Serching for God # 31

 From episcopalchurch.org, in a segment entitled, An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, we find:

The importance of the biblical narratives of salvation history is reflected in the scripture readings for Easter Vigil…including the story of creation, the flood, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea, and other stories of redemption and renewal….The concept if based on the German term Heilsgeschichte (history of Salvation, or redemption history). It was used by C. von Hofmann (1810-1877), who urged that all sacred history can be deduced from the fact of personal conversion.

The Cross, that pivotal, historic, epic and transformational moment on the Christian calendar has become an archetypal image for the faith, as well as for the secular society. Linked intimately, an perpetually with human ‘sin’ and the need for forgiveness, it has marked a turning point in the consciousness of the West, irrespective of the specific faith to which one is in any way connected. On the website, danielleshroyer.com, in a piece entitled Moltmann Monday: Burdening the Cross with Salvation, March 12, 2017, we read, quoting from Moltmann’s work, The Crucified God, and the chapter, Resistance of the Cross Against Its Interpretations:

(From Moltmann:) The religion and humanist world which surrounded Christianity from the very first despised the Cross, because the dehumanized Christ represented a contradiction to all ideas of God, and man as divine. Yet even in historic Christianity the bitterness of the cross was not maintained in the recollection of believers or in the reality presented by the church. There were times of persecution and times of reformation, in which the Crucified Christ was to some extent experienced as directly present. In historic Christianity there was also the religion of the suppressed (Laternari) who knew that their faith brought them into spontaneous fellowship with the suffering Christ. But the more the church of the crucified Christ became the prevailing religion of society, and set about satisfying the personal and public needs of this society, the more it left the cross behind it, and gilded the cross with the expectations and ideas of salvation.

And then Moltmann quotes H. J. Iwand, who said this doozy of a sentence;

We have made the bitterness of the Cross, the revelation of God in the cross of Jesus Christ, tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a necessity for the process of salvation…As a result the cross loss its arbitrary and incomprehensible character.

(Back now to Daniele Shroyer)

Moltman and Iwand do not mean to say that the cross has nothing to do with salvation, or that the cross isn’t deeply and intentionally tied up in God’s act of salvation in Jesus. What they are trying to say is that it’s worth considering how we have so simplified the cross that it has become nothing more than a convenient solution to our rather basic salvation math problem. And the reason that is problematic is because a) salvation is a lot more complicated than that and b) the cross means a whole lot more than that. When we choose to see the cross only as a means of fulfilling our personal salvation needs, we sidestep all the things that make the cross difficult, uncomfortable, scandalous and incomprehensible. Rather than squirming, we decide instead to ignore, to personalize, and to sentimentalize it…..

Moltmann’s point is that there is much about the cross that is and that will always be a little bit despicable to us, and out faithfulness as Christians is not to reject it but to accept that as part of what makes the cross such a transformative act. Jesus was stripped o his humanity and his divinity on the cross. He was left for dead. He was an enemy of the state, an enemy of organized religion, an enemy of the status quo, an enemy of just deserts. He was above all- and this is important- the enemy of death and destruction, which throws some rather serious shade on all the other things that got tangled up in his own condemnation on the cross, because it assumes that they were in some way, too….The American church is not the church of the crucified Christ. It is not and it never has been. It is the prevailing religion of society, and its central desire to satisfy the personal and public needs of that society and to support in any number of ways its own survival. And because it continues to choose that path, it continues to leave the cross farther and farther behind it. American Christianity has decided to burden the cross with only one thing, to the exclusion of all else: our own misguided expectations and ideas of salvation. By doing so, we have made the cross tolerable (how else could we have cotton blankets with crosses on it or blinged out cross jewelry and shirts or cure little ceramic cross s hanging in our kitchens) but we have also made it cheap, and shallow, and rather empty. Which is why I will never stop being grateful that the cross has this unfathomable magical way of resisting our bad interpretation of it. The facts are the facts and no amount of cross-encrusted coffee mugs are going to take away from the fact that an innocent Jewish man born to a refugee family who we profess to be the son of God was condemned, beaten and executed as an enemy of the state and an enemy of organized religion and that even his followers abandoned him because they could not bear to see it happen. And apparently neither can we. The very first sentence of this book which is a sentence that literally saved my faith, is this:

The cross is not and cannot be loved. This Lent, consider letting go of your need to love the cross for what you think it gives you. Look on it instead, in all its complicated, confusing facets and allow it to destabilize you. Allow yourself to be brought into Christ’s suffering rather than doing everything you can to avoid it. See what happens when you stop burdening the cross with your own salvation, and see it as the salvation of God for the life of the world instead.

The church, as depicted by Shroyer, with Moltmann’s underpinning, has reduced the cross to a cheap and easily-revered image of personal salvation, especially when compared with the facts of the suffering opposition to death and destruction, the defaming of the innocent one, whose sacrifice can be ‘viewed’ from the perspective of the whole world, and not as another of those placeboes to sooth and calm the personal needs including the need for personal salvation.

I was raised in a church in which the personal salvation of each individual was the standard of ‘success’ for whether the clergy and the theology being preached was biblical, literally. At twelve, I sat on a sofa with the clergy in the chair in front of me, as he asked, in preparation for my first communion, “John have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour?” How could I have had even an inkling of whatever that might mean, at that age? Of course, I knew, intuitively, that, if I wished to participate in a first communion, the answer expected was, “Yes!” and it was to be proferred unequivocally and unreservedly. I had watched, and was to watch millions parade to a altar in evangelical revivals both in person and on television (think Billy Graham) and ponder, what did that ‘walk’ mean to each of those millions?

Recently in this space, I have been walking a path in and through gardens of thoughts that exposed the ‘privatization of sin’ and the ‘impunity of the church’ from reflection on its own darkness. Pleasing to the society, as a different kind of, but nevertheless another ‘agency of service to the society’  (tax exempt, in many jurisdictions) the Christian church has defaulted on the mission of the horror and sacrifice of Calvary, (here recall Jay Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong) that posits a perspective of a willing sacrificial martyr to the notion of relationality, in opposition to conflict and violence in relationships (of and for the whole world). Except perhaps to have made if dogmatic to ‘oppose abortion’ as its sign of conviction to have grasped and incarnated that aspect of opposition to death, without at the same time, even coming close to a similar opposition to military conflict, or, in many instances, to capital punishment.

The model of a willing sacrifice to the injust, unwarranted, murder of this Jesus, as an exemplar for humanity, not only those who call themselves Christian, in the light of the manifest volcanoes of violence, mostly of revenge and retribution, that erupt at the personal, organizational, state and national levels, on innocent, mostly unwilling and unwitting, men, women and children is both graphic and epic.

There is another aspect to this notion of the ‘personal need for salvation’ that instantly separates, with a degree of both impunity and indignity, those who profess their loyalty and belief in the Cross as an instrument of forgiveness and the concomitant salvation it assures, from those who don’t fully need or comprehend, or refuse to extract the mystery and the complications of the Cross, or those who see the salvation of the world as paramount.

We live in a culture so deeply embedded, even enmeshed in the personal individual, as to be both literally and metaphorically blind to the ‘whole world’ as having both a need and an inherent and inalienable access to the universal intrinsic compassion, brotherhood and equality and fraternity that is encompassed in the Sermon on the Mount, (remember Tolstoy).

It seems highly unlikely even perhaps impossible that the ‘culture’ or as Hillman calls it, the ‘anima mundi’ will ever be put under the same kind of magnification to which we submit human blood and tissue cells in our search for both disease and antidote. It is highly unlikely, especially and so long as, we continue to consider and to value our personal salvation as eclipsing legitimately any thought of the kind of reformation needed by a culture blind to its own denial and blindness to the ‘wholeness’ or our shared existence. Even in our critiques of our own culture, we continue to deploy the lens of the ‘personal evil’ as evidence that we are diagnosing and the treating the malaise that is smothering humanity.

And, think of the suffering of the most deprived, the most alienated, the most homeless, the most starving, the most diseased and war-torn refugees, immigrants and asylum-seekers as closest to that suffering on Calvary….that suffering is unwarranted, unequal, dispassionate, detached, and inhumane….just as was the death of Jesus on Calvary…..

And to think that we are continuing, if not perhaps even enhancing the impunity with which we view violence, at all levels of our human interactions, including especially between and among nations whose obsessive-compulsive consumption of the latest and most lethal weaponry has spiked recently.

Protecting the homeland from the invasive threats of evil and even deranged men (and it is mostly men who demand more weapons, and more conflict and inflict more death and destruction) is the precise opposite of what ever human being on the planet knows ‘intimately and innately’ within him or herself. Shifting to an ethic of being true to our own self, refusing to engage in wanton violence, whether it is verbal, physical, emotional, or even military, is one path to rendering to the Cross a meaning and a definition and purpose beyond ‘personal salvation.’

And there is no escaping the bond that links the religious impulse to the foundational currents that undergird our culture. And a re-consideration of the Cross could be at the centre of that bond.