Animate Faith 5 | Cross: Where God Is

One of the weirdest things I’ve been told: a guy named Jesus died on a cross for me.

That’s amazing, since he lived 2,000 years before me.

I never quite knew how to respond to this declaration.  Thanks?

I mean no disrespect here.  It’s just that the idea of it never resonated very well with me.  I can understand it intellectually and theologically, but have struggled to really connect with it personally.  This, by the way, does not then become a cause for increased prayer for me on your part – OMG, Pastor Pete hasn’t embraced Jesus’ crucifixion yet!  No worries about my faith and commitment to Christ here – I’m as “all in” as I know to be.

What I am realizing – and what Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber gets at in her video segment in the Animate Faith series on the cross – is that there are different ways to look at Jesus’ crucifixion.  How we understand the meaning of the cross says perhaps as much about us as it does about God.  Reality: our view of the cross is incomplete.  A diamond sparkles because it is multifaceted.  The cross is similar in that regard.  It’s meaning is multifaceted, which gives it great beauty.  So, what follows is a brief description of four primary ways of understanding the cross.

Four primary ways of viewing the cross.
1.  The Cross as Victory over Evil.  In this view, we think of the devil holding us captive ever since Adam and Eve made their fateful choice.  In order to save us, Christ gave himself as a ransom, trading his life for ours, and since he was resurrected, his work on the cross also symbolizes Christ’s victory over death – the devil’s great weapon.  Of course, this way of seeing things says a lot more, theologically, than that Jesus simply gave his life out of love.  Is God so powerless that he cannot defeat the devil without such an act?  Is the devil really that strong?  Despite these issues, there is power in this metaphor.  Sometimes we feel like we are in another’s control.  We feel trapped.  We feel like without an outside helper, we won’t make it.  So when we hear that Jesus came to save us from our captivity, it resonates with us.  We feel great relief and gratitude to the One who loved us enough to conquer the power of death over us.  Does this resonate with you?

2.  The Cross as the Satisfaction of God’s Wrath.  Looking at it from this vantage point, God has made the Way clear from the beginning.  We know right from wrong, and yet we choose to do wrong.  Over the course of a lifetime, counting every little bad thing up (even thoughts of bad things), it overwhelms whatever good we may have done or thought.  And so, when we come before God, we find ourselves on trial, having the evidenced weighing against us.  We realize we’re toast – we have no hope for God to let us into a relationship with God today or heaven tomorrow.  Enter Christ.  Being without sin, he chooses to pay the debt with his own life so that we may go free.  Or, another related way to see it: on the cross, Jesus becomes an everlasting scapegoat (like that found in the Old Testament) who carries away the sin of the world to keep God’s wrath at abeyance.  There are some ugly downsides to this way of thinking.  It makes God particularly unreasonable and ugly, for instance.  Not a God anybody would want to cozy up with.  Be afraid of a God like that?  You bet.  But hard to love.  However, there are times in life when we have blown it so completely that we are absolutely certain that God has it out for us.  We continually look over our shoulder for God to attack.  When bad stuff does happen, we are sure it’s God.  Sometimes we say that we cannot go to church because God would make the walls fall down.  So when we hear that our debt has been cleared and that God sees us not as loathsome, hideous creatures but as beautiful, radiant children, we rejoice!  What relief to know that all the crap we’ve accumulated is forgiven and cancelled out.  That’s the power of this metaphor.  Many find great comfort and strength in the cross viewed from that angle.

3.  The Cross as a Moral Lesson.  From this perspective, Jesus’ work is along the non-violence route that Gandhi and MLK took so many centuries later.  The world is not redeemed by a greater, more violent force than humanity can conjure, but rather is won over by the subversive act of unending love expressed in sacrifice.  By not refusing torture, and even forgiving those who were killing him, Jesus overcomes the worst humanity has to offer.  We are won over by love.  We are also then instructed by this act on how we should behave as his followers.  For those who are sick and tired of violence and more violence in our world, with suggestions that increased violence will somehow create less violence, Jesus’ example is compelling.  Finally, a person who promotes peace actually lives and dies peacefully!

4.  The Cross as a means of Transformation.  Looking at it this way, “the cross was the culmination of a process by which God redeemed a corrupted relationship with humanity.  God, in the person of Christ, transfused divine life into every stage of human existence – from birth to death” (from the Animate Faith Facilitator’s Guide).  This is particularly inspiring when we want to build on the God-within us aspect of faith.  We believe that God’s Spirit dwells within us, animating us, healing, inspiring, and leading us. 

So what do we do with these views?  The point of this week of the series is to recognize how we have understood the cross and what implications come with that view.  It is when we realize what we believe about something that a new way of thinking about it can take root.  Each facet of the cross is helpful, and each offers a limited view.  The question really is, how is the cross informing your life now?  Are you, yourself, cruciform?  How does that play out in our lives?  How does each facet instruct our footsteps?