29 June 2008
The Manger and the Cross
Maybe it’s for the pure spectacle,
the earthquake, the darkness, the curtain torn.
Maybe we just can’t believe that God isn’t angry
and we need to hear about blood and nails and agony.
Maybe it’s because this language about death,
sin demolished, evil destroyed, death itself put to death—
maybe this language comes easier than words about life.
Maybe we know altogether too much about killing.
But I wish we wouldn’t celebrate your death more than your life.
I wish we wouldn’t look past the manger to the cross,
past the stable and the unwed, travel-weary mother,
past our embarrassingly frail and needy, helpless baby Lord.
Because we’re far too good at putting to death the old,
but I wish we knew what it means to be made new.
Because I’ve seen your words used as weapons,
and I’ve heard hateful things spoken in your name,
and sometimes I’ve been the one speaking.
And I’ve seen your kingdom turned into an empire,
and watched battles being fought in your name,
and I’ve mistaken myself for a warrior
and called everyone else your enemy,
and called the battle holy.
And I’ve fixed my eyes on what must die
and lost sight of life.
But maybe the world didn’t change when you left it,
but when you came.
Maybe that day, it wasn’t that you were degraded, diminished,
shrunk down, made small so our minds could contain you.
Maybe instead that day, you lifted humanity up, and said,
“Be new! Be something more than you ever were before!
Share in my nature! Be the dwelling place of God!”
And maybe that’s too big for us to grasp.
But I wish we wouldn’t fix our thoughts on death,
and forget to speak about the new creation.
As a young Christian I was told that “the Gospel” should be presented as follows:
1. You have done bad things.
2. So, you deserve to be punished.
3. But, Jesus was punished in your place.
4. If you believe in Jesus, you won’t be punished.
This formula (sometimes augmented with an extra clause about God’s love, but that one’s optional) has the virtue of being so simple that even a three-year-old can understand it. It is entirely rational, legal language, which appeals to people in the modern mindset.
It is also almost completely non-Biblical. We have about twenty examples in the book of Acts of the preaching of the apostles. Only six of those sermons mention the cross (2:23, 3:13, 5:30, 10:39, 17:3, 26:23) and those only in passing ("you killed him, but God raised him..."). No salvific power is attributed in Acts to the cross; instead all the preaching centers on the resurrection. Taking a broader view, of the verses in the New Testament that talk about salvation (that is, what has changed for us because of Jesus) depending on which ones you count about five to ten percent of them have something to do with forgiveness of sins. None of those state that Jesus was being punished by God on the cross in our place; that idea is found only in the Old Testament (Isaiah 53:5).
The formula above is sometimes called the "Romans road" because it is based on four verses in Romans taken out of order and out of context (3:23, 6:23, 5:8, 10:9). If this formula were indeed the core of the Gospel, it’s surprising that it doesn’t appear more often and more plainly in Scripture. Even more problematic (for us, not for the folks in Acts) is that the last verse (Romans 10:9) says that what we must believe in, in order to be saved, is not the cross, but the resurrection.
This idea of Jesus being punished in our place is absent from Christian writings until around the twelfth century. Prior to that, Jesus’ death was understood not as a payment to the Father, but as a victory over the powers of sin, death, and the devil. And salvation was understood as a change wrought in humanity through the Incarnation: Jesus taking on all aspects of our humanity in order to redeem all aspects of our humanity. This is the doctrine of "theosis", expressed in the words of Athanasius: "God became man so that man might become god." This is what Peter is referring to when he says that we have been made "participants in the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).
If you read the New Testament expecting to see theosis instead of expecting to see substitutionary atonement, you’ll see it everywhere. Suddenly things that didn’t quite fit before make sense, and the story of salvation becomes a cohesive whole: the incarnation, birth, life, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and return of Christ all woven together into a story where it is all cohesive and necessary, instead of just being a backdrop for the cross.