by: Pastor Isaac Collins
Last night, we spoke about the scandal of divine love. Divine love is denied and betrayed by its disciples, arrested and condemned by the Roman empire, and opposed and tempted by demonic evil. Our love fails in the face of those things, but divine love does not. The scandal is that in the place of strongest death, sin, and hell, divine love overcomes, reveals, and speaks.
On Good Friday, the scandal of divine love begins with judgment. The crucifixion of Jesus is Rome’s judgment against Christ’s ministry. The crucifixion is Rome’s judgment of the proclamation of the coming Kingdom of God. The crucifixion is Caesar’s judgment of Jesus, the pretend-Messiah. Rome judges the Jesus movement to be seditious, dangerous, and criminal. The sentence passed on Jesus is the shame of public execution and the silence of the grave. Crucifixion was Rome’s favorite tool to use to discredit would-be revolutionaries and their movements. By naming Jesus a threat to the empire, Pilate hoped to discredit him in the eyes of his followers. Rome wants to have the last word in Jesus’ life and stun his followers into silence.
The Romans do not succeed in winning the silence they hoped for. They do not succeed because they failed to see what the powerful see now: the easiest way to insure the silence of Christians is to take the scandal of the cross and pervert it. Many of us deeply dislike Good Friday and find the cross abhorrent. We spend little time focusing on the message of this day because we have been sold a theology that is so horrid, it guarantees our silence. We’ve been taught that we have all committed spiritual sins before God, and that God’s going to unleash the wrath of divine judgment upon us, to pay for our sin. Just in the nick of time, Jesus intervenes between us and God the Father. He takes all of our sin on his shoulders and accepts the Father’s punishment so that we don’t have to. We win salvation because the Father punishes the Son instead of us. God’s wrath is satisfied, and we can go on sinning until we die and go to heaven.
The fancy name for this theology is the theory of penal substitutionary atonement. It is a theology of silence. This theology makes the cross apolitical; the crucifixion becomes a spiritual matter only. The god we see here is a monster that must extract a pound of flesh. We each stand before this angry, abusive dad of a god alone. The things that this god is mad about are not injustices but shameful sins that leave us hating ourselves. Rome made the mistake of criminalizing Jesus, when it should have thought to criminalize humanity instead. Penal substitutionary atonement makes our identities sinful. Sexuality, race, gender, socioeconomic status, nationality, each of these things becomes sinful if they do not adhere to the dominant norm, the picture of the angry dad god. In this theology, the cross is not about liberation. The cross is about uniformity so it leads to our silence. When we lose our identities, we lose our voices.
Many who do not accept the judgment at the heart of white supremacist theology turn away from the cross all together. We assume that the problem is judgment itself, instead of the judgment of the powerful. So we jump from Maundy Thursday straight to Easter Sunday. We become quick to preach love, acceptance and grace without including judgment or justice. A liberal holy week without the cross produces cheap grace. We respond to the angry father with a loving God that is all mushy feelings. Meanwhile, the world is on fire with injustice. We have a God that loves us, but won’t help us. We don’t want to speak of judgment and so we silence the cross.
But the scandal of divine love is that there is judgment present in the cross. Jesus goes to the cross in order to expose the truth about this world. The cross is not about the Father’s judgment of the Son. The cross is about God’s judgment of the sin and death that hold sway over this world. The truth is that the logic of human power is a logic of crucifixion. We create new golgothas every day. We have all shouted, ‘Crucify him!’ With the crowd in Jerusalem. The cross interrupts our delusions of moral purity by showing us that there’s nothing that our love of violence will not consume, not even the Son of God. The price of our comfort is paid by the blood of strangers. The cross reveals to us how deeply enmeshed our lives are with other people’s pain. Here is the true scandal of the crucifixion of divine love, God takes away the joy of the lives that we lead by showing us that we live by rejecting God as our Creator. The joy and fruits of this sinful life are robbed from us forever by the knowledge of the price that must be paid in order to enjoy them. This is the scandal of our faith! We can never look at the world the same way again. What we see on the cross, we cannot unsee. Now that we see the logic of crucifixion that killed Jesus, we will see it over and over again in the power structures of our world. From that place of death, divine love judges the ways of this world, and declares our love of violence sinful. From the cross, divine love speaks of the end of those ways. Divine love has accomplished what it set out to do, teaching us the deadly truth about this world, by revealing the pain that undergirds our love and use of power and violence.
Now that we recognize the sinful state that we are hopelessly enmeshed in, how can we ever be liberated from it? The logic of this world is a chain that we forge throughout our lives, even as it chokes the life out of us and our neighbors. Who could possibly set us free from this terrible bondage? Only the one that has become the victim of our violence. Divine love goes to the cross to teach us the truth about this world, but also to be in solidarity with all victims of the logic of crucifixion. Divine love weaves the truth of God’s power into the Golgothas of this world so that death cannot have the last word in those places. Divine love speaks to the crucified peoples of this world of an end to their suffering, divine love speaks to them of the hope of resurrection, and the coming of justice and reparation.
Divine love also speaks from that place of solidarity and victimhood as one who has authority to offer forgiveness. For the perpetrators of violence who see the truth of God’s judgment, there is the possibility of mercy, if we will embrace the scandal of the cross. The scandal is that we must renounce the lives that we have enjoyed. We must renounce the logic of crucifixion and our love of violence. We must turn to the cross in lament, and seek to be healed. We must relearn that we are not God, but mere creatures. We must learn to hunger for life instead of death, light instead of darkness. May we be given the strength to see the cross in all of its terrible truth and not look away. May we be healed of all that kills us. Amen.