Cross Connections
Sermon
Sermons On The Gospel Readings
Series I, Cycle B
Good Friday is not an easy day on which to preach, nor is what happened on Good Friday easy to explain. Many thoughtful Christians have a difficult time understanding how this very bad day in the life of Christ has become for Christians a good day. What's more, many find it perplexing to say that Jesus died for their sins because he died some 2,000 years before they were born. Then perhaps most perplexing of all are those theories of atonement that come to us in the New Testament, theories steeped in a popular culture light-years removed from ours.
So at the outset, it is well for us to confess that there is a profound mystery about this Friday called good, a mystery that has, at least in part, been generated and fostered by those very thought-forms that were intended to make clear what happened. We have been aware of this for some years. P. T. Forsyth, many years back, said it like this: "What the cross is for the soul and the race can be put into no theology, adjusted in no philosophy. No thought or form can contain the greatness of the personality which it took the eternal act of cross and resurrection fully to express."1 Leslie Weatherhead noted it too: "Few matters so muddle the thoughtful layman ... than the attempt to link the death of Christ in A.D. 29 with the sins of men today."2
But even more recently, there is the voice of John Macquarrie:
We can first of all clear the ground by setting to one side some theologies of atonement which, though they have been very influential, appear to me to presuppose ideas of God which, from a Christian point of view, are very questionable. I mean theologies which represent God as angry and offended, or as a punishing God intent on exacting the penalty for sin.3
Consequently, many of us don't know how to connect to the cross; or, if you will, feel disconnected from the cross. When Paul writes to the Corinthians about "Christ crucified" being a "stumbling block" to some and "foolishness" to others, many of us will understand those perceptions; but when Paul writes of the "crucified Christ" as "the power of God and the wisdom of God," we are apt to draw a blank. What good is this Friday in reconnecting us to God? Or, to use the imagery of a text from Hebrews, how do we make the leap from the suffering Son to the Son who is "the source of eternal salvation" or the "high priest" who bids us approach "the throne of grace" (Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9)?
I suggest we begin by calling to mind the rather remarkable, but by no means uncommon, human pattern of experiencing intense difficulty or defeat and now, in retrospect, finding in that difficulty or defeat new lease and not dead end. With varying intensity, this happens every day.
A woman once went downhill skiing out west and took a fairly significant tumble. In the process of being x-rayed for possible internal injuries, it was discovered that she had a completely encapsulated malignant tumor in need of surgical removal. She was in great discomfort because of the fall, but in even greater discomfort now because of the discovery of cancer. But looking back on those very dark days now, she sees that as fortune, not misfortune. Ironically, had it not been for the skiing accident, she might never have discovered that malignancy and its potential to metastasize.
Christians look back on the cross in just that same way. What began in fact as a kangaroo court and ended as murder becomes, through hindsight, the very crucible of redemption. Perhaps imagery that helps me more fully understand that will help you also.
There is the image of absorption. This image is not flawless. Most of us probably associate the word "sponge" with absorption, but sponge can be a pejorative term. We sometimes refer to someone who takes advantage of us as being "a sponge." But there is a different side to this matter of absorption, and it comes from the field of physics. In physics, absorption refers to taking in, and not reflecting, and in that sense absorption nicely describes part of the activity of the cross. There God in Christ absorbs -- absorbs abuse, scorn, pain, rejection, sin -- all that is sinister, morbific, and nocuous.
By contrast, we tend to be more reactive. If someone pummels us, by nature we want to pummel in return. The eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth mentality is deeply ingrained, both in the child and in the highest counsels of any government on the earth.
Please note that absorbency is not to be equated with being a doormat. To absorb can be a conscious and calculated decision.
Let me illustrate this way. In every human grouping we encounter people who are rough around the edges. Their touch is the touch of coarse sandpaper; their behavior is chafing. When they irritate us, it is natural for us to consider responding in kind. But there are occasions when maturity bids us think twice about doing that. Very likely, responses in kind will simply perpetuate more of the same. So we make a conscious decision to absorb the vexation. Sometimes we absorb and forget; perhaps other times we absorb and respond appropriately later. Absorption -- not reflection; there is one image that can help us understand the cross today.
There follows the image of neutralization. Absorption can lead to neutralization. During the Second World War, a Lutheran bishop was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and tortured by an S.S. officer. The officer wanted to extract a confession from the bishop, and since the Lutheran bishop wouldn't willingly give it, the S.S. officer was sure that torture would bring it forth. In a small room, the two faced each other and as it took its course, the severity of the torture was continually increased. The bishop, who had a high tolerance for pain, did not respond to the torture. His silence enraged the S.S. officer to such a degree that the Nazi hit his victim harder and harder until, exploding and hollering at this bishop, he exclaimed: "But don't you know that I can kill you?" The bishop looked in the eyes of the S.S. officer and slowly said: "Yes, I know -- do what you want -- but I have already died." At that moment, the Nazi lost any power over his victim. The grounds for violence had gone and torture was now a futile effort. Such is the power of neutralization.4
We also see this power at work in the three strategies (found in Matthew 5) Jesus suggests for interrupting the pattern of retaliation, the pattern of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. We are indebted to Walter Wink for a very insightful treatment of these maneuvers.
Particularly insightful is his treatment of this strategy: "... if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also" (Matthew 5:39). Wink asks why the right cheek and how one would go about striking someone in that location. A blow, he notes, by the right fist in that right-handed world would land on the left cheek of the opponent. What's more, to strike the right cheek would require the use of the left-hand, but in that culture the left hand was only to be used for unclean tasks. So the only way to strike the right cheek with the right hand would be to use the back of the hand. Hence, we are talking here about backhanding someone as a form of insult. The purpose is to humiliate and put someone in his place. In that culture, one did not strike a peer and if that happened, the fine was significant. But backhanding was the normal way of admonishing inferiors, and in the context of this teaching, Jesus is addressing people whom the culture deems inferior -- slaves, wives, children, women, and Jews.
Why, then, does Jesus counsel these folks, already humiliated, to turn the other cheek? Wink indicates this action would say in effect:
Try again. Your first blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate me. I am a human being just like you. Your money, gender, race, age, or status does not alter that fact. You cannot demean me.5
What's more, such a response places the striker in enormous difficulties. One can only backhand another's left cheek by using the left hand -- and that's forbidden. And if you take your left hand and land a blow on the other's right cheek, you are declaring that other person a peer. Again, remember, that peers do not backhand each other; the back of the hand is reserved for reinforcing the caste system and institutionalized inequality.
In effect then, to "turn to them the other also" was a way of neutralizing their power. This wasn't cowardice; it was a strategy designed to place one's adversary in a no-win situation in a non-violent way. It stripped him of his ability to dehumanize you.
Absorption. Neutralization. But the cross also invokes the image of transformation.
What else can explain the seemingly inexplicable shifts that occur in the wake of Jesus' death? What is heinous becomes hopeful; what is deadly becomes salvific; what is seemingly an ending becomes instead a beginning; what is raised in hate issues in health; what is designed to be ignominious becomes something in which the community of faith glories; humankind's worst is met with God's best. We remember this gruesome, ugly event and it so dramatizes God's deadly determination to get our attention and win our hearts that we can do naught else than stand and sing, in the words of Isaac Watts:
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
Such is the transforming power of love.
You may remember Edwin Markham's memorable lines:
He drew a circle that shut me out --
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.6
The cross is God drawing a circle around the whole of creation and taking us in.
A man was walking down the gangplank from the USS Massachusetts, moored in Fall River, Massachussetts, and looking back over his shoulder, saw its massive guns against the backdrop of the sky. But he saw something else as well. Off in the distance, beyond that formidable armament, was a church steeple and atop the steeple was a cross. There, in juxtaposition, the fundamental options we always have: the cross and the cannon. Nations make that choice in the context of international politics; you and I make that choice when it comes to the bearing we assume with family, friends, and fellow believers.
What makes this bad Friday a good one is God showing the world a better way -- this way of absorption and neutralization, leading to transformation. Easter is its vindication. Little wonder the author of Hebrews calls Jesus "the source of eternal salvation" and bids us "approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." Amazingly, the throne of grace is the cross.
Charles Allen Dinsmore had it right: "There was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted on the green hill outside Jerusalem."7 Cruciform disciples, likewise, continue to be the best hope for the world God continues to love.
____________
1. P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London: Independent Press, LTD, 1951), p. 74.
2. Leslie D. Weatherhead, The Christian Agnostic (New York: Abingdon Press, 1965), p. 113.
3. John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), p. 401.
4. Henri J. M. Nouwen, Reaching Out (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1975), p. 84.
5. Walter Wink, "We Have Met the Enemy ..." (Sojourners, December 30, l986), p. 30.
6. Edwin Markham, "Outwitted" (Masterpieces of Religious Verse, James Dalton Morrison, ed., New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1948), p. 402.
7. D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), p. 194.
So at the outset, it is well for us to confess that there is a profound mystery about this Friday called good, a mystery that has, at least in part, been generated and fostered by those very thought-forms that were intended to make clear what happened. We have been aware of this for some years. P. T. Forsyth, many years back, said it like this: "What the cross is for the soul and the race can be put into no theology, adjusted in no philosophy. No thought or form can contain the greatness of the personality which it took the eternal act of cross and resurrection fully to express."1 Leslie Weatherhead noted it too: "Few matters so muddle the thoughtful layman ... than the attempt to link the death of Christ in A.D. 29 with the sins of men today."2
But even more recently, there is the voice of John Macquarrie:
We can first of all clear the ground by setting to one side some theologies of atonement which, though they have been very influential, appear to me to presuppose ideas of God which, from a Christian point of view, are very questionable. I mean theologies which represent God as angry and offended, or as a punishing God intent on exacting the penalty for sin.3
Consequently, many of us don't know how to connect to the cross; or, if you will, feel disconnected from the cross. When Paul writes to the Corinthians about "Christ crucified" being a "stumbling block" to some and "foolishness" to others, many of us will understand those perceptions; but when Paul writes of the "crucified Christ" as "the power of God and the wisdom of God," we are apt to draw a blank. What good is this Friday in reconnecting us to God? Or, to use the imagery of a text from Hebrews, how do we make the leap from the suffering Son to the Son who is "the source of eternal salvation" or the "high priest" who bids us approach "the throne of grace" (Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9)?
I suggest we begin by calling to mind the rather remarkable, but by no means uncommon, human pattern of experiencing intense difficulty or defeat and now, in retrospect, finding in that difficulty or defeat new lease and not dead end. With varying intensity, this happens every day.
A woman once went downhill skiing out west and took a fairly significant tumble. In the process of being x-rayed for possible internal injuries, it was discovered that she had a completely encapsulated malignant tumor in need of surgical removal. She was in great discomfort because of the fall, but in even greater discomfort now because of the discovery of cancer. But looking back on those very dark days now, she sees that as fortune, not misfortune. Ironically, had it not been for the skiing accident, she might never have discovered that malignancy and its potential to metastasize.
Christians look back on the cross in just that same way. What began in fact as a kangaroo court and ended as murder becomes, through hindsight, the very crucible of redemption. Perhaps imagery that helps me more fully understand that will help you also.
There is the image of absorption. This image is not flawless. Most of us probably associate the word "sponge" with absorption, but sponge can be a pejorative term. We sometimes refer to someone who takes advantage of us as being "a sponge." But there is a different side to this matter of absorption, and it comes from the field of physics. In physics, absorption refers to taking in, and not reflecting, and in that sense absorption nicely describes part of the activity of the cross. There God in Christ absorbs -- absorbs abuse, scorn, pain, rejection, sin -- all that is sinister, morbific, and nocuous.
By contrast, we tend to be more reactive. If someone pummels us, by nature we want to pummel in return. The eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth mentality is deeply ingrained, both in the child and in the highest counsels of any government on the earth.
Please note that absorbency is not to be equated with being a doormat. To absorb can be a conscious and calculated decision.
Let me illustrate this way. In every human grouping we encounter people who are rough around the edges. Their touch is the touch of coarse sandpaper; their behavior is chafing. When they irritate us, it is natural for us to consider responding in kind. But there are occasions when maturity bids us think twice about doing that. Very likely, responses in kind will simply perpetuate more of the same. So we make a conscious decision to absorb the vexation. Sometimes we absorb and forget; perhaps other times we absorb and respond appropriately later. Absorption -- not reflection; there is one image that can help us understand the cross today.
There follows the image of neutralization. Absorption can lead to neutralization. During the Second World War, a Lutheran bishop was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and tortured by an S.S. officer. The officer wanted to extract a confession from the bishop, and since the Lutheran bishop wouldn't willingly give it, the S.S. officer was sure that torture would bring it forth. In a small room, the two faced each other and as it took its course, the severity of the torture was continually increased. The bishop, who had a high tolerance for pain, did not respond to the torture. His silence enraged the S.S. officer to such a degree that the Nazi hit his victim harder and harder until, exploding and hollering at this bishop, he exclaimed: "But don't you know that I can kill you?" The bishop looked in the eyes of the S.S. officer and slowly said: "Yes, I know -- do what you want -- but I have already died." At that moment, the Nazi lost any power over his victim. The grounds for violence had gone and torture was now a futile effort. Such is the power of neutralization.4
We also see this power at work in the three strategies (found in Matthew 5) Jesus suggests for interrupting the pattern of retaliation, the pattern of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. We are indebted to Walter Wink for a very insightful treatment of these maneuvers.
Particularly insightful is his treatment of this strategy: "... if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also" (Matthew 5:39). Wink asks why the right cheek and how one would go about striking someone in that location. A blow, he notes, by the right fist in that right-handed world would land on the left cheek of the opponent. What's more, to strike the right cheek would require the use of the left-hand, but in that culture the left hand was only to be used for unclean tasks. So the only way to strike the right cheek with the right hand would be to use the back of the hand. Hence, we are talking here about backhanding someone as a form of insult. The purpose is to humiliate and put someone in his place. In that culture, one did not strike a peer and if that happened, the fine was significant. But backhanding was the normal way of admonishing inferiors, and in the context of this teaching, Jesus is addressing people whom the culture deems inferior -- slaves, wives, children, women, and Jews.
Why, then, does Jesus counsel these folks, already humiliated, to turn the other cheek? Wink indicates this action would say in effect:
Try again. Your first blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate me. I am a human being just like you. Your money, gender, race, age, or status does not alter that fact. You cannot demean me.5
What's more, such a response places the striker in enormous difficulties. One can only backhand another's left cheek by using the left hand -- and that's forbidden. And if you take your left hand and land a blow on the other's right cheek, you are declaring that other person a peer. Again, remember, that peers do not backhand each other; the back of the hand is reserved for reinforcing the caste system and institutionalized inequality.
In effect then, to "turn to them the other also" was a way of neutralizing their power. This wasn't cowardice; it was a strategy designed to place one's adversary in a no-win situation in a non-violent way. It stripped him of his ability to dehumanize you.
Absorption. Neutralization. But the cross also invokes the image of transformation.
What else can explain the seemingly inexplicable shifts that occur in the wake of Jesus' death? What is heinous becomes hopeful; what is deadly becomes salvific; what is seemingly an ending becomes instead a beginning; what is raised in hate issues in health; what is designed to be ignominious becomes something in which the community of faith glories; humankind's worst is met with God's best. We remember this gruesome, ugly event and it so dramatizes God's deadly determination to get our attention and win our hearts that we can do naught else than stand and sing, in the words of Isaac Watts:
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
Such is the transforming power of love.
You may remember Edwin Markham's memorable lines:
He drew a circle that shut me out --
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.6
The cross is God drawing a circle around the whole of creation and taking us in.
A man was walking down the gangplank from the USS Massachusetts, moored in Fall River, Massachussetts, and looking back over his shoulder, saw its massive guns against the backdrop of the sky. But he saw something else as well. Off in the distance, beyond that formidable armament, was a church steeple and atop the steeple was a cross. There, in juxtaposition, the fundamental options we always have: the cross and the cannon. Nations make that choice in the context of international politics; you and I make that choice when it comes to the bearing we assume with family, friends, and fellow believers.
What makes this bad Friday a good one is God showing the world a better way -- this way of absorption and neutralization, leading to transformation. Easter is its vindication. Little wonder the author of Hebrews calls Jesus "the source of eternal salvation" and bids us "approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." Amazingly, the throne of grace is the cross.
Charles Allen Dinsmore had it right: "There was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted on the green hill outside Jerusalem."7 Cruciform disciples, likewise, continue to be the best hope for the world God continues to love.
____________
1. P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London: Independent Press, LTD, 1951), p. 74.
2. Leslie D. Weatherhead, The Christian Agnostic (New York: Abingdon Press, 1965), p. 113.
3. John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), p. 401.
4. Henri J. M. Nouwen, Reaching Out (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1975), p. 84.
5. Walter Wink, "We Have Met the Enemy ..." (Sojourners, December 30, l986), p. 30.
6. Edwin Markham, "Outwitted" (Masterpieces of Religious Verse, James Dalton Morrison, ed., New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1948), p. 402.
7. D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), p. 194.
