"THE MEANING OF THE CROSS"

“THE MEANING OF THE CROSS”

            Several people have wished me happy or a blessed Easter this week, and since we are still deep in Lent, those wishes have been a bit jarring.  Easter comes about as late as it can this year (April 21), so maybe the bursting out of spring in the South has called forth these ideas of resurrection and Easter a bit early.  Yet, whatever we are wishing or hoping, we still are immersed in the power of death.  The recent votes in state legislatures to adopt the FGFBM’s proposals (Forced Gestation and Forced Birth Movement) on the “heartbeat” bills are a reminder of the power of death, as evidenced in this white, male supremacy.   We are in the season of the Cross, in the season of atonement, and I am feeling it.

            Still, I am always uncomfortable with this emphasis on the Cross.  Perhaps it is my own sinfulness which makes it uncomfortable – I don’t like this emphasis because it is  reminder of my own captivity to so many of the powers.  I don’t have  problem with the emphasis on captivity  or “sin” or whatever label you want to give it.  I have a problem with the idea that God wants to kill us, and that the Cross is testimony to both the depth of God’s hatred for us and the depth of God’s love for us. 

I grew up with this kind of God, a God who must kill someone in order to be reconciled to us.  I’ve seen that God over and over again in my life – the God who hates communists and Vietnamese and Muslims and Americans and African-Americans and immigrants – the list seems to be endless.  I’ve grown up with that kind of killing God. 

            I’ve spent my entire life in the South, and in this region, we are dominated by a violent, killing God.  We white Southerners believe in violence – we love the death penalty;  we hate human beings when they come out of the womb;  we cut government budgets for support for poor people as often as we can.; we believe that people with brown skin are inferior to those classified as “white,” we believe that women are inferior to men.   This kind of God afflicts the whole American identity, but it seems to have deeply permeated the white, Southern identity.  It has soaked in so deeply because deep in our hearts, we know that in order to keep our power as white people, our hands must be soaked in blood.  Violence is in the Godhead, and so must it be in us – the Cross, the death penalty, the execution – those are central to God, and so must they be to us.

            Through God’s grace, my perceptual apparatus has been changed – I no longer understand God as a killing God but rather as a loving God, a God who desires us and wants us to respond in love.  The Cross, then, is not the price that Jesus must pay for us to be reconciled to God.  It is not, as I had been taught, the fact that God hates me and wants to kill me but killed Jesus instead.  It is rather – and to me this is stunning –  that God takes that pain of injustice and brokenness on Her own self.  The crucifixion of Jesus was not God’s will or desire but rather our will and our desire.  The Jesus who welcomed all, the Jesus who called for all of us to center our lives on God and on justice, the Jesus who loved us – this Jesus was too threatening to the religious establishment and to the empire.  The Cross reminds us of this difficult truth – we would rather kill Jesus than to be transformed by his love.  So, yes, at its base, the Cross has an obvious motive of a desire for killing.  That desire, however, is in us and not in God.  In this season of Lent, we are asked to reflect upon our particular captivity that causes us to want to kill Jesus also. 

            There is a thin balance and a strong tension in the Cross.  There is the “love” part -  in the Cross we see the depth of the love of God – nothing will ever separate us from the love of God, a love so deep that She will take upon Herself our pain and our injustice.  There is also the “justice” part, the immigrant mother watching her children taken from her at the border, the mother held as a slave watching her child sold down the river – who will pay for these heinous acts?  I’m aware that I’m writing as a comfortable white man, but I must answer – who will pay for these?  God will.  It is an answer that I do not understand, and it is an answer that I often reject, but I must say that I believe that it is the meaning of the Cross.