On Obedience, even to Suffering and Death

Q. What is the great importance of Jesus' suffering and death?

A. By his obedience, even to suffering and death, Jesus made the offering which we could not make; in him we are freed from the power of sin and reconciled to God.

The heart of Christian faith is a scandal—the scandal of the cross. The most universally recognized symbol of the Christian faith is the quintessential example of human corruption, of our regular pattern of the powerful using that power to inflict suffering on the powerless. With or without God’s body on display, the central image of our faith was the preferred method of the Roman Empire for torturing, humiliating, and further degrading its slaves and criminals, those already at the bottom of the social hierarchy. When Paul wrote that he proclaimed “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23), he was speaking about intellectual hang-ups resulting from reflection on historical abstractions, but of the immediate, visceral reality of ministry in which he dared to scandalize decorum and sensibilities by daring to say that God’s victory came through an all-too-real tool of state terrorism, not simply recalled or described but seen and heard and smelled in the screams of agony of the condemned, the sight of disfigured and bloodied bodies, the smell of the dead left to rot on crosses outside of Rome’s cities.

There has been a tendency in contemporary Christian thought, both in it’s popular form and in more academic theology, to recoil from the concept of the cross, from the idea that Christ had to suffer and die in order to bring about reconciliation. There is a kind of chronological chauvinism in this, with many assuming, with various degrees of awareness and sophistication, that “more primitive” peoples may have remained content with the idea of a bloody sacrifice to appease a wrathful God, but that we have moved beyond such views of God. Such thinking often leads us to see Christ’s offering of himself in his incarnate life or in his teaching, in his willingness to identify with us in our humanity in order to transform and elevate it. And indeed, there is much value in seeing Christ’s atoning work as encompassing the whole of his life, from birth to death to resurrection.

Nevertheless, the idea that we have “moved beyond” a focus on the cross because of some concept that it is uniquely distasteful to us now misses the point that the centrality of the cross has, from the inception of Christianity, been scandalous. In the ancient world the scandal seemed to reside primarily in realm of repulsion at the idea that the divine would descend to such a position of lowliness and humiliation; for contemporary people I get the sense that the discomfort with the centrality of the cross is more that it reminds us that God would need to descend to such a position, that the cross is intimately linked with a reminder of the wretchedness of our state under Sin. This latter view, insofar as it is extremely difficult to avoid the fact that Jesus was crucified, turns the cross merely into a pathetic tragedy of yet another failed revolutionary crushed under the heel of empire.

Both the Catechism and the liturgies of The Episcopal Church prevent us from turning the cross, this central feature of our historic faith, into a meaningless tragic accident. Our Eucharistic prayers proclaim that Christ “offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world” (Rite II, Prayer A). In the Good Friday liturgy, we conclude by praying that Christ set his “passion, cross, and death between [his] judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.”

It is significant to remember that there is a risk of perverting even the scandal of the cross. Christians have promoted an overly individualized view of Christ’s atoning work, as through it were something wrought purely interiorly, without any regard for his identification with the most despised and powerless in his death. There have been attempts to collapse the multiple facets of imagery around what Christ accomplishes on the cross, images in the New Testament that include ransom, substitution, and sacrificial offering, into the one, final, correct Atonement Theory (often a version called Penal Substitutionary Atonement). Believers have been told that a failure to give cognitive ascent to the correct idea about how Christ restores the relationship between God and humanity may, or definitely does, disqualify them from receiving the benefits of this atoning work. A failure to adequately emphasize the Trinity and the fact of Christ’s divine Sonship have led many to accept—or reject—the cross on the basis of an image of a bloodthirsty God demanding the blood sacrifice of an innocent other rather than God’s loving self sacrifice.

Yet we should be wary of reducing the centrality of the cross and of Christ’s offering of himself on our behalf to repair the rift between humanity and God. Humans suffer not only as victims of the powers of death, of forces in this world, whether natural or imposed by other humans or spiritual forces, that seek to oppress and exploit—although humans do indeed suffer under these forces and the cross represents God’s condemnation of and victory over them. Humans also bear the burden, indeed the guilt, of our broken relationship with God. The cross calls us both to condemn the unjust and exploitative uses of human power, to have a preferential option for the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed, even while it also tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The misuse of or overemphasis on certain visions of Christ’s atoning work, of trying to evoke too much subjective experience of the feeling of our guilt, should not obscure the fact that God is both merciful and just. Indeed, the ability to call out as unjust and oppressive the powers unmasked by the cross requires there to be a ground of justice, a ground that Christians believe to be God if God really is that Being of which none greater can be conceived. Our being in relationship with God is not only our end and highest good, it is also the way the universe has been ordered in God’s wisdom. Turning away from that proper order is not something indifferent, but is an affront to God’s perfect design and thus a wrong that needs to be rectified. Whether one wants to think of the penalty of this rupture as primarily a “natural consequence” or a “punishment” from God, the cross shows that Jesus takes this on himself, that God takes this on Godself, so that we do not have to bear it and instead can stand in right relationship with God. The cross is thus the sign of God’s love conjoined to God’s justice, that God will neither cease to be God by ceasing to be Justice itself (an impossibility) nor will God turn God’s back on creation.

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