the
physical location where God poured out his wrath upon Jesus.
Here, wrath is
understood as the punishment for our sin which God’s justice is obliged to mete
out: namely death. And Jesus …. bears the brunt of God’s implacable justice so
that we, in spite of our sin, can escape punishment.
And the cross as the time of judgement is understood as the
point in history when God sovereignly intervened in human affairs to solve
humanity’s sin problem…..
So there we have it: time and
place come together at the cross as Jesus bears God’s punishment for our
sin. This, then, is the judgement of the cross: a resounding verdict of
“Guilty!” pronounced upon the human race by God, accompanied by an unappealable
death sentence. The twist is that Christ comes in as an innocent victim to
serve the sentence in our place.
This is what I believed, says
Grayson, without a second thought for most of my Christian life. Until I began,
through a process of reading and thinking, to see some gaping holes in it:
Hole number 1: In
this view, God is not free to simply forgive sin; but rather is beholden to a
higher principle of justice that must be obeyed. This is a major philosophical
and theological problem, because if God is God, there clearly cannot be
any higher principle than self by which God is bound.
Hole number 2: Following
on from hole number 1, since God is bound by a higher principle of justice that
must be satisfied, the only way God can forgive us is through some kind of
transaction. God’s end of the transaction is that someone has to die, since the
wages of sin is death. Jesus agrees to be that someone, so God can now forgive
us because Jesus, the perfect son, has died in our place, thus balancing the
scales of justice. The problem here is that this is supposedly the same God who
elsewhere in scripture instructs us to freely forgive others, even
as we have been forgiven. So
God requires a different standard of us – free forgiveness – than he himself is prepared to meet.
Hmm.
Hole number 3: This
understanding makes God into a God who uses scapegoating to accomplish his
purposes. In this view, Jesus is
a God-ordained scapegoat. …. Scapegoating … shifts blame
for a community’s ills onto an innocent victim and then buries that victim so
that life can go on as before. The innocent is made to pay the price for the
guilty, so that the guilty can carry on unreformed. Do we really think the God
who is supposedly the apex of love and compassion would endorse such a
practice, let alone deliberately use it as a mechanism of justice?
Hole number 4: This
view treats sin as a legal problem to be settled, an equation to be solved. In
doing so, it shifts sin from the concrete to the abstract. Thus, the event of
the cross does little or nothing to actually address the here-and-now reality
of humanity’s sin; it merely promises a clean legal record to anyone who puts
their faith in Jesus.
I could go on, but I think those
holes are already quite large enough.
In this classic view, then, the outcome
of the judgement that takes place at the cross is this: humanity is found
deserving of death because God must actively mete out punishment
to all sinners; and God is not averse to engaging in the …practice
of scapegoating in order to see Lady Justice satisfied. This judgement, I
contend, is as much an indictment of God as it is of humanity. Both humanity
and God are found wanting: humanity because of our sin and God because of a
willingness – nay, requirement – to deal out violent death in response.
How, then, are we to understand
the judgement of the cross? ….what exactly was being judged at the cross?
Let me first make a statement,
which I will then try to unpack: the
cross judges the world in that it proves that none of our violence or
accusation was ever rooted in God.
Humanity’s number one problem is
and always has been violence. Physical violence, verbal violence, mental
violence. Violence expressed in war, in oppression, in racial hatred, in
intolerance. Violence manifested in mistrust, suspicion, accusation and blame.
We don’t mind talking about sin because it’s such an imprecise,
abstract term that it’s easy to hide from its implications. But as soon
as we talk about violence in its many and various expressions,
we are all implicated.
So what has this to do with the
judgement of the cross? Well, one of the main ways in which humanity has sought
to justify its violence throughout history is by claiming it to be divinely
sanctioned, or even divinely ordained. ….. And if God, the ultimate authority,
sanctions human violence, how can the cycle of violence ever be broken? Answer:
it can’t, and so the world keeps on spinning ever faster along a
trajectory of escalating violence. That way lies apocalyptic destruction.
What happened, then, at the
cross? Far from revealing God to be the ultimate dispenser of violence, the
cross showed that God would rather die than engage in violence of any kind.
The cross drew a sharp
distinction between humanity and God. Humanity gravitates towards violence as
the final solution for every problem, and is prepared to engage in scapegoating
and lynching to preserve the status quo. God, on the other hand, eschews all
forms of violence and, in going to the cross, exposes scapegoating as the structural
evil that it is.
God is not judged and found
wanting at the cross: on the contrary, God is decisively shown to be genuinely,
truly, perfectly good and non-violent. What is judged is the world,
the kosmos, civilisation and the wicked systems of
violence and injustice that underpin it. And, most importantly, humankind’s
favourite excuse for its violence – God told me to! – is forever obliterated.
I must draw this to a close …But
before I do, let me make one final point. I believe the cross was and is a
judgement that has power to transform individual and collective life in the
here and now, not simply to leave the status quo undisturbed pending a
post-mortem deliverance. And how does it achieve such transformation? It does
so by starkly revealing the problem of human violence and showing the only
way in which the cycle of violence can be broken: free and unconditional
forgiveness, first from God to humankind, and then from human to human. As he
goes to the cross, Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they
do”. And as he returns from the grave three days later, he announces not
vengeance but peace. The cycle is broken.
The cross is a judgement, yes,
but it is a judgement of light and life. The question is, are we prepared to
see it that way, release our tight grip on violence and enter into the virtuous
cycle of forgiveness and peace?
Margaret Garland and blog material by Rob
Grayson
No comments:
Post a Comment