On this, the day we celebrate the Cross, I wanted to help the people understand that not everyone sees the Cross like they do.
John 3:13-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-24; Psalm 78:1-2,34-38; Numbers 21:4b-9
Happy Holy Cross Sunday! I always like to make a big-ish deal out of today, because it is our church’s name’s day. But today, I’m actually going to do something a little bit different: I want to look at how the rest of the world sees Christians, and in particular, the Cross.
Today I’m focusing on our reading from 1 Corinthians 1: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” In other words, “If you believe, it’s the best news ever; if you don’t believe, it sounds absolutely nuts.”
That’s kind of what it comes down to, really, and it’s something that Christians have, in a way, become out of touch with. We’re used to hearing, from ourselves and from other Christians, how wonderful Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is, but that makes us forget how non-Christians tend to see us. It’s actually an advantage to know how people react to a crucified Lord, because if we don’t know how people are thinking, we will never know how to meet their spiritual needs. For example, telling someone Jesus died for their sins does very little good for someone who has no concept of sin, or an understand of why something needed to die for sin at all.
The first thing we’re going to do, though, is look at what people say about Christianity, and the cross in particular. In ancient Rome, Christians were widely persecuted. There were several reasons for this, not the least of which being that Nero blamed arson by Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, but here are a few of the more popular:
1) Christians were, to the Romans, pagans, heretics, and traitors. Christians didn’t worship the Roman pantheon, which made them pagans, nor did they worship the Emperor, which made them heretics and traitors.
2) Christian values were vastly different than Roman values. Romans honored strength, whereas Christians were taught to be meek. Christians were seen as weak, in part because they didn’t fight back when thrown to lions, instead they had a tendency to sing songs praising God.
3) The Roman rumor mill was convinced that Christians ate babies. They knew, from talk of what we now call Communion, that Christians believed they were eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood, so Christians were assumed to be cannibals, and when a rumor mill gets started, it always ends up at the worst permutation of the original rumor, so Christians ended up being thought of as baby-eaters.
4) This is, in a way, the most subtle. Romans thought that Christians had to be some of the stupidest people on either because they worshipped someone stupid enough to get themselves crucified. Crucifixion, as an execution method, was reserved for the worst criminals who also were not Roman citizens; usually it was only for slaves, pirates, and traitors.
Curiously enough, much of the world today views the Cross in similar lights. I asked, rather informally, some friends of mine who are not Christians to share how they look at Jesus, and more particularly, his relation to the cross. Here is a sampling:
1) God set us up. He made the rules so difficult that they can’t help but be broken, then kills his own son to fix the mess he created.
2) You shouldn’t have to kill someone to bring peace and forgiveness into the world.
3) It’s disturbing and morbid for God to kill someone in order to show the world how they’re supposed to behave.
4) How did one man’s death, who is represented as a moral paragon, represent the cleansing of the world?
This is just a few of the responses I got; there were several more. As Christians we’ve become out of touch with how our faith is viewed by the “outsiders”. We’re so comfortable in knowing that we are forgiven by Jesus’ death, that we are saved from sin, that we don’t realize that the words we use don’t really mean anything to people.
I want to focus on the first response I got, that God “set us up”. This seemed to be a recurring theme: God decided what sin was, and then killed his son to fix sin, even though he came up with sin in the first place. People who aren’t Christian hear our usually comment, “Jesus died for my sins,” and this is what they hear.
Part of why we’ve run into this problem, and as Lutheran’s we’re actually really susceptible to this, is that we’ve intellectualized faith. We create a big argument: God wants us to follow Him; sin is not following God; sin leads to death; God creates a system where animals die instead of people for people’s sin; God’s son takes on the role of the animal in order to die for everyone’s sin. But to non-Christians, that all sounds like “Banana, banana, banana.”
To tell you the truth, I can’t say I blame them. When I think about why I follow God, it isn’t because someone convinced me once that I had a sin-issue that God resolved for me; I follow God because my experience has shown me that He loves me, He wants the best for me, and, through following Him, I can have my best life. Is having my sin forgiven important? Definitely. Does the thought of spending eternity with God make me happy? Of course. But those two things by themselves weren’t enough for me, so how can I expect it to be enough for someone else.
This is what celebrating the cross means to me. As Paul wrote, it’s not about miracles and it’s not about what makes the most sense, it’s about the Creator of Everything wanting to know me for who I am, but not wanting to keep me there, and instead making me better — culminating in my being recreated to be like the perfect Human, Jesus. Lumped into that is everything else — forgiveness of sins, Jesus’ death and resurrection, eternal life with God, miracles, coincidences, everything else — but that’s what it comes down to, and in fact is what it’s always been.
The cross is really the tipping point for all of this. It’s the center of the whole story, because it turns everything on its head. Yet we get so caught up trying to figure out what happened behind the scenes, that we forget the core reason for it all: love for the whole world. Because of love, God became a human. Because of love, God died. Because of love, God rose again. Because of love, I can follow God. Because of love, I am no longer condemned by sin. Because of love, I have eternal life. Because the cross is the ultimate of expression of God’s love — not a clever intellectual argument, or just a fancier miracle, or a “set-up” on God’s part — but Love incarnate and perfected.