We Catholics get used to crucifixes with their image of a man nailed to a wooden cross. We see them in our churches, in schools and in hospitals. They are the central symbol of our faith. We can be surprised that people who have had little contact with Christian faith are shocked when they find a crucifix above their hospital bed. They see the tortured man that we can often miss. They find in it, not consolation, but fear and blame. A fine and anguished American poet Sylvia Plath summed it up. She wrote while in hospital, ‘Skinny man you are someone’s fault’.
The heart of Christian faith is that God saves us through his terrible death on the cross. It makes an extraordinary link between God’s love for human beings and the tortured execution of Jesus that was designed to annihilate everything human about him.
In Jesus’ death two stories that tug in different directions are joined. There is the story of God who loves human beings and our world so much that he sends his Son to join us in our human world and saves us through Jesus’ death and rising. There is also the human story of Jesus who is born in Israel, preaches the Good News of God’s coming, is rejected by the Jewish and Roman authorities, and dies as a criminal.
MAKING SENSE OF JESUS’ DEATH
For the early Christians the joining of God’s love and salvation with the tortured death of Jesus was a big stretch. How could you find God in the blood, pain and shame of an execution? How could God bring life to us through it?
The New Testament offers many images and stories through which Christians tried to bring these two things together. They all described God as freeing us from sin and death. Some compare God’s love for us with that of someone who buys back and frees a slave. Jesus’ death was the price paid for setting us free from slavery to sin. Other images compare Jesus’ death to a sacrifice. Instead of offering an animal, Jesus offers his own body to God to wash away our sins. Later Christian thinkers compared it to the payment of a debt that human beings had incurred through sin and had no means of paying. The Son of God paid the debt through becoming human and through his death.
All of these images helped the early Christians deal with the shock of finding that at the centre of our relationship to God lies a criminal trial and brutal execution. St Paul perhaps explores it most deeply when reflecting on his experience of meeting Christ. As a devout Jew he had tried to serve God by being faithful to every detail of Moses’ Law. His devotion to the Law led him to hunt down Christian converts who had abandoned it. He discovered, however, that he often failed to keep the Law and so failed to serve God. His vision of Christ revealed to him that God’s love was shown in Christ who was executed as a law breaker and as a sinner to win other sinners like himself.
THINKING OF JESUS’ DEATH
When we think of God’s involvement in Jesus’ death, we must also remember the human story of Jesus’ life. As a human being Jesus drew the map of his life as he lived it. He was inspired to preach God’s love and presence through his ministry, hoping to bring people to accept his message. As opposition grew, he recognised that if he continued his mission his enemies would have him killed. His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane shows that he feared this, longed for a way out, but remained faithful to his mission.
This, of course, was only half the story. It meets God’s story in Jesus’ rising from the dead. Through his faithfulness God raised him from the dead, showed his way to be more powerful than evil, and brought us salvation. The end point of the human story of Jesus’ death is that, though it was humiliating and seemed to close his story by dismantling his life and his reputation, it was not the end. It seemed that there was no way out and no way back from such a death. But three days later, God raised him from the dead, gathered his disciples, and gave them hope. It also offered them a way of life. To follow Jesus in giving your life to others was a way to full living and to life after death. In Jesus’ human story and in God’s story, life, his death and rising were the beginning of a new world.
For Christians the crucifix hanging in the hospital room says that Jesus, the Son of God, hangs there out of love. He joins us having shared in our weakness, anxiety and self-doubt, and promises us that we will be with him. A Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp was once forced to watch a child dying in agony as he was hanged. When someone shouted, ‘Where is your God now’, he answered, ‘God is hanging there.’ In the most inhuman places hope can arise and overcome despair if we know that God is with us.
JESUS’ DEATH IS NOT ABOUT PUNISHMENT
When we imagine Jesus’ shameful death, we can be tempted to think of it as God’s punishment. From childhood we often learn to associate pain with judgment and punishment. That, of course, was the way in which the people who had Jesus crucified and those who watched it saw it. Jesus was a criminal and was being punished. That was the public story. It tempts us to think that God’s story of Jesus’ crucifixion, too, is one of punishment. The human race had offended God by sin and deserved punishment. As a just judge God had to see the punishment delivered, and so decided that his Son should take on a human life and take on himself the punishment that we deserved.
This view of God’s part in Jesus’ death looks at things the wrong way round. It makes God a player in our human story of crime and punishment, instead of inviting us into God’s story of love, enduring betrayal and forgiveness. As in St Paul’s image, Christ takes on our human sin and punishment to show God’s way of love and a really human way of living. He echoes the remark of the Jewish observer of the hanging child: ‘God is hanging there’. And God is not present in Jesus’ execution as a judge to uphold the law but to weep with him and invite us to weep with all his beaten-up brothers and sisters.
IS THE CROSS TOO DEPRESSING?
We should certainly not see God as a stern and distant judge. If that is so, should we not also stop focusing on Jesus’ crucifixion? Some Christians certainly think so. They say that we should deplore the emphasis on sin, on Jesus’ suffering, and on the association of our happiness with his terrible death. They prefer to emphasise the goodness of the world and of human beings and to see sin as immaturity, not as malice. They focus on our union with God through creation and through Christ’s rising from the dead.
They are certainly right to criticise a grim focus on sin that ignores Christ’s rising from the dead. The goodness of the world, transformation, and the Resurrection, too, are all a central part of Christian faith. Teilhard de Chardin and other Catholics have written inspiringly about them. It is still important, however, for us to reflect on Jesus’ agonising death and so to imagine a world in which all grounds for hope are taken away and where human beings in power will stop at nothing to destroy people who challenge their power. This is a world in which human decency and hope appear to be totally defeated.
That is not our everyday Australian world. But it was Jesus’ world. And it has been the world of many people in our lifetimes who have lived and died in civil wars, dictatorships and criminal rule. When we look at our own world, too, with its readiness to regard the lives of innocent people as expendable, to trash our environment for financial gain, to disregard the future of our world in order to preserve our comfort, and to tolerate gross inequality, we can come close to despair. If we are to continue to hope our hope needs to give full weight to the forces that make for despair.
In such a context the crucifix is a realistic image of the Christian message that God has shared such apparently total defeat out of love for us and has brought life through it. No human perversity, cruelty, disregard for humanity, nor abandonment of decency lies beyond God’s care or is stronger than God’s love. As St Paul writes, nothing can separate us from God’s love. If we downplay the horror of Jesus’ death and the power of sin to destroy human life and hope, we risk also weakening the power of God’s love to meet the horrors of our own world. When we are confronted by them, being told to think positively does not really help. We need to know that God has been there, suffered that, and has risen to encourage us to ensure that decency will outlast barbarism, love overcome hatred, and trust overcome despair.
THE BALANCE BETWEEN SIN, CROSS AND RESCUE
When people are rescued from danger, then the deeper the threat they had faced and the greater the cost to the person who rescues them, the more wonderful and life-changing they will find their rescue. If the danger was small and the rescue matter of fact, the smaller would have been sense of relief and gratitude. Its impact on their subsequent life would also have been smaller.
Similarly, a faith in which our hope is small and in which we see God’s work in our lives as undramatic will offer little confidence if we are in a disastrous situation. To minimise the power and the depth of human evil and the destructiveness of sin will certainly draw attention away from the horror of Jesus’ death, but it will also create doubt about whether God’s rescue really answered our needs.
When we look at the crucifix we are invited to look with open eyes both at the goodness of our world and at the horror of what we do to our common home and to one another, and the love of God who entered our world to free us. We do not look at the crucifix as if it is the end of the story. We look back on it from the view of Christ’s rising from the dead, knowing that God’s love and rescue are stronger than the power of evil and the pain and shame of the cross.
Sylvia Plath was right to see the crucifix as someone’s fault, indeed as everyone’s fault. That is how we treat one another. But she understandably missed the love that brought Jesus to hang there and is more powerful than all our fault and its effects can ever be.
Jesuit priest Andrew Hamilton is a roving writer at Jesuit Communications who loves cycling and gardening.
QUESTIONS
1. Do you wear a cross? Do your schools or hospitals have crucifixes on the wall?
2. What does the cross mean to you?
3. Why did Jesus’ crucifixion shock the first Christians?
4. How did they describe it as part of God’s story of love?
5. Do you associate Jesus’ crucifixion as punishment?
6. Why is the cross important in hard times?