WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CROSS

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Today, September 14, is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. I'm sharing here some thoughts that I put together for a talk I'm giving later today.

There was this Christian missionary who found himself deep in the jungle, meeting with the chief ofthe village. The missionary asked him,  “Do your people believe in God?”The chief lowered his voice almost to a whisper, and replied, "In the evening we hear the sound of his footsteps in the treetops, but we stay away."  God is by nature unknowable to us humans with our limited intellects. So, the Lord has to reveal himself to us. 

One of the central beliefs of Jews and Christians is that God does this  through Sacred Scripture, “revelation.” So it’s obviously important to get scripture right; but unfortunately, we often don’t do so! I’d like to offer a couple of basic ideas to help us, when we’re reading or listening to the bible, to get from it the message that the Lord intended.

Firstly, the bible is a collection of 72 different books with various authors, written over a period of a thousand years, and, sensing that, we tend to read the books as stand-alone texts, rather than in their true context, as part of a unified sacred book. We seldom think of the bible as a single work, with a unified plot. But that’s exactly what it is: From the first verse of Genesis to the final verse of the Book of Revelation, the Bible is always heading in one single direction, toward love and unity.

One scholar said that the bible is “a document in travail.”  This means that we shouldn’t think of it as a book that is finished, and that we can just read it the way we read a cookbook or an automobile repair manual. We need to engage the Sacred Text and connect the dots, trying, with the Holy Spirit’s help, to find the direction, the momentum. We just need to keep remembering that the direction of revelation in the scriptures is invariably toward mercy, inclusion, forgiveness, non-violence and trust.

The first point, then, is that the Bible is a single work with a single, definite direction, leading us inevitably toward the fulness of LOVE: Mercy, inclusion, forgiveness, non-violence and trust.
The second point, the bible is written by human beings and is rooted in specific times and particular places, bounded by the writer’s specific culture.

And this is a crucial point: it means that like any human endeavor, biblical revelation doesn’t proceed in a nice, smooth straight line. Yes, it has a definite direction, a goal, and leads us toward the final fulfillment of God’s love, a New Heavens and a New Earth. But it proceeds toward that goal in typical human fashion by taking three steps forward and two steps back.

It’s important that we develop an eye for identifying the difference between scripture verses that are bringing us three steps forward, and those that are heading two steps back, and to know how to deal with each. Otherwise we can’t manage to connect the dots, and we miss the momentum, and the accidental things become central, while the essential points get buried.

Let’s look first at some “three steps forward passages:” Think, for example, of the beautiful readings at the Easter Vigil: God creating the world and seeing that it is very good, God delivering his people through the Red Sea, or bringing them into the promised land where they enjoy the first crops in the new country -- this is God being faithful. We see the story moving three steps forward toward the goal when the Word becomes flesh in Bethlehem, or when Jesus gives himself up to death out of love for you and me, thereby conquering death itself to save us. Clearly these are events that bring us three steps forward.

But its just as important to be able to spot the two steps back passages that lead in the opposite direction, away from the goal of love and unity. They’re easy to spot, too. They’re the ones in which God acts like a human! The God of vengeance, divine pettiness, form over substance, law over grace. These passages tell us of a God who keeps score so he can get back at people, a God of justice, who demands that justice be done. We can all relate to this God of the two-steps-back passages, because he’s just like us!

This God who punishes to the third and fourth generation, or who demands that towns be obliterated with women and children inside of the. This is the proprietor of hell.

Recently I read about the rioting that occurred in South Africa between rival tribes after apartheid was ended. Both sides practiced a cruel form of torture and execution called “necklacing,” in which people would hold somebody down and slip a tire over his torso, pinning his arms at his side, and then set the tire on fire.

When I read that I said to myself, “Oh yeah! That’s hell! That’s what our God does to us if we’re bad! " The passages in the bible that talk about this kind of a God, those in the “two steps back” column, are strangely attractive to lots of people. Plenty of good Christians are very reluctant to let go of this very understandable God.

We want God to mete out strict, blind justice to everyone: Divine justice is the same as human justice: “retributive justice,” for example, in which retribution is part of a carefully balanced system.

This idea of a perfectly balanced, reasonable system of justice was picked up by St. Anselm and then by Thomas Aquinas. They developed it into a theology of the cross, the theology of atonement: Original Sin was an offense against God, an infinite being, and therefore the only way for justice to be balanced would be that the sin must be expiated or atoned for by some infinite being. So, God’s Son, who shared in the divine nature, was sent to be crucified and die to satisfy the Divine demand for atonement. I picture God glaring angrily at us humans and growling, “Now look what you made me do!” But at least the scales of justice are balanced, and Jesus has thrown himself between us and His angry father whose wrath needed to be calmed.

We could call this “redemptive violence.” We make God very small, and draw him into our own ego-driven need for retribution and punishment. (Isn’t this circle of violence and retribution exactly what Jesus came to undo?)

There is another way, of course, to understand the mystery of the cross. It’s said in dozens of different ways in both the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian. God, out of pure, spontaneous love for his creatures, decided to come in person to set things right. By taking on himself our sins, by grappling with death itself, he overcame sinfulness and conquered death itself, and rode from the dead, bringing us along with him to live forever in the Kingdom of the New Jerusalem (see the final chapter of the Book of Revelation). When we gaze on the cross we should be seeing not the piece that the Father demanded for our sins, but rather the ultimate spontaneous act of God’s love for us. The cross is our gateway to heaven.

 Notice where all of this started: Not with God but with us humans. We made the first move by our sins, and God simply reacted, and was bound by the laws of justice and balanced scales and so on. Poor God is now subject to the limitations of the human mind, and is not completely free to act out of spontaneous, infinite love. But at least the system is comprehensible to us: It’s familiar and therefore comfortable, like a favorite pair of slippers. We’ve got God in our pocket.

This is why so many of us get nervous with the "three-steps-forward" God, such as the Father we meet in the parable of the Prodigal Son. We say to ourselves,  “I know what I would have done if I were that father.” But Jesus came to tell us, “Well, you are not that Father, his ways are far above your ways. His love overpowers every other consideration.”
Some of us are uneasy when Jesus pardons the woman taken in adultery, because he seems to be condoning sin.

Our headmaster has a phrase he uses when he’s in a one-on-one situation with a troubled student. Maybe the kid is struggling with a terrible home situation, and his grades are dropping, and the word is that he’s starting to smoke pot. So, here’s the scenario: The kid comes into Fr. Ed’s office and slumps into a chair and stares at the floor. Then after a few minutes of conversation about how bad things are, Fr. Ed says,
“Marcos, look at me.” The kid raise his head. The headmaster holds the kid’s stare for a second or two. The he says:
“Marcos, I want you to realize something. Listen, because it’s super-important: God loves you just the way you are, right now. In the midst of all your pain and struggles and sins, God loves you just the way you are.”
Marcos’ eyes start to fill with tears, and whispers,
“No one ever told me that before.”

Not surprisingly, we don’t manage to tell our kids about the three-steps forward God, since we’re not comfortable with Him. Instead we’ll fall back of the humanly understandable God of two-steps back; we say things like, “See, God punished you!”  “Your sins offend God.” (That’s an interesting concept, when you think about it -- a God who can be “offended.”) “God is watching your every move”. (Yikes! If I let myself think about that all the time, I’d go crazy pretty quickly, I imagine.)
The clear direction of the bible, as unmistakably set out by Jesus, is toward love, forgiveness, openness, as modelled by Jesus, who is introducing us to the Father who is all-loving and who is not bound by our predictable rules of retributive justice or our human wish for vengeance.
All a sinner needs to do is turn around (repent) and, like the prodigal son in the parable, show up at the father's doorstep. No necklacing, no getting out the account ledger to add up your sins.
And when someone objects, “Hey, necklacing is in the bible, and so is the fact that white people are superior to the sons of Ham, and that we should destroy people who don’t believe in our God!” Jesus gently urges that person to let go of the easily-understandable two-steps-back pages of the bible, and embrace the more difficult mysterious passages, the ones that reveal to us a God who is so loving, so beautiful that He's incomprehensible to us.

Let's all pray for one another, that the "three-steps-forward" passages in the bible may lead all of us together toward the final goal of infinite, everlasting all-inclusive Love, the Kingdom of God, where we hope to live together with Him as one loving family forever and ever.
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