Throughout human history, there are countless examples of strongly held beliefs that have to be reexamined. You know the kind of things I’m talking about: We once believed that the world was flat and the Earth is in the middle of things. We once took it as a given that one human being may own another, that women have no place in politics, or that mental illness is the result of some moral or spiritual failing. On a more personal level, most of us carry around ideas and assumptions about life that need a refresh: we tell ourselves falsities like: “my worth comes from achievement…if I try hard enough, I can control my life…if I have just a bit more it will finally be enough…” These are lies we tell ourselves that lead to spiritual stagnation; they are stories that need to be told a new way.
This morning I want to invite you to reconsider the meaning of a story that is important to all of us—the death of Jesus on the Cross. I wonder if you’ve spent much time thinking about it—why it is it one of the main ideas in Christian faith: that Jesus dies a brutal death on a Cross, and that that act is a critical part of how God saves us. When we say that the Cross is how Jesus saves us, what do we mean?
In American Christianity today, the dominant way of explaining the meaning of the Cross is a theory called substitutionary atonement, and while that term may not be familiar to you, the meaning of it probably is. Substitutionary atonement has a rich theological history that includes much depth of thought; but these days and for many Christians in our time and culture, it mostly says this: (1) we are sinners and cannot earn our own salvation, (2) but Jesus lived a sinless life, (3) so in giving up his life on the Cross, Jesus takes upon himself a punishment that we deserve, and (4) this is how God saves us.
This telling of the story of the Cross has gained traction in the church for a number of reasons, and I’m not going to suggest, like with the world is flat, that you must let it go. This explanation of the Cross goes back at least 500 years, to the Protestant Reformation, and if you find it helpful to your walk of faith, please hold on to it—you are in good company with countless faithful people who have gone before you. Many of us get stuck in patterns of horrible thinking about our own past mistakes and failings—if this story of the Cross helps you to let go of those things, I believe that is good.
What I would also like to suggest, however, is that throughout the history of Christian thought, there are other equally traditional ways of understanding the Cross. When I started studying religion, I was invited to think about them, and I found other explanations that were more helpful to me. Today I want to share one of them with you, one that is more consistent with the story of God we have been telling all winter and spring: that God is love, and that in Jesus Christ, God’s love is with us in the world. Theologians have referred to this way of thinking as “solidarity,” but the main idea to state it simply, is that on the Cross, in Jesus, God is with us. In the greatest sufferings, betrayals, and hardships of human life, God is with us. In order to get into it, let’s go to the Scripture.
In this morning’s reading, and in all four of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we learn that Jesus’ death comes following a trial and that he is hung on a Cross and crucified. Crucifixion was a horrible way to die. It was painful and slow. It was publicly embarrassing. And it was meant to be intimidating; mostly reserved for people who had engaged in some act of challenge to the authority of the Empire, crucifixion was Rome’s way of saying to its conquered peoples: beware.
Jesus’ crucifixion comes after a trial, and the charges brought against Jesus are instructive. In some of the Gospels, the charges come primarily from Jewish religious authorities, who attack Jesus for blasphemy because he has claimed to be the Messiah. This way of thinking suggests to some that the Jews killed Jesus and has led over time to a terrible history of Christian antisemitism; if there’s truth to this explanation, it’s that a particular insecure group of religious leaders call for Jesus death, not a whole people. A second explanation is that it is Pilate, the Roman Governor, who is threatened by Jesus. Rome is worried about Jesus’ enthusiastic followers, so Pilate puts Jesus to death to end the threat to his power. A third explanation is that when charges are brought against Jesus, it is really the people in the streets—the mob—the same people who celebrated Jesus on Palm Sunday—they are the ones that shout “crucify him!” and puts him to death. What all three of these accounts share is that we are not ready to encounter the depth of God’s love. Even though Jesus is the one who has been offering a return to a deeper relationship with God, even though he has been offering a world of peace apart from the intimidation and injustice of Rome, even though he has been healing, teaching, and loving them all along, the crowd chooses the life they know: a inferior if familiar life, a0 violent and unfair life, a life under the authority of earthly rulers instead of following Christ.
For us, for you and me, the reminder of the Cross is that none of us is really prepared in the midst of this broken world to receive the way of life Jesus is inviting us to. Most of us think we like Jesus, but when we find out how much his way of life will change our own, we tend to turn away. Jesus never gives us quite what we are expecting. So we all collectively have rejected him; we all have allowed for his crucifixion.
If that is the context, then what does it mean that Jesus died in this way? And why do I prefer to talk about it, not in the terms you might most often hear, but through this idea that God is with us?
As I said before, substitutionary atonement—this idea that Jesus died to pay for our sins—it is popular, and there are good reasons for that. Most of us have a good sense that we are all broken people, far less than perfect. A recipe which starts with that universal problem and proposes a fix is attractive—you can preach a sermon about it. Additionally, this explanation comes to us in terms we can understand. It’s a transaction. In a world where so much of what we know about life has to do with debts and credits and getting what you deserve, this explanation makes sense. Furthermore, in a world where violence reigns all around us, and armies and wars are always the news of the day, this explanation based around Jesus winning the fight just makes a lot of sense. But where it breaks down for most people is when we go a step further and ask, “Can’t God do better than what we’re used to in this world? Can’t God do better than a transaction? Can’t God do better than a salvation that depends on an act of violence?
This is where the “God with us” explanation comes in. Solidarity means that instead of expecting God to fix each one of us by dying for our sins, solidarity means that in the midst of all the mess, God is with us. Jesus comes to live as a human being and to know the brokenness of humanity just like we do. Just like the name “Emmanuel” means in the naming of Jesus, Jesus is “God with us.”
Jesus “saves” humanity by experiencing just as much brokenness and despair as any of us will ever encounter—he is lied to, abandoned, and betrayed, even to the point of his own death. There is no amount of suffering that Jesus himself has is not willing to endure with us—even death. But what’s different about God is that God defeats death. This is why followers of Jesus are not death people we are Resurrection people. And in three days, Jesus gets back up. Love wins.
But here’s the thing about being Resurrection people: you can’t rush to it. The death—the solidarity in the midst of the suffering—that has to come first. There’s really no richness to the promise of Resurrection unless we’ve first taken seriously the reality of death. So the challenge of Christian faith is not to rush too quickly to Easter Sunday, but to stay in this Holy Week in front of us long enough to appreciate that in the suffering as well as in the joy—God wants to be with us.
There is a very practical meaning for this, because we live in a world that is consumed by violence and death in so many of the same ways Jesus saw in his own time. We are met by death in the news of every day; death to innocent Palestinian families at the hands of armies and settlers; death and to citizens in every nation of the Middle East as missiles and bombs continue to fall. Death in Ukraine, death in Sudan, death by war and by starvation. Death on the streets of our city due to too many guns we point at each other and at ourselves, deaths of despair from addiction and depression, deaths of the hope that keeps us going.
And these many deaths that surround us, they require change, justice, attention…they require that we be willing to look and pay attention long enough to figure out where God is calling us to do something because we have had enough of death. In Holy Week, we’re challenged to remember that following Jesus isn’t supposed to be easy—Jesus is put to death because he challenges people to change their ways of living: to respond to hate with love, to the brokenness of the world with demands for justice, and to violence with peace. There is a cost to these things. Most of us would rather respond to hate with more hate and to violence with more violence; Jesus is put to death because he refuses to continue to the cycle of death; his life is about love, and that demand is costly.
We live in a world that needs saving. Jesus saves us by coming in to the world to be with us in the midst of it all. Before the good news of Easter, comes the Cross, and must pay attention.
Holy Week is the time for people who want to be serious about following Jesus. I beg of you: do not just walk out that door today and cease to think about Jesus again until Easter morning. This week we will invite you, in studying his story on your own or in groups, in worship on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to hear the story that on the Cross, God is with us.
The spiritual giant Richard Foster writes that the Bible is about human life with God. And that in its stories we should consider how God is with us and allow ourselves to be spiritually transformed. How is God with you in this story? Amen.